Now
this
is a buyout I can get behind. In my mind, Oracle buying Sun makes loads more sense than
IBM
buying Sun (although I readily admit that many of you disagreed with my logic on that.)
The reason? There's not nearly the same overlap among products. Oracle will significantly expand what it offers now, rather than just offering more of the same stuff (e.g. servers) under a different name.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/20/20090 comments
Stray thought about the
huge news
today: One company that simply can't be happy is VMware. It's set to announce the details of
vSphere
tomorrow, and was certainly hoping to have the news stage mostly to itself. Now it has to compete with one of the biggest IT stories of the year, a story which will dominate the week's coverage.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/20/20097 comments
I got an interesting tidbit of information from VMware today (not related to the big
announcement
coming next Tuesday about vSphere.) I asked a VMware spokesman how much of the company's infrastructure is virtualized.
It's an interesting question, especially considering how Microsoft likes to tout that it eats its own dogfood. It is never shy, for instance, about mentioning that big Websites like TechNet are running on Hyper-V. The same question, naturally, is relevant to the virtualization leader.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/16/20095 comments
Get ready for a big announcement from VMware next Tuesday. Although VMware hasn't made it official, everyone in the virtualization community knows VMware's going to be releasing the first broad details of VMware Infrastructure 4, which is going to be re-named "vSphere".
It's been a long time coming for most virtualization administrators, who have been using VI3 for several years now.
Make no mistake, though: this is going to be big. Very big. It will serve as the first glimpse of the specifics of the Virtual Datacenter Operating System (once known as VDC-OS), and provide a substantive roadmap for VMware's future in the clouds. Will VMware lap the competition again, or will the vision be misty and underwhelming? I don't know, but I do know there's a lot riding on this.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/15/20097 comments
Greg Shields, formerly a columnist with
Redmond
magazine as well as
Virtualization Review,
has one of the very best explanations I've ever seen on the architectural differences between Hyper-V and ESX in his
blog
over at Realtime Publishers.
It's a balanced explanation, not taking sides, of the reasons Hyper-V is faster than ESX, as we found in our recent hypervisor comparison. In Greg's analysis, it mainly comes down to a question of drivers, and how they interact with the hypervisor layer.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/15/20093 comments
The versatile Lee Pender, who writes a blog for
Redmond Channel Partner
magazine as well as serving capably as Executive Editor for
Redmond
magazine, my old stomping grounds, has an interesting
blog item
up about a meeting he recently took with HP.
He quotes an HP virtualization executive who brings up a good point. From Lee's entry:
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/14/20092 comments
Duncan Epping over at
Yellow Bricks
has noted a security
patch
that was just released for ESX 3.x. According to VMware, "A critical vulnerability in the virtual machine display function might allow a guest operating system to run code on the host." Hmm. Sounds slightly scary.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/13/20090 comments
I'm considering buying a laptop for virtualization and other uses. Of course, that means I need a real screamer. The virtualization I want to do goes far beyond the "load VirtualBox/Virtual PC/VMware Workstation and fool around"-type stuff. Yes indeed; I want to be able to build a virtual infrastructure and simulate a small virtual network, with multiple VMs and applications, interconnected to each other and the outside world the way it happens on a real network. All in software, of course.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/09/20096 comments
So VMware is going to
guarantee
that you get at least a 50 percent savings on server hardware, or their professional services are free. What to make of this?
First, it's a good thing for the industry. Sure, VMware isn't completely altruistic here. The company stands to make a bundle from selling Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 (now at Update 4 if you hadn't heard) and related upgrades, if the industry embraces this offer. But it also reduces some -- and maybe a lot -- of the risk involved for companies that want to virtualize, or do more with virtualization, but are hesitant to take on such a project in this economy. Knowing that they won't have to pay for the consultant work if they don't achieve 50 percent savings on server hardware should make it an easier sell to upper management, which is becoming harder and harder to convince to spend any money on IT these days.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/06/20097 comments
I
mentioned
the other day that our upcoming issue features a story about the display protocol wars -- you know, the battle to make stuff like RDP, ICA, SPICE, and so on work better, which greatly enhances the end-user experience that will be critical to acceptance of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
A central thrust of the story is VMware's deal with Teradici to software-ize its PC-over-IP (PCoIP) offering. Currently, it exists as a hardware-only solution, but VMware wants to bring that kind of capability down to the software level. As you might guess, some folks are skeptical that any software version of a hardware device can get anywhere near hardware performance. Whether VMware can pull it off, or get its software PCoIP product anywhere close, is anyone's guess.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/03/20091 comments
I had a very interesting conversation the other day with Greg Scherer, CTO for Neterion. Neterion just announced the release of a 10 Gigabit network adapter, the
X3100 series
. Greg is a fascinating guy to talk to. Being the former CTO of Emulex, he's got some real insight into the virtualization arena.
One of the first questions I asked him was about the viability of the 10Gbps market. He estimates it at about 10 percent, and that seems about right to me. Fortunately for Neterion, they're not counting on this product to make or break the company. He said Neterion predicts steady, rather than spectacular, growth for the X3100, and the dual-channel version, X3120, coming out this summer. Neterion still makes its real money with standard hardware server and storage adapters.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/02/20093 comments