Citrix Demos of a New Kind of Virtual Machine for Mac

[RogueWarrior65]

If it lives up to the hype(rvisor)...

Then I'll buy it. Parallels is tolerable at best for simple stuff but it takes too long to launch and I don't like pausing it because Windows appears to become unstable when you do that for too long. I use Bootcamp when I need to run a graphics-intensive app. I do hope they allow for booting from a Bootcamp partition so I can pitch it if it isn't so great.

 

[tosehee]

We got 8 cores for what? Why do I need to reboot just to run some application because it's so slow with vmware/parallel? I hate to use one application, reboot to use another, and etc.

Hope this advances further and becomes a reality for Mac users very soon.

 

[Bakafish]

Well, that's what the thinking was, which makes this so interesting. I think the implication from the video is that this is not Mac OS X Server, but Client. Are you suggesting that Citrix is doing this so people can run Mac OS X Server on their MacBook (again, see they keynote video).

Here's also another comment by a live-blogger of the event (doesn't confirm anything, but gives some context)
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/br...2-quot-cloud-amp-datacenter-quot-keynote.aspx

Look, I worked for VMware during the time Fusion was developed (sorry, I'm not trying to say I'm some super knowledgeable insider, but I saw what I saw.) Trust me, there is no technical limitation to running OS X Client as a hosted OS in either type of hypervisor, it is a decision made by Apple to not allow it which has been honored by the developers. If you want to run OS X as a client there are hacked versions that work quite well, it's just not something Apple wants to see right now and there really isn't any good reason for VMware or Parallels to argue with them. Type 1 hypervisors don't offer native performance for GUI workloads, and they never will. The whole point of that type of virtualization is to increase utilization across as many VM's as possible, for workstations there is one user who wants the maximum graphics performance possible.

Let's face it, that's where the bottlenecks are at this point in time, CPU's have become multi-core monsters and are not all that big of an issue on modern hardware. A bare metal hypervisor would have to create a virtualization layer for all the different video hardware (an easier task on Mac's than PC's, but really unlikely to pay of performance wise) whereas using Apples graphics API's and OpenGL for the most part abstracts you from having to virtualize hardware that you don't have the spec's to anyway. That's why all the bare metal hypervisors emulate standard VGA, and two or three different NIC's. When you go bare metal you have to basically write all of the glue that handles interaction between the host OS and the Hypervisor. It's not just passing instructions, since you have to properly deal with what instructions you are passing and saving state.

My point is that bare metal hypervisors do offer better efficiency and performance when you are running lots of non-graphical VM's. A server in other words. When you are trying to run a workstation that has some server VM's or multiple GUI based VM's host based virtualization is a superior solution. I'm not saying it will always be so, graphics cards are becoming far more abstracted into generic processing, and they may see the advantage of creating hardware based extensions similar to AMD and Intel to help support virtualization of their tasks, but that isn't here today, and it's unlikely to be something you will see soon.

Most people in an interactive shell just want the thing that they are doing to be fast, if they switch to the Windows VM, they want it to have crazy framerate. They don't want to lose 5fps there just to make the DVD they are ripping in OS X take 15 seconds less time. If bootcamp could instantly switch between frozen OS's I'd bet 90% of Parallels and Fusion users would never have bothered with it. A type 1 hypervisor just isn't suited for that kind of user, and Apple knows it. I really don't blame them since the only thing that virtualizing OS X client could possibly do is make it slower and less stable, bare metal or not.

 

[SilentCrs]

Unfortunately, there's a lot of enthusiastic comments here from people that don't really know what they're talking about.

A type 1 hypervisor like this would be similar to VMware ESX. It's "baremetal" in the sense that it's the "OS" that all the other VMs run on. However, that also means OS X would essentially run as a VM on top of the hypervisor along with Windows, resulting in a performance decrease for both Mac and Winodws.

