Executive Editor
Tom Valovic
and I had a briefing yesterday with
Pano Logic
, makers of a little silver box that goes "thin client" one better, down to zero client. The idea is that you plug your keyboard/mouse/monitor into the box (Pano execs like to emphasize that in terms of design, the box is on a par [at least according to one design
competition
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/09/20085 comments
As Executive Editor Tom Valovic reported earlier today,
Dell
is the latest vendor to
partner
with Citrix on an embedded hypervisor. This is interesting on a couple of levels.
First, from Dell's perspective, it's clear that the company is figuring out what its place is in the virtualization universe. Rather than build out entire infrastructures, including its own hypervisor, like IBM, HP and Sun are doing, it is relying heavily on third-party support. This certainly saves on R&D, and makes the virtualization ISVs happy. And the savings help keep its prices very competitive.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/07/20080 comments
I have no problem with competition. I think it's good for Microsoft, VMware, Cisco and AT&T. It's just as good, and healthy, for IT publications. I do have a problem, however, with publications that either a) Outright lie, or b) Are woefully ignorant, and don't check facts before they publish something.
That has happened with a competitor of ours. Virtualization Journal has announced a print magazine, that allegedly debuted today at JavaOne, a conference in San Francisco. Here's the critical part of their announcement:
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/06/20083 comments
Greg Shields is our "Virtual Architect" columnist, and he's awesome. His column on virtualization strategies for disaster recovery, coming in the May/June issue, is outstanding, and a must read. (Not a subscriber?
Do something
about it.)
Greg is also an author for Realtime, an online publishing company. He recently responded to a blog posting of mine that referenced a demo VMware published about Quick Migration, and how it drops TCP connections. VMware's point is that Quick Migration is inferior to Live Migration, which can move VMs from physical server to physical server without dropping connections.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/05/20082 comments
I recently asked you for
feedback
about the viability of a single console for managing your virtual and physical environment, vs. using more than one interface. Would it impact your buying decision, as an admin? Here's a thoughtful answer to that, by an admin out West who works for a local government and asked that his name not be used:
"Quick Answer: No.
We've been using VMware in our production environment for the past six months with a growing implementation. In my humble opinion it is not a big deal that I need to use Virtual Center for my VMs and other Microsoft tools for the physical boxes. Sometimes multiple simple tools are of more value than the monolithic approach where an admin can supposedly do all things. I must admit that I don't have any experience in the Microsoft VM environment. "
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/05/20081 comments
The latest beta version of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was
released
today. It's a feature-complete beta, according to this
blog
entry by Hector Linares, a program manager with the Windows Virtualization team. VMM 2008 is a very, very important product for Microsoft: Management, in my estimation, is more important than the hypervisor when it comes to virtual environments. Microsoft has put a ton of resources into this, and this is the first look the general public has seen with all the features in place. It needs to hit a home run here.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/29/20082 comments
Executive Editor
Tom Valovic
and I took a briefing this morning with virtualization vendor
xkoto
. Xkoto does data virtualization focused around databases, offering (according to the company) better availability and performance, even with clustering solutions.
Its product is called Gridscale, a software appliance that works by changing the traditional active/passive roles of cluster servers and making every server active, resulting in an active/active environment. Normally, the passive servers in a cluster are hibernating, waiting for a failure to wake up and start working. Not so with Gridscale, which keeps all servers active and humming along. The company claims up to an 85 percent performance improvement with this arrangement, depending on the application and environment, of course.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/25/20082 comments
By David M. Lynch, Vice President of Marketing at
Embotics
(Note: this is a guest blog from a virtualization vendor. We do accept guest blogs if the content is relevant to our readers, and no mention of a vendor's products is made in the blog. These have to be straight information, with absolutely no marketing spin or hype. Contact me if you would like to contribute. -- Keith Ward)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/24/20080 comments
Virtual Iron has released a point upgrade of its virtualization software,
Virtual Iron 4.3
. The big news in this upgrade is support for Windows Server 2008, Microsoft's newest server OS. Another cool feature is the ability to LiveUpgrade. Virtual Iron says this means that you can upgrade from 4.2 with no VM downtime (just remember to make snapshots!)
Virtual Iron is a very interesting company, almost uniquely situated in the virtualization space. It offers mature, strong management tools on top of its Xen hypervisor, and several analysts I've spoken with like its products very much. Virtual Iron goes hard after SMB customers, which it sees as its niche currently. That doesn't mean it can't be used in enterprises, but it markets itself and its products as a good fit for smaller virtual deployments.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/24/20086 comments
Virtualization is one of the very few areas within IT in which the hardware and software are equally important. There's lots of virtualization software, and at the same time, a growing amount of virtualization-tuned hardware on which to run it.
Chip maker AMD is making some new inroads into the virtualization space, announcing that Dell is carrying its brand-new Quad-Core Opteron procs, and also that it has certified those same chips to work with VMware's ESX and ESXi hypervisors.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/22/20081 comments
Blip.tv has a graphic
demonstration
of what you could be in for with Microsoft's Hyper-V in terms of Quick Migration. In Microsoft's world, Quick Migration means that when you move a VM from one physical server to another, it happens almost -- but not quite -- instantly, with minimal downtime. In fact, the VM does go offline, if only for a short time. On the other hand, VMware's Live Migration (in its ESX and ESXi) is an instantaneous transfer, with no downtime, loss of data, state information, and so on.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/20/20087 comments
One of my passions is riding my bike (although you might not know it to look at my waistline). And I mean bicycle, not motorcycle (in fact, motorcycles should not be allowed to be called bikes, since there's no B, I, or K anywhere in the name. But that's an argument for another time).
I've been hurt a few times, but always on my mountain bike (which may be why I don't ride my mountain bike much anymore). I've always been much more of a roadie anyway. And I've never had a serious accident on my bike.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/19/200811 comments