Rackspace Announces API driven Bare Metal Servers

businesscloudnews.com

13 points·blakehaggerty··7 comments

Can anyone comment on the state of these "microVMs" they speak of? I didn't realize Openstack went that deep in the sense that I thought it was just a VM management platform.

The "micoVMs" are Linux containers [1] running within the operating system that is installed on the bare metal.

Since containers start in milliseconds, you gain a tremendous amount of flexibility in what you run on top of these machines. I believe that Pantheon has successfully run ~30k containers (edit: systemd-nspawn, not Docker) on a single machine.

[1] http://www.docker.com/

I thought they wouldn't want to muddle the waters by saying "microvm" instead of just using the term container. I thought they were using something like Mirage:

http://openmirage.org/

Which, imo, would be more exciting.

I wouldn't be shocked to see "MicroVM" become the buzzword for "container". Sounds much nicer for putting in marketing material and pitching to non-technical management. That's especially true given that management has been hearing their tech staff talk about VMs for so long.

This has nothing to do with OpenStack. I believe they're just saying that someone with an OnMetal server can run any workload they choose.

Disclaimer: I work on the OnMetal team at Rackspace.

I would love to know how this is being done, exactly.

Something like having banks of live unprovisioned machines with a managed switching infrastructure, KVM-over-IP, some sort of netboot or UEFI installer for OS installation, all managed via an API?

That's how SoftLayer does it, since 2005.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com