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FastScale Virtual Manager 1.0

Saturday, 01 September 2007 by Michel Roth

One of the things about VDI that has been bothering me since the hype around VDI began, is the actual creation and provisioning of virtual machines. I mean, if you think of VDI in the classic way, it's about remoting into a hosted / virtualized Windows XP or Windows Vista Desktop. So , unless you plan to have a virtual machine powered on for every single named user, you would some way of creating virtual machines on demand.

If you would do this in a classic way, this would take way to long no matter how small you make the WindowsXP image or how fast your SAN is (don't get me started on Windows Vista). So there must be another way to provision these virtual machines. Another way to provision virtual machines would be to create "deltas" of a template virtual machine using for example Virtuozzo or ESX Snapshot technology. I must admit that I haven't looked to deep into this so I do not know of every single technology used by every vendor.

Recently however, I came across (via Alessandro) a rather new product in this market space: FastScale Virtual Manager 1.0. The creators of this products must have seen the limitations in VDI without dealing with the provisioning ordeal: "FastScale Virtual Manager 1.0 can automatically build and streamline server software environments on-demand and provisions them to virtual machines in seconds � without manual effort of any kind. On average, server software environments are 99% smaller than traditional images, and they are built in only seconds. Because of the small memory footprint of the FastScale software environments deployed, benchmark tests of FastScale Virtual Manager have shown that 3X the number of virtual machines can run on a given physical machine without degrading performance."

Sounds interesting huh? We'll see where FastScale goes. If any of you have any experience with FastScale Virtual Manager 1.0, I'd love to hear about it!