A new player enters the empty OS virtualization market

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日本語

A new player enters the empty OS virtualization market

Posted by Alessandro Perilli | Monday, December 29, 2008 | 11 Comments

The evolution of the virtualization industry in the last five years clarified how the market prefers hardware virtualization over any other kind of approach.

Application virtualization certainly is the next big step towards a “liquid” data center, but so far it’s still far away from the mainstream adoption.

The third platform virtualization technique that we track at virtualization.info, something we called for a long time OS partitioning, is the OS virtualization.

As our Virtualization Industry Radar highlights the only commercial players in this segment are Sun and Parallels (formerly SWsoft).
But the Sun presence in this space is very limited: its Solaris Containers (aka Zones) are available only for Solaris 10 and while the product became very flexible in the last two years, it’s clear that the company is moving its investments on hardware virtualization.

This makes Parallels the uncontested leader in this market.
The company, not worried by competition, had the opportunity to grow in the profitable niche of web hosting where hardware virtualization was not the best option.

Why no other vendor ever tried to develop and sell OS virtualization?
Even Microsoft publicly disclosed its interest for this technology in 2006 but never translated it into a real action.
Whatever the reason is, things may be changing as a new player emerges from the stealth mode: iCore Software.

The company was co-founded in 2007 by by a group of students from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technologies (MIPT), which is ironic considering that SWsoft/Parallels founder, Sergei Beloussov, is Russian as well.
It’s CEO and co-founder is Artem Prokopenko.
No other information about the company is available at the moment.

iCore brings OS virtualization to the clients, selling its containers, called Virtual Accounts, as different user personalities for working, gaming, browsing, etc.
At the moment the company offers its product for free on Windows XP only and claims just 1-2% overhead.

We’ll see if this young company as the numbers to compete against the monopolist Parallels.

iCore Software has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Market Trends

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11 Comments

ian woodstock Tuesday, December 30, 2008 3:52:00 AM

The challenge with OS Virtualization/container approach is support.
Take for example Parallels, they replace the Windows or Linux kernel with their own which right away makes them unsupported by the OS vendor. So for example if you run Virtuozzo on Red Hat and you have a problem with the OS and call Red Hat they won't support you, same with Windows. When M$ or RH endorse the technology or ship it then I'd consider it safe for production use.

Anonymous Tuesday, December 30, 2008 2:43:00 PM

For the sake of completeness, there exists several equivalent solution in the open source world. Even if they are not backed up by a commercial company, there is some form of paid support/consulting.

- bsd jails (see http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/papers/jail/jail.html)
- linux vserver (http://linux-vserver.org)

It is also worth noting that several major companies are working on "linux containers" which will provide os level virtualization in the upstream linux kernel, along with other goodies: process mobility/checkpoint/freeze/restart. More on the mailing list archive (https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/containers/) and http://lxc.sourceforge.net/

Anonymous Tuesday, December 30, 2008 5:26:00 PM

To my understanding, iCore positions this for home use.

Anonymous Saturday, January 03, 2009 11:50:00 PM

"But the Sun presence in this space is very limited: its Solaris Containers (aka Zones) are available only for Solaris 10 and while the product became very flexible in the last two years, it’s clear that the company is moving its investments on hardware virtualization."

what makes you think they are moving away from Solaris Containers?... they support it very well and still invest a lot on it... new capabilities are added on each new update to solaris, like the "update on attach" or the container migration added on Solaris 10 U8...

The xVM Server Type-1 hypervisor is just another product Sun offers, and that's directed at a different target!!... you should now that by now!, particularly on this site... They also have VirtualBox, Type-2 hypervisor, and it doesn't mean they are abandoning one product for another.

Not only that, others are also expanding it's capabilities. For example, Nexenta added their "devzones" (http://devzone.sourceforge.net/) to easily create development zones and OpenSolaris' Boomer project seeks to replace the lx_audio part on the Linux Containers with their OSS port... meaning, new versions of the Linux Containers could work much better than they do now...

