Virtual Machine Upgrades and VMCasting

I just read this story: RSS Tapped to update virtual machines, and thought I would comment on it a little bit.

First of all, VMCasting is designed to provide a distribution method for virtual machines. Other people have tried to put something together before us, and it never really stuck. I am not saying we have it all figured out, but we have something that works with our Enomalism platform, and that is good enough for me right now. Also, we are not trying to provide an ugprade path for running machines anyways, just for the images. I am sure that our management for this will get better as time passes, but for now, again, this works.

As for the upgrading of instances/VMs, I think that people really don't understand the entire purpose of the VM in the first place. I mean, the idea is that you can aggregate servers together, sure, but also you can use different distributions and leverage their different strengths, and that includes upgrade paths. People have spent YEARS on these upgrade systems. VM management is not the silver bullet for that, and we are not going to surpass the richness and flexibility of existing package management any time soon.

Do I think that there is a better way? Sure. This field is immature, and there are a lot of players. rPath has some fantastic ideas, as long as you can stump the $$$ to use their platform. We are targeting a more fully open (as in no lock-in) platform, so we are investigating other methods. Of course, since we are fully modular, I would love to develop a plugin to pull rPath machines. I think that would be hella sexy.