At present, there's no VM that runs at hardware speed. There never will be. There have been improvements, of course. You can send VM processor instructions down to certain AMD and Intel processors and they'll basically run as is. Those processors can understand "this instruction belongs to this VM, this one to that, run them as is and don't let the streams cross". However, there's no way to do that with graphic cards, sound cards, etc. A hypervisor in this case needs to act like a traffic cop, and generally speaking only one VM will have hardware level access at a time. Not to mention, most OSes will freak out if they see (for example) their video card disappear when another VM "owns" it.

So, TLDR summary:

1.) A type 1 hypervisor would need to run below all OSes, resulting in performance decreases not only for Windows but Mac as well.

2.) "Access to the 3D hardware" is possible, but likely for only one VM at a time, and OSes will have to be capable of "letting the hardware go" (not all OSes are).

3.) You will never have a VM run at the full speed it could run on bare hardware. Period. Even when the hypervisor is very thin like this, there's always some slowdown as there's an abstraction layer.

Would you be willing to give up performance in Mac OS to use Windows apps at native speed? Would Apple let you run a hypervisor on Mac OS on the desktop? Not likely.

 

[adamberti]

The iPhone app sounds like good news. I have a Medical Office client who runs their client database through Citrix, time to see how it works on the iPhone. I'm sure the Technology Manager would love an excuse to issue some iPods/iPhones, he's a Mac guy surrounded by PCs all day.

 

[Farplaner]

Would you be willing to give up performance in Mac OS to use Windows apps at native speed? Would Apple let you run a hypervisor on Mac OS on the desktop? Not likely.

For me, it would depend on how much performance I would have to give up. I would be fine with 90% speed on both OSX and Windows compared to native speed.

 

[locust76]

Hypervisors: The Ultimate Boss Key

 

[jzuena]

Most people in an interactive shell just want the thing that they are doing to be fast, if they switch to the Windows VM, they want it to have crazy framerate. They don't want to lose 5fps there just to make the DVD they are ripping in OS X take 15 seconds less time. If bootcamp could instantly switch between frozen OS's I'd bet 90% of Parallels and Fusion users would never have bothered with it. A type 1 hypervisor just isn't suited for that kind of user, and Apple knows it. I really don't blame them since the only thing that virtualizing OS X client could possibly do is make it slower and less stable, bare metal or not.

I agree, and Citrix's own video shows the real reason for a Type 1 hypervisor in a workstation rather than server version... so that users needing two different Windows environments don't have to pick one of them to be the host OS with the ability to crash, taking the guest OS out with it.

 

[parapup]

Would you be willing to give up performance in Mac OS to use Windows apps at native speed? Would Apple let you run a hypervisor on Mac OS on the desktop? Not likely.

by the last 2 sentences. Xen _is_ a hypervisor. It uses a modified version of the OS to run as a hypervisor. It boots what is called "Dom0" on bare hardware which then allows you to run other "unmodified" OSes on top - fully accelerated, if the CPU supports it.

Secondly hypervisor does not run *top of any OS* - it runs a modified OS on top of bare hardware.

There is less chance that in the demo above they modified OSX to run as hypervisor as it requires significant support from Apple and access to complete Mac OS kernel source - that is too much of work. So one possibility is that instead they could be running modified Linux hypervisor on top of the Mac Hardware (Apple cannot prevent running any OS on their hardware) and running OSX and Windows as what xen calls "domU".

Xen has what is called "PCI passthrough" support - so that way they could have written a glue to allow OSX and Windows direct access to the Graphics device for full native performance - albeit one at a time.

You are running OSX, you press a key combo - the hypervisor traps it, saves state and then switches to Windows while suspending OSX. Windows now has access to the graphics and potentially other PCI devices like the network card, and other emulated devices. Quite doable based on where Xen is today.

Given that only one OS runs at a time in the above scenario, and also that OSX has direct access to hardware when it runs, this becomes quite interesting and different from Apple's licensing point of view. They cannot prevent the hypervisor from running on their hardware, they cannot really claim that OSX is running simultaneously to other OS or that it is virtualized given the hypervisor gets out of the way when it is running. I don't think this compares to how Apple prevents VMWare or Parallels from running another copy of OSX virtualized inside of OSX Client.

