Had a briefing from a company who has an interesting approach to making virtualization more efficient and less resource hungry. FastScale is a new (founded 1/06) Sunnyvale company that has developed a virtualization provisioning package that cuts down the size of virtualized guest operating systems and applications by as much as 99%. In a RHEL4/Apache example, the standard load of application, libraries, drivers, etc., totals 3GB. With FastScale, the same software, with the same functionality only needs to load 30MB of data. Their secret sauce is their software that analyzes the application software from a needs standpoint, and then only loads as much of the operating system (and application) as is absolutely needed for the environment. Unnecessary drivers don’t load; libraries that aren’t needed don’t go on the system, even parts of the application that aren’t applicable to the particular installation are jettisoned.

The results are impressive. Provisioning takes seconds rather than minutes, the amount of hardware resource needed is much less meaning that more VMs can be crammed on single boxes without bumping up against the limits of the hardware. Performance is improved as more of the app can be run in memory. FastScale says they can run three times more VMware VMs per server (without a performance hit), and boot 40 FastScale VMs in less time than one comparable non-FastScale VM.

Currently, their software works only with VMware , but FastScale did say that they will be bringing out Microsoft and Xen versions of their software before the end of the year. Currently, their closest ties are to VMware. According to FastScale, VMware uses quite a bit of FastScale in their internal development labs. To us, (assuming the product works as demonstrated and advertised) it seems that FastScale should be extremely important to VMware as it could radically decrease the size of VMs thus making VMs perform better and lessening the impact of virtualization overhead. If I’m VMware, and I just banked a big pile of cash, and I see competitors starting to gain strength (if not mindshare – yet), I might start looking for my checkbook…