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.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/02/20081 comments
Well, Citrix has released its
guidelines
about using the Xen name, and it's about like I expected, and
blogged
about last week.
In a nutshell, Citrix says "The name Xen is ours. Hands off." Here is the key sentence (emphasis in the original):
"All uses of the Xen Marks are reviewable by Citrix who, acting in the interests of the Xen community and in the interests of protecting the value of the Xen Marks themselves, expressly reserves the right to revoke permission to use the Xen Marks."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/02/20085 comments
Most of the virtualization products I've been exposed to over the last six months look at virtualization from an IT perspective. How well is P2V working? Are we getting up to, or over, 50 percent server utilization through consolidation? BladeCenter or System p?
One thing I don't hear as much about is the end user experience. All this virtualization technology is extremely cool from a geek's point of view, but ultimately, IT's primary job is to keep users happy. That's the philosophy behind an intriguing 2005 startup called Aternity. Their product, Frontline Performance Intelligence, sees the network from the user's point of view, rather than being datacenter-centric.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/30/20085 comments
If you're building a Xen-based product, you'd better be careful what you name it. If you call it "XenBlank" or "XenFred" or "XenMyReallyCoolProduct," you will likely be getting a polite but firm letter from the Citrix legal department.
Citrix has decided to clamp down on what it calls "widespread and unregulated use" of the Xen trademark. Naturally, this is to protect the general public as well as Citrix. From a blog posting by Stephen Spector, Senior Program Manager of Xen.org:
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/27/20083 comments
Virtualization is hot right now -- that's not news to anyone half-awake in IT. But it appears that virtualization-related jobs are also in serious demand.
A new report from tech job site Dice.com states that jobs requiring VMware experience are up 40 percent in six months, with more than 1,500 postings. "Right now, only a handful of jobs call for Hyper-V knowledge, but we'll be watching to see if demand for this skill grows once the product is released," says Dice executive Tom Silver in the report (hat tip, Alessandro).
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/22/20082 comments
Today, Microsoft
published
the second release candidate of its new bare-metal hypervisor, Hyper-V. The release keeps Redmond firmly on track to push out the final version of Hyper-V in August.
RC2, according to Microsoft, is feature complete. The upgrades are very minor in nature. It includes support for an older OS, Windows Server 2004 SP4, along with better mouse integration with some Linux installations, and a streamlined install process for Windows Server 2008 Integration Components. One thing to note: If you're also using the first beta of Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager, which was released late last month, you don't want to upgrade to Hyper-V RC1 (the previous release was RC0), as they're incompatible.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/20/20082 comments
Citrix's virtualization strategy took a big leap forward today with the release of
XenDesktop
. The announcement was made on the first day of Synergy, Citrix's flagship conference.
XenDesktop is Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure product, and a direct competitor to VMware's VDI. Other companies such as HP, Sun and Microsoft all have, or are developing, VDI solutions, but the industry leader is clearly VMware VDI.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/20/20080 comments
As part of my virtual education, I've been looking over a number of virtualization-related books. When I recently took the family out to a semi-nearby Borders store, I picked up a couple of tomes (I just can't help myself): "
The Best Damn Server Virtualization Book Period
", trading on the name of the sports show, and "
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/19/20086 comments
I recently asked for feedback from anyone using Virtual Iron (VI) in a production environment. I got the following comments from Tanya Morton, the IT director for a child services entity:
"We deployed VI in January and migrated 12 of our servers onto the platform. In the past four months, each node has locked up once, taking the virtualized servers on it down, as well, with no automatic move to a different node - VI is still trying to figure out what happened.. Aside from that, I have been very pleased, and certainly appreciate the much lower price tag."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/15/20085 comments
There's an interesting security discussion going on now between Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO, and noted security blogger Christopher Hoff.
Hoff kicked off the fun by taking Crosby to task for allegedly claiming that virtualization security is rightfully handled by third-party vendors, and that Xen isn't in the security business (note to readers: there's a big red button beside this article with a profanity on it, as well as profanity in the entry. If this type of language bothers you, you might want to skip it.) Here's the key quote:
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/12/20080 comments
So now we know, apparently, what VMware's application streaming product will be called: Alessandro Perilli over at virtualization.info
reported
that the new name is ThinApp. You may remember that VMware, seeking a toehold in the app virtualization market,
bought
Thinstall last January. Now it has rebranded the product.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/12/20084 comments