Seeing as how I'm a big fan of both virtualization and the
iPhone
, anything that combines the two is going to excite me.
And this does. Citrix has released a technology preview for iPhone, called Citrix Receiver. Basically, the app (available now on the iPhone App Store) allows you to access applications stored in a XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) environment.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/02/20091 comments
- So who cares if "virtualizationness" isn't a word? It's my blog, and I'll create new words if I want to. It's the Internet, after all, where spaces between words are going thewayofthedinosaur.com.
- Remember when IBM was going to buy Sun? Many of you told me why I was wrong to speculate that it wouldn't be a good marriage. You're probably still right, but I do note that there has been precious little mention of that since the initial burst of hype.
- I bet you didn't know that Microsoft opened a Palo Alto campus. I wonder if Steve Ballmer is starting to feel like VMware is the new Google?
- Speaking of Sun, you've probably seen that Sun's VDI 3.0 is out. My question: When is xVM Server 1.0 coming out? On the positive side, Sun is being very good about keeping us in the loop with its "xVM Central" blog. Number of blogs in March: 2.
- I've been doing a lot of reporting lately on the economy and its effect on the virtualization community. My overall feeling is that virtualization escapes mostly unscathed. I don't think we'll see much folding of virtualization vendors; more than that, if you're a startup in virtualization, or considering a startup company with a virtualization focus, don't give up on trying to get venture capital funding. I had a chat recently with a VC expert, and he confirmed what I suspected: that if you have a strong management team and a solid vision, there's still money out there for you (more on this later.) Even now, there's money available.
- Finally: keep an eye out on virtualizationreview.com for something new and cool coming really soon.
Posted by Keith Ward on 03/31/20096 comments
Sorry about the lack of blogging lately, folks. We're at production deadline for our next issue, and that takes most of my time. With that in mind, I wanted to give you the normal sneak peak at the upcoming magazine.
Our cover story is about virtualization and the economy. It's not exactly news that the economy is in a tailspin -- but that doesn't mean everyone is suffering equally. Virtualization vendors, in particular, seem to be surviving -- even thriving -- in these dark financial days. Our intrepid reporter goes inside the companies to find out why.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/31/20090 comments
I received a copy of a new virtualization book the other day, and wanted to share it with you. It's called
Virtualization: A Beginner's Guide
, and is available on Amazon, among other outlets.
It's written by Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest, a writing team you're likely familiar with if you do the virtual dance. For one thing, they're columnists for Virtualization Review, writing the "Virtual Architects" column. They are top-flight technologists and writers, which is a hard thing to find. It's not too difficult to find folks who know technology, or to find folks who can write; to find folks who can do both is rare indeed.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/23/20093 comments
A new virtualization management product has hit the streets, and this one has a lot of promise:
Hyper9
, which "Google-izes" your infrastructure.
I first saw Hyper9 in action at last year's VMworld, and liked what I saw from the demo that a Hyper9 executive walked me through. It immediately felt very Google-like, with a search window at the top for finding various aspects of a virtual infrastructure.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/23/20092 comments
It's looking like IBM may be
buying Sun
, for the over-inflated price of $6.5 billion.
My question is why? What exactly does Sun have that IBM would like to have?
Servers? Nope. IBM has plenty of those.
Software? Maybe. Although Solaris and MySQL are very nice products, they're not worth a $6.5 billion premium. Besides, IBM seems to be doing well with Linux as the core OS on the majority of its servers.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/20097 comments
You may have heard that our recent
cover story
, in which we tested hypervisor performance for Hyper-V, XenServer and ESX, caused some controversy. Everyone seems to have an opinion -- VMware
thinks
our testing stinks and our results can't be trusted, Simon Crosby at Citrix
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/17/20092 comments
Microsoft has made the
beta
of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) R2 available. This
release
keeps it more or less synchronized with the Windows Server 2008 R2 development schedule.
The big upgrade, from a functional standpoint, is that it supports and manages Live Migration. Live Migration is the ability to move a running virtual machine (VM) from one physical server to another, with no downtime. Live Migration was a
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/16/20091 comments
So, Cisco's now a
server OEMer
. I'd say this qualifies as somewhat substantial news.
Wow. I must admit that I didn't think Cisco would be taking this step -- Nostradamus, I ain't. Does this make sense for Cisco? And what will it mean for the virtualization market? No one knows for sure right now, but it sure is a tremor-causing event in the hardware world.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/16/20091 comments
Well, the
hypervisor test
story is stirring up a hornet's nest, as I expected. The latest
entry
is from Alessandro Pirilli at virtualization.info. Unfortunately, some of Alessandro's facts are wrong. He states that "last week a group of brave reporters at Virtualization Review challenged VMware and published an independent analysis without asking any permission."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/16/20092 comments
It looks like Virtual Computer will be the Neil Armstrong of the bare-metal client hypervisor space. They will beat everyone to market with a desktop management product that includes a hypervisor that sits on top of the hardware, instead of sitting on top of the desktop OS.
In a press release announcing its partner program, Virtual Computer said the application, NxTop, will be available "this month." That's pretty quick turnaround, considering the final beta/release candidate only came out Feb. 23.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/10/20091 comments