 

[ChrisA]

Two Big Problems

(1) Apple currently does NOT alow Max OS X to be run in a virtual environment. Their license prohibits it.

(2) And if you are using a "type 1" hyperviser then if you wanted to run Mac OS X on your Mac then you have to run it inside the VM just like you run Windows inside the VM. Also would people want to do this?

(3) If the above "works" then any idiot could build a "hackentosh" just by installing the hypervisor. This would be great. Not only would Mac OS run on any hardwre perfectly but you could MOVE the running images to different hardware -- basically take you entire Mac computer with you and run it on whatever hardware you'd like or happen to have available. Peole who run data centers like this. They can run six machines on one physical server then as the load goes up move some of the machines over to their own physical server. The effect is that you can add hardware to track demend of the service. What's new is running Mac OS X in this environment.

Some people are forgetting that this "new" idea in effect treats Mac OS X, Windows and any other OS you might run equally. All the OSes run side by side with neither having any special preference. This is NOT a replacement for VMware's Parallels.

Also, this in not new. VMware sells a product like this already, it is just not priced not marketed for Mac owning consumers.

 

[German]

2.) "Access to the 3D hardware" is possible, but likely for only one VM at a time, and OSes will have to be capable of "letting the hardware go" (not all OSes are).

There is a solution: http://www.heise.de/ct/Parallels-vi...Geschwindigkeitsverlust--/news/meldung/135442

Intel VT-d + more than one GPU!

Till now, only the Xeon has VT-d

3.) You will never have a VM run at the full speed it could run on bare hardware. Period. Even when the hypervisor is very thin like this, there's always some slowdown as there's an abstraction layer.

Maybe under 5 percent.

 

[Wotan31]

Citrix made a number of announcements last week related to Mac and iPhone. While most of these announcements were targeted specifically towards IT/enterprise customers, one announcement has more potential mainstream significance.

Is this a joke? What a silly and confused comment to make. Commercial enterprise IT *is* the mainstream. That's the core of Citrix's business, and most other hardware / software manufacturers as well. A bunch of hipster doofus college students with iMac's, or the 33 year old Mac Pro dork living in his parents basement reading MacRumors.com is not the "mainstream". Just FYI.

 

[BTW]

Very useful from a corporate IT perspective. I look forward to its development and deployment.

Exactly, which is my point about the Snow Leopard release. Snow Leopard's focus is on the Enterprise level push. So we'll be seeing more corporate apps coming out with Mac compatibility. I won't be surprised if Citrix and a whole slew of corp apps companies make the keynote at WWDC.

 

[Cappy]

It's kind of ironic that I just came back from a conference where one of the sessions covered how virtualization with a hypervisor worked. Some others here have already described much of it.

One thing that surprised me is that the so-called bare metal hypervisors aren't anything more than a custom stripped down OS. In some cases it's linux. If I recall correctly vmware uses an old, old version of Redhat in their "bare metal" hypervisor.

The other thing that surprised me was that Xen is written in Python. There's not any fancy C code or anything....just Python.

The fellow speaking also stated that Intel is working on a cpu that would have the hypervisor code as part of the chip. These are interesting times but I'm not so sure it's anything that your normal Mac user really cares about.

 

[PowerCD]

How exactly is this any more beneficial to the user than just booting into Boot Camp?

Seriously, you don't know.

Let me try and explain it to you. You're working in OS X and you're say, building a website. You check the site against all the OS X browsers but you really need to make sure it looks right in IE6, because IE6 is, shall we say, particular. You only want to run one app for a few minutes and then get back to work. You honestly can't see the benefit of NOT having to reboot the entire machine every time you want to check IE6? I really didn't think that was such an abstract notion.

 

[gkarris]

How is this news?

This "bare-metal" hypervisor virtualization has been around for years.

One of the virtualization company persons at a presentation I was at said they have OS X running virtual on their lab version (for Macs or PC's, the virtual hyperviser fools OS X into thinking it's a Mac) as well - but that won't make Steve Jobs very happy....

