Community Unified Drivers

The Community Unified Driver Package was started in early 2008, a project to allow the use of low cost commodity hardware on modern hypervisors such as VMware ESXi and Xen Server.  The beginnings of ‘accessible cloud computing’.

Background

Our data center went live in 2007 with a mix of dedicated and virtual provisioned resources.  The transition to a completely virtual infrastructure was completed in early 2008, and along the way we learned a lot.  By working with the community we found that various users of these hypervisors had the same issues we faced.  Many organizations and users were transitioning from older or less expensive hardware, and like us found it difficult to get support from manufacturers and sometimes from the VM makers themselves (VMware/Citrix/Microsoft).  Plenty of this equipment worked correctly in a variety of *nix flavors and environments but served as a major pain for several hypervisor implementations.

Contributions

We worked with users in public and private, many in communities such as vm-help and the VMware forums, starting the unified package.  It was recieved well, and helped the community for some time.  Along with this public activity we have been contracted to do private driver development.  Visit the mentioned sites for more information on downloads.

Going Forward

While we are no longer doing private driver development we continue to use our knowledge of these hypervisors on EC2, primarily optimizing software and operating systems to scale.  We continue to contribute in the form of compiler enhancements, machine and software scaling, and IO management (among other things).

At this moment the Unified Driver Package is dormant, but are looking to resurrect it in mid-late 2010.  Stay tuned or drop a message if you’d like to help!