Some people believe that by forsaking Xen and embracing the open source KVM hypervisor via its recent announcement of version 5.4 Red Hat Enterprise Enterprise Linux (RHEL), that Red Hat is simply playing a "me too" virtualization game that is too little, too late. After all, how can Red Hat gain a solid foothold in a market where VMware rules, Microsoft is coming on strong and XenServer from Citrix is bidding for market share.
In her Sept. 9 blog, ServerWatch managing editor Amy Newman suggests a twist on this scenario that will not put a happy face on the Xen world.
"It is Xen, which has been part of RHEL since version 5 was released in 2007 that stands to lose the most," Amy writes. "RHEL said it will continue to support Xen for the 10-year release cycle of version 5, but it made its aim to migrate customers to KVM quite clear."
Navin Thadani, a senior director of Red Hat's virtualization business, attempted to calm the fears of Xen users in an article that recently appeared in Campus Technology. According to Thadani, "The KVM hypervisor will sit right beside the Xen hypervisor," adding that RHEL customers who have deployed the Xen hypervisor will continue to be supported throughout the full lifecycle of RHEL 5.
Still, it's gotta be enough to make a Xen user nervous.
In her blog, Amy briefly digresses from her Xen tack by referring to her colleague Paul Rubens, who also recently interviewed Thadani. In response to a question about a possible industry shakeout, Rubens quoted Thadani as saying, "We see consolidation as being inevitable, and in the medium term, in this market, we believe that will leave VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat."
Other than being so much unleavened pabulum, that comment seems highly believable.
Anyway, getting back to Amy again, she concludes her analysis of Xen's questionable future by saying, "This leaves Xen out in the cold, or the cloud, which is where the majority of activity has been of late. But with the virtualization vendors scrambling for the cloud, the competition is stiffening there as well."
Who would have thought the cloud would become a second-chance killing floor for technologies that have been ousted from the virtualization penthouse?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2009 at 12:48 PM0 comments
I'm Bruce Hoard, the new editor of Virtualization Review. Let me immediately deliver my first unvarnished opinion about virtualization: I think it is an awesome technology. Not super-duper awesome, but awe-inspiring awesome.
Before I expound further, let me give you a brief tour of my IT journalism career. I started out as a staff writer at ComputerWorld back in the early 80's, when emerging LAN technologies were the subject of a holy war between the baseband and broadband crowds, and the IBM PC was just starting to turn the IT industry on its ear.
My beat back then was networking, which was predominantly composed of data and voice technologies (these guys were also not far from going at each other with pitchforks). After a few years of moving up the editorial ranks, I was chosen to be founding editor of Network World, which of course, still graces the ranks of IT publications today.
After leaving Network World, I started a 20-year freelance career, during which I wrote about a wide range of technologies, ran a webzine about Microsoft software running on Compaq computers, edited another webzine that covered storage networking, and generally speaking kept busy producing whatever editorial products were called for at the time.
During the past year or so, I was commissioned to do some freelance white papers on this new technology known as virtualization, and right away, I thought it was a cool, compelling topic. As a result, when I had a conversation with 1105 Media VP and Editorial Director Doug Barney about some job openings, and he mentioned that the estimable Keith Ward was vacating the editor-in-chief job at Virtualization Review to run another magazine there, I immediately threw my hat into the ring.
Happily, I got the job, and now I am presenting myself to you, gentle readers, as your new editor. I'm asking you to continue your interactive relationship with us by bending my ear with your rants, raves and plain old comments relating to our editorial product.
My goal is to build on Keith's fine work by getting you even more involved than you were before. I promise to read all your constructive e-mails, and to publish the ones I think will be the most interesting and instructive to our audience of over 40,000 readers. I'm making it as easy as possible for you to opine by including comment boxes. Please give them a workout!
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2009 at 12:48 PM10 comments
I've been wondering if people are rolling their own VDI, as it were, and now I have run across at least one company that has done just that. The story of this implementation comes from David Davis, who is Director of Infrastructure at TrainSignal.com, a global company offering video training for IT Pros. He has a number of certifications including CCIE #9369, MCSE, CISSP, VCP and vExpert. The prolific Davis also writes for a cool site called VirtualizationAdmin.com.
His roll-your-own description was part of a larger piece he wrote on the benefits and pitfalls of VMware's VDI package (which has since been supplanted by VMware View).
So as Davis tells it, TrainSignal.com is a frugal company that didn't want to pay the big ones for a full-blown VMware VDI solution. The company has a large Citrix farm with over 400 concurrent Wyse thin clients connecting to 16 servers, with users sharing applications that are installed on each server.
The problem, Davis discovered, was that a number of older applications were not multi-user enabled, and when a second user ran one of them, it would lock or crash.
"What we did," Davis wrote, "is create a VMware virtual desktop (on Server 1.x or ESX), and enable RDP to run it. We installed the old application, and we made it so the workstation would automatically login using Windows credentials, and the application would start -- maximized in the virtual desktop -- when the user connected and logged in.
"Back on that user's Citrix desktop, we put an icon with a name of the application. The application actually ran an RDP connection, full-screen, and connected to the virtual desktop system. When the connection was made, the user immediately saw their application, but it was running on the other server. However, because that user was the only person using the application, it worked fine with just a single server."
Davis calls this his "sort-of-ad-hoc VDI system," saying it enabled his company to hold down costs (no PCs required), keep its network secure, and easily roll out more of these virtual desktops.
Question: Is this kind of roll-your-own virtualization a good idea? E-mail me your thoughts or post below.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/2009 at 12:48 PM6 comments