 

[MikeTheC]

And just imagine then, folks, not to completely rain on your parade, if Apple switches processor architectures again to something else, and now you can't run Windows any longer (without going back to hardware emulation).

Man, I'll bet that would really screw up Apple's future sales!

 

[Furrybeagle]

Is this a joke? What a silly and confused comment to make. Commercial enterprise IT *is* the mainstream. That's the core of Citrix's business, and most other hardware / software manufacturers as well. A bunch of hipster doofus college students with iMac's, or the 33 year old Mac Pro dork living in his parents basement reading MacRumors.com is not the "mainstream". Just FYI.

That's right! Screw the doofus college students with their Macs, the real majority of Mac users are in corporate enterprises.

Considering the target audience of MacRumors, not referring to corporate/enterprise as "mainstream" doesn't seem that odd. You, on the other hand, shoehorned the millions of people who use Macs at home, for science, education, graphics, video, etc into "hipster doofus college" students and dorks.

 

[Constable Odo]

Won't this sort of environment just put Apple out of business? Seems to me that this Citrix will having everyone running applications on the cheapest hardware possible. I'm a bit confused about this, but won't this allow OSX to run on any Intel hardware? Apple depends on selling higher-priced hardware to stay in business and this environment looks geared to helping cheap PC hardware makers increase their market share.

It seems like it would be an excellent product, judging from that video showing high def video playing and being able to manipulate 3D images at the same time. Almost too good to be true.

 

[thogs_cave]

Isn't that benefit enough? Seamless switching between Windows and Mac OS X operating systems? Not having to save everything and reboot just to use a single windows app?

I would give a useful body part to be able to run multiple instances of OS X client on my Pro. Right now, to support clean test installs as well as various client configurations, I have to either:

A) boot off of an external drive.
-or-
B) Keep a bunch of machines around with different configurations.

Option (A) is annoying, option (B) is just expensive and space-consuming. I would love to have a T1 hypervisor that allowed me to simplify this need. Not to mention the ability to take a disk image of an existing Mac (say a laptop), boot it on my Pro in a VM, and work on issues w/o having the hardware on my desk.

Good news, if it comes about.

 

[Sesshi]

"I confirmed that this Mac demo was a true Type 1 XenClient hypervisor. The story is that the Apple license agreement says that the Mac OS must run on Apple hardware, so it's cool."

I'm not going to get an answer from the drooling blogger here, but why is that cool? I want my virtualised OS X sessions to run under something that's not a pile of shiny, pretty crud with 'enterprise' site support that is below mediocre at best.

 

[ToneFREQ]

I fail to see why this is newsworthy. VMware has had a Type 1 hypervisor for numerous years. They even have a version that they give away for free (ESXi).

 

[ToneFREQ]

Won't this sort of environment just put Apple out of business? Seems to me that this Citrix will having everyone running applications on the cheapest hardware possible. I'm a bit confused about this, but won't this allow OSX to run on any Intel hardware?

No. Apple doesn't license OS X (non-server) to be run in a virtualized environment. While you can hack OS X to install it in a virtual machine, it does not run well. and will probably never been supported. VMware has had a type 1 hypervisor for many years now. Apple still seems to be in business. Also... While Type 1 hypervisors are much more efficient than type 2, consumers probably won't care. Most consumers will only be running 1-2 operating systems and the difference in performance between hypervisor types will not be of significant consequence to them.

 

[Jeezeypeeps]

I fail to see why this is newsworthy. VMware has had a Type 1 hypervisor for numerous years. They even have a version that they give away for free (ESXi).

Its news because its a client hypervisor. They haven't had a client hypervsor for years, only server.

 

[pesos]

Is this a joke? What a silly and confused comment to make. Commercial enterprise IT *is* the mainstream. That's the core of Citrix's business, and most other hardware / software manufacturers as well. A bunch of hipster doofus college students with iMac's, or the 33 year old Mac Pro dork living in his parents basement reading MacRumors.com is not the "mainstream". Just FYI.

+1 lol