Don't just disregard Sun's commitment to Zones development just for the sake of it, Parallels is no leader in this market. Many use Solaris Containers... not only Solaris 10, but also Solaris 8 and 9 for their upgrade paths... and with the coming to play of project Crossbow, it can only get better on OpenSolaris.

As Solaris Containers are a Solaris only product (kind of obvious), it's not only for Solaris 10, but also for OpenSolaris and the future commercial versions of Solaris, they are very well commited to it.

Don't get me wrong, but I find your comments on Sun and Solaris Containers to be very uninformed and I didn't expect that from a virtualization news site... one that I considered to be the best around.

Paul Milligan Sunday, January 04, 2009 7:53:00 AM

Without getting paranoid, there is the whole "Russia" thing to consider. Russia is not a stable open democracy, it has dubious commercial law. Could anyone leave their IT dependant on a product which is closed source and not subject to a rigorous legislative environment to ensure fitness for purpose and liability for quality.
e.g. How do we know this product doesn't have a back-door and does not compromise security /passwords etc?

Paul Milligan Sunday, January 04, 2009 4:35:00 PM

I've downloaded and tried the product. It is much more a "sandbox" system than OS virtualization. Out of the box it sets up 3 "user accounts" each of which has a user "VM". You have to use XP's fast user switching to access the machines. It does not provide any extension to the RDP protocol or server to allow remote access. There is a well documented "fix" to allow multiple RDP sessions on XP available on the internet, but this does not work with iCore, it requires you to log off the main console before you can get remote acess - so it's a single user virtual machine -Wonderful!

Frankly this is a toy product, useful for a home computer sandbox for trying out new software but I can't think of a sensible use for anything else.

The management tools are also virtually(sic) non-existent. You can create or delete virtual machines and decide where their files are located, but you can't manage any aspect of the machines -not even disk usage. There is some way to go for this to be interesting. Parallels don't need to feel nervous.

Anonymous Monday, January 05, 2009 2:33:00 PM

2Paul Milligan
Why do you think that it is more sandbox than OS virtualization?

Massimo Re Ferre' Thursday, January 08, 2009 3:22:00 PM

Assuming they manage to remove the restrictions Paul Milligan is referring to above it would be an interesting alternative for a VDI context. While bare metal hypervisor vendors are developing tools to reduce the storage footprint for the XP VMs instantiating hundreds of identical fully operational XP instances requires some beefy kits to support that. One answer would be to use Parallels to leverage the OS virtualization approach but the problem is that Virtuozzo only works on Windows Server (and to me is not so compelling to implement a Windows Server based VDI solution - it doesn't solve all the limitations of Terminal Services). The obvious compromise would be a Virtuozzo-like solution for XP / Vista / Windows 7 (eventually) .... something that Parallels doesn't (yet) provide.

I have to agree that I don't think Sun is necessarily disinvesting from Zones. But I have to say that I don't think they (zones) are going to rule the world. They have a fit and they will continue to fit a purpose but they are going to be a niche compared to the pervasiveness that bare metal hypervisors will reach (my opinion).

Last but not least if you mention Solaris Zones you should have also mentioned the IBM AIX Workload Partitions (counterparts of the Zones) which also supports migration across physical systems. This is among the many others OS virtualization technologies out there (I don't think this is a two horses race between Parallels and Sun).

Massimo.

Dan Salinas Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:48:00 PM

This seems simiar to Ringcube..Though Ringcube is way down the road.

Massimo Re Ferre' Thursday, January 08, 2009 10:08:00 PM

Dan, true.. I forgot about RingCube... there are just too many companies out there.... ;-)

Massimo.

Kazuboki Wednesday, May 13, 2009 2:42:00 AM

i just like Japanesse comercial products and of cource open source.Lets leave paid product or closed source product, just use open source products .

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