Sun has made its first real foray into PC virtualization space with the
acquisition
of innotek and its flagship product, VirtualBox. (Note that I said "PC virtualization", not "desktop virtualization". They're very different. PC virtualization, for me, is when one desktop OS is hosted inside another OS, the way Parallels, for instance, creates a VM inside a Mac in which you can run Windows. It's a "Type 2" hypervisor, i.e. one that requires a host OS. Desktop virtualization is the delivery of a user's desktop and apps remotely, from a server. Think Citrix.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/13/20081 comments
Wow. Microsoft won't let Yahoo go
without a fight
. Gotta say, I'm not a big fan of hostile takeovers. If Yahoo wants to continue to underperform, lay people off, and generally stumble around the Internet yard like it's wearing a blindfold, Microsoft should let 'em.
Another question: I'm not very sophisticated about high-falutin' financial stuff, but I was a little surprised to hear that Yahoo thinks Microsoft's $44 billion offer "undervalued" the company. How is it undervaluing a company when you offer to buy it for about 62 percent more than its market value? And I'm not even asking that sarcastically (for a change). I guess I just don't understand. If you have some insight that I don't (which shouldn't be too hard), feel free to share.
Posted by Keith Ward on 02/12/20082 comments
Interesting
study
on virtualization usage by companies, reported on by the inimitable Becky Nagel.
Becky writes, "74 percent of those surveyed (88 percent in the U.S.) ranked servers as the most important area for virtualization, followed by storage (60 percent worldwide/63 percent U.S.), applications (49 percent worldwide/54 percent U.S.) and the entire enterprise/data center (43 percent for both)."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/12/20081 comments
Citrix XenServer 4.1, the first upgrade to its Xen-based hypervisor since Citrix bought the open source company last year, is scheduled for
release
next month.
The Citrix press release claims that more than 50 enhancements have been made in the upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1. Among the changes Citrix touts most highly are improvements for XenApp, its application virtualization product, and integration with NetApp's Data ONTAP storage devices. In addition, XenServer 4.1 will support 64-bit Linux guests. Most other changes appear to be plumbing related, including NIC bonding and 10Gb/s networking capabilities.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/11/20082 comments
One of my goals with this Website is to become a one-stop shop for virtualization information. To that end, I check a multitude of sites for information, press releases, etc. But I'd like your help as well. If you're a vendor and have a new product coming up, please contact me. If you're a reader and are experiencing a problem with a virtualization product (say, for instance, your testing of Hyper-V is uncovering some weirdness), let me know. If you're hearing rumors about a buyout, pass them along; I'll try to verify. If you have a question you need answered, I'll try to get an answer if I don't know it myself. Basically, I want you to partner with me on this project.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/11/20082 comments
I was born in Washington D.C. and my dad used to be a Redskins' season-ticket holder, in the pre-Lombardi days when they were a joke year after year. So that might give you an idea of what football team I follow.
Anyway, the Skins finally ended their endless search for a head coach to take over the reigns from Joe Gibbs. And in typical (owner) Dan Snyder style, they did the strangest thing possible and promoted their just-hired offensive coordinator, Jim Zorn, to head coach. They interviewed everyone except me for the job, and I half expected a call from head honcho (and extremely scary-looking guy; seriously, would you want him babysitting your kids?) Vinny Cerrato asking me if I was available.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/09/20084 comments
Warning: Jazz content! I've gotta give props to my friend
Eric Byrd
. Eric is a composer and pianist who specializes in Jazz. His fourth album was just released, and it's called
Brother Ray
. It's a tribute album to Ray Charles, one of Eric's primary musical influences. The album focuses on Charles' jazz stuff, and it's fantastic. I bought it earlier this week at one of his gigs (he plays a lot in Westminster, MD, where he and I both live.) It swings like crazy!
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/09/20086 comments
Linus Torvalds doesn't think virtualization is a transformational technology. I'm a big Torvalds fan in general, but in this case, the founder of the Linux OS is simply dead wrong. Here's what he said in an
interview
with the Linux Foundation:
"Jim Zemlin: Virtualization. Game-changer? Not that big of a deal?
Linus Torvalds: Not that big of a deal.
Jim Zemlin: Why do you say that?
Linus Torvalds: It's been around for probably 50 years. I forget when IBM started offering virtualization on their big hardware. Maybe not 50 years, but it's been all around for decades and it's very interesting in niche markets - I think the people who expected to change things radically are just fooling themselves.
I'd say that the real change comes from new uses, completely new uses of computers and that might just happen because computers get pushed down and become cheaper and that might change the whole picture of operating systems.
But also, I'd actually expect that new form factor is in new input and output devices. If we actually end up getting projection displays on cell phones, that might actually change how people start thinking of hardware and that, in turn, might change how we interact and how we use operating systems. But virtualization will not be it."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/08/20082 comments
VKernel
just got $4.6 million in funding. The money will go toward advancing product development, increasing sales and expanding market awareness, according to a press release announcing the cash influx. Sounds like a good use to me.
VKernel makes two products: a capacity analyzer, so you can tell how many VMs you can add to a pool of resources, and be alerted to processing bottlenecks in your virtual environment; and a very interesting tool called a chargeback virtual appliance. The idea behind a chargeback appliance is that you can determine which virtual resources are being used by which computers in a company, and the value of that usage. So, for example, you can find out just how much more the Engineering department is costing you, in terms of computing resources, than Accounting. A useful tool, I'd say, around budgeting time.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/06/20080 comments
So Microsoft, do you want more evidence of why people are, for the most part, shying away from Windows Vista and sticking with Windows XP? Consider this: I use a MacBook Pro as my main work machine. It has an Intel Core-Duo processor and 2 GB RAM. I use VMware Fusion to run my VMs. I've been doing some fiddling around today, and finding some rather shocking figures about Vista's resource usage compared to XP's.
For instance, loading Vista in the VM takes about 1:32 (averaging out multiple attempts). XP loads in about 36 seconds. But the bigger shocker is the load that each OS is putting on my processor. According to Activity Monitor (the Apple equivalent of the Performance tab in Windows Task Manager), Vista uses about 50 percent of my processor's power, on average. XP is averaging out to around 5-7 percent of my CPU's horses. When you multi-task the way I do, that's ginormous.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/06/20087 comments
Well, Microsoft is going to launch at least one new product during its GLOBAL LAUNCH WAVE! As reported by yours truly yesterday, Windows Server 2008, formerly Longhorn, was
RTMed
, which means it should be available by the Feb. 27 kickoff date. And did you notice my understated sarcasm with the all caps? It's hard to call something a "Launch Wave" when a total of one product is being released. I guess that's why they replaced the "Launch Wave" hyperbole with the el-lame-o slogan
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/05/20081 comments