LinuxWorld, Boston 2006 - Wrap Up
Posted by Fraser Campbell Fri, 07 Apr 2006 03:07:00 GMT
Lots of interesting news came out of LinuxWorld Boston this year …
Virtual Iron
Virtual