Built-In Virtualisation

I think there are three major reasons for not integrating any VM technology into the ReadyNAS: support, support .... and, what was the third again ..... ah, yes: support ;)

-Stefan

But support is business... no ? oÔ

No. At least not always. As it is, Netgear for example offers 90 days of free installation support. Now where does installation support end? Does it end when you've successfully inserted the hard drives and finished the initial setup. Or does it end when you have your virtual machine configured with Windows 2012 Ultimate Server with Active Jungle and whatnot else? Does it include setting up a virtual Oracle instance? In addition, right now all Netgear has to support is their own OS. With virtualization support, they'd also have to hire specialists for various scenarios. In the end, I don't think that would be a viable business model.

-Stefan

I disagree.

All they would have to support is whatever UI/service that provides the virtualization, not management or production of the VM's or design.

IE, support of start/stopping of VM's and being able to configure them, but not how to configure or when to start/stop.

Support does not help with your media streaming or how you buy/setup your clients and such, it only supports ensuring that the readydlna service works etc.

Nor would they support helping you set up the included torrent client to download media. All they have to support is making sure it works in general.

I think having build-in virtualbox (or other free virtualization) support would be a huge draw, and the support would not have to be any more than readyldna or even iscsi support.

TeknoJnky wrote:
I disagree. All they would have to support is whatever UI/service that provides the virtualization, not management or production of the VM's or design.

I wish that 99% of the targeted user base would expect the same ;) In reality, a lot of users think different.

-Stefan

If they made it a premium feature that people had to pay extra for, I guess that would be another way around it. If enough people bought it, then that would cover development and support costs.

Sure, that may be an option. Still, that would require either a "supported" memory upgrade or yet another "sub-line" with added memory to support the VMs. And even if it is a premium feature *and* is explained well *and* is run on upgraded hardware I can already imagine the posts about "I wanted to set up this and that and I need at least 8GB RAM for the VM and that's not available. If someone had told me before I've never bought that crap .... yaddayadda ... packaging says 'supports virtual machines' ... yaddayadda" ;)

I'm not at all against running VMs on a ReadyNAS, I'm doing it here, too. But from a business perspective I see too many pitfalls and dangers to make it an official feature, even a premium one.

-Stefan

I guess I'd have to agree with that. It'd be a nice feature though. I'll have to think about whether I want to upgrade the memory in my Pro 6 at some point.

It would be nice if NetGear released an 8GB (2x4GB) memory upgrade kit for the Pro 6, but seeing that they haven't so far, I wouldn't expect it.

WhoCares? wrote:
(...) I'm not at all against running VMs on a ReadyNAS, I'm doing it here, too. But from a business perspective I see too many pitfalls and dangers to make it an official feature, even a premium one. -Stefan

Of course. But I talked about partnerships too, like Egnyte, Backup Exec, etc. The, most of support will be done by the partner (VMware, Sun...)

MacManiak wrote:
Of course. But I talked about partnerships too, like Egnyte, Backup Exec, etc. The, most of support will be done by the partner (VMware, Sun...)

That would be a possibility but after looking at the price list of VMware and Oracle I doubt anyone would buy it ;)

-Stefan