I just took a briefing with
Phoenix Technologies
(took a briefing is journalese for "I just did an interview with them about their company.") You're probably familiar with them as a maker of the BIOS firmware that runs on many of today's computers (and may of yesterday's, since they're about a quarter-century old).
It was a fascinating talk about their entry into the virtualization market. Phoenix is making a hypervisor that's embedded in a system's BIOS. It's what the company calls a "Type 3" hypervisor, meaning it lives in a layer between the physical hardware (where "Type 1" hypervisors like ESX Server, Hyper-V and Xen live) and the operating system (which houses "Type 2" hypervisors like VMware Server, Microsoft Virtual Server and PC virtualization products like VMware Fusion, Parallels for Mac and Virtual PC.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/21/20084 comments
Interesting
story
on how one of the world's most secretive organizations -- the National Security Agency -- is using virtualization to gain more security.
Security is becoming more and more of an issue in virtualization. Admins are realizing that although the machines are virtual, the security issues are very real. In some ways, they're worse -- having five, 15 or 55 VMs on a single server means that, potentially, a lot more servers and data are at risk.
Posted by Keith Ward on 03/20/20080 comments
The embedded hypervisor arms race is heating up. The latest company to join in is Citrix,
announcing
an embedded version of its hypervisor, Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition, in (you guessed it) select HP ProLiant servers.
XenServer is Citrix's standard, enterprise-class hypervisor, built on the the open source Xen platform. The Select Edition is a stripped-down version of XenServer, tuned to work with the ProLiant brand. It also provides an easy upgrade path to the full version of XenServer for organizations.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/20/20082 comments
You've probably noticed by now, but the release candidate for Hyper-V is
out now
. Kudos to Microsoft for releasing it so quickly and allowing admins (and the rest of us geeks) to start playing with the near-final code.
It looks like at this point that there won't be any more features added, so what you see with the RC is what you get. It will support Microsoft's updated desktop OSes, Windows Vista and Windows XP, along with SUSE Linux 10 (that still puts it nearly a generation behind Novell, which is set to release SUSE 11 sometime soon -- at least we hope.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/19/20082 comments
You know you're a geek at heart when getting a new server makes you weak-kneed with giddiness. Well, I guess I qualify.
I just got my new test server, courtesy of the good folks at HP. They've shipped me a ProLiant DL360 G5 for an extended loan, so that I can play with all this cool virtualization technology. It's a 1U "pizza box" (perfect for my home) with two 64-bit, quad-core Xeons and 4 GB RAM. Yes, that means eight screaming processors, all for little ol' me. Excuse me while I wipe the drool off of my keyboard.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/20082 comments
Novell has
announced
the next version of its flagship Linux platform; the most interesting thing for readers of this blog are the many hints dropped about Novell's virtualization strategy.
We don't know when SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is coming out; Novell says it will release details about availability "later this year" (thanks for that Novell; that's extremely helpful information. Like, major "Duh"). One thing the press release strongly implies, however, is that Novell wants to compete with VMware in the embedded hypervisor space.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/20082 comments
Very interesting news to see that VMware's stock price is
back down
to its post-IPO levels. The company had ridden the coaster to the very top, and has now plummeted down the other side.
My quick take: this is much ado about nothing. VMware's stock has been wildly overvalued since the IPO, and has now returned to the level at which it should be. Virtualization, while I'm quite sure is the coming thing, is still in its infancy. Witness the fact that most companies still use one facet of virtualization: server (also called hardware) virtualization for consolidation purposes. That functionality alone is not enough to continue to propel a company into the outer stratoshpere (to quote the Wonderful Wizard of Oz).
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/14/20080 comments
Well, things are moving along on the magazine front. I've seen the near-final version of the launch issue, and I have to say that I'm impressed by what we've got. Everything has come together nicely, and I'm confident we'll produce a magazine that will quickly be on your "must-read" list.
It's not often that you get to be the first in the world to do something, but that's the situation we find ourselves in. When Virtualization Review launches as a print magazine later this month, it will be the first print pub in this space -- ever. And, for now at least, the only one. That's a nice feeling, and one that an editor doesn't get very often.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/10/20085 comments
Vista, folks, is in trouble. Big trouble. Microsoft's latest desktop OS now faces a class-action
lawsuit
, on top of all the other issues that continue to dog it nonstop. Even Microsoft execs, according to internal e-mails, hated it.
I've been wrong plenty on technology topics, but on Vista, I've been right. I felt almost out of the gate that it was going to have trouble gaining traction in the consumer and business markets. There has, of course, been lots of talk about application incompatibility and driver problems. But the main issue, it has always seemed to me, was a simple one: Windows XP works well. Darn well. It has a huge ecosystem around it, and is extremely stable. It does what most users need it to do.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/10/20082 comments
Parallels, the company formerly known as SWSoft, has released the second beta of
Parallels Server
. I'll be interested to get my hands on it and start playing around, as soon as my "extended loan" server from HP comes in (one of the key benefits of being a technology journalist is getting to play around with stuff for free. And that reminds me -- I'm always looking for product reviewers. If you, similarly, like tinkering with new products, I can get you free reviewer's copies of these programs.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/07/20082 comments
Very, very busy couple of days for me, as we're putting our launch issue to bed now, but I wanted to pass along one little tidbit of information from a managed service provider I took a briefing with yesterday.
This provider and I were chatting about his offerings, and about how his products work on top of VMware infrastructure. I asked him about the possibility of implementing his solution on top of Hyper-V. His answer was very revealing. He simply won't do it. His company has tested Microsoft's new hypervisor a good bit, and they've found it's simply not enterprise-ready in its current state; and he doesn't expect that to change when the final code of 1.0 hits, sometime this fall most likely.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/05/20082 comments
Very interesting
take
on the VMworld Europe conference in Cannes, France, last week from virtualization.info. Alessandro Perilli, who owns and runs the site, does an outstanding job -- his prose is a little difficult at times, owing to the fact that he's not a native English-speaker, but he really understands the market and the technology.
He was at VMworld all week (alas, budget considerations kept yours truly firmly glued to his desk in Westminster, MD -- which, by all accounts, is nearly as scenic as Cannes), and filed multiple reports, followed by a wrapup. To summarize his summary, he says that, basically, VMworld Europe was a gigantic missed opportunity for VMware. He wrote:
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/03/20081 comments