back to article Nutanix 'working on a homebrew hypervisor', sources tell El Reg

We're not quite sure why Nutanix would be working on its own hypervisor, but apparently it is, The Register has learned. Sources on both sides of the Atlantic tell us development work on the hypervisor has reached an advanced state. The startup, based in San Jose, California, expects to talk about its efforts at its user …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Own hypervisor

    Could it be to let you run Hyper-V and ESXi on the same box?

    1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Own hypervisor

      Turtles, all the way down.

  2. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Risky...

    Risky.

    The upside: Hypervisor software is relatively small. This isn't like writing an entire OS, or an office suite, or a web browser. Also,if your business is based on "cloud" or "convergence" or whatever (i.e. hypervisors), then rolling your own DEFINITELY lets you differentiate your software and services from the other providers in the market. As AC says, being able to spin up both VMWare and Hyper-V VMs is pretty unique already. This is really a rather immature market, and there's no real guarantee that any of the existing hypervisors are particularly close to an "ideal design" yet, they may be able to come up with a noteably better design.

    The downside: The software, although small, is highly technical. It could be entirely possible to have development hit a snag, or end up with a hypervisor where the major bugs aren't quite worked out (which of course makes it quite the non-starter for the types of uses hypervisors are used for.) It's possible for you to think some features are important, but find the customers don't think so. Finally, it's possible to come out with some new features but have the other vendors replicate them.

  3. Tom Maddox Silver badge
    Go

    Makes sense to me

    If you buy a Nutanix cluster now, Nutanix has specified the hardware as well as the software which controls it, but the software has to sit in a resource-intensive virtual machine which needs to communicate with another layer of software, the hypervisor, in order to manipulate the hardware. It would clearly be much more efficient to roll the management software into the hypervisor and manage all available resources directly, essentially consolidating two layers of abstraction into one, yielding more efficient resource consumption and management. Even better for Nutanix will be if they allow users to have multiple flavors of Nutanix (native and third-party hypervisors) in the same cluster.

    On the flip side, I envision VMware leaving a horse's head in Nutanix's bed as a result of this announcement.

  4. dan1980

    Question . . .

    Is this article attributed to "Team Register" due to this not being something Nutanix wants revealed and thus done to protect the "sources on both sides of the Atlantic"?

  5. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Xen?

    Wasn't Xen supposed to be a small/light-weight hyper-visor?

    1. Lusty

      Re: Xen?

      All of them are small and lightweight, then various layers of crap have to be added for them to work such as drivers and machine management. Lightweight is marketing directly aimed at OCD techies who like things to be optimised and small.

      Xen also had the unfortunate problem of being used by Citrix which effectively killed it and caused the birth of KVM, which has the unfortunate problem of not being VMware or Hyper-V and lets face it Hyper-V only made progress because it's bundled with Windows and is cheaper than VMware to buy.

      In reality, Nutanix don't need their own, they just need to package a hypervisor so that the install is slick with a single package. Xen or KVM will achieve that as long as they play nicely with the licence folks (yup, looking at you VMware...)

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Or...

    Since they control the hardware and hypervisor they're doing an Apple. Both VMware and Microsoft don't have total control over the machine target. Definitely able to stomp down some of the layers of abstraction strewn all over the place and one more shining example that virtualization itself has a cost, albeit small compared to wasted machine resources of before.

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