How-To Column Debuts
We're awfully lucky to have Chris Wolf writing for us. Chris, for those of you new to virtualization, is without doubt the most widely-quoted and most-sought-after analyst covering this industry. He works for Burton Group, and understands all aspects of virtualization like few others. He's our "Virtual Advisor" columnist, and has an exceptionally strong background in IT beyond virtualization, giving him insight into how virtualization fits into the enterprise.
He's also an outstanding writer. It's rare to find the combination of technical expertise and writing skills that Chris brings to the table. When you find those people, you hold on to them.
Starting in May, Chris has an exclusive column on our Web site. When I approached him about writing for the Web, I told him I was looking for "hands-on" coverage of a topic.
Chris said that he'd love to do a column like that, with one caveat: he didn't want to write a column on how to install ESX, for example. The kind of stuff you can find in the manual doesn't interest him as far as topics go. "I like to do different kind of things," he told me. As an editor, that's music to my ears. "You da man!" was my approximate response.
That first column is up, and it's a doozy. It shows you, step by step, how to run XenServer 4.1 from a USB drive. Why would you want to do this? Here's one good reason, from Chris' column:
"This is useful if you are testing multiple hypervisor solutions and do not want to multi-boot the hypervisors on local server storage."
Makes sense to me. It gives you a way to evaluate XenServer as well, since XenServer Express Edition is free (a great, great decision by Citrix, by the way. You may recall that Express Edition was a suprise product, a new SKU when XenServer 4.1 was released.)
I think you'll get a lot out of Chris' how-to columns. Look for them twice per month, starting in June.
Posted by Keith Ward on 06/02/2008 at 12:48 PM