

Rackspace Announces API driven Bare Metal Servers - blakehaggerty
http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2014/06/19/rackspace-announces-bare-metal-cloud-based-on-openstack-project-ironic/

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lbotos
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.

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robszumski
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/](http://www.docker.com/)

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lbotos
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/](http://openmirage.org/)

Which, imo, would be more exciting.

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akerl_
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.

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teilo
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?

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teepo
That's how SoftLayer does it, since 2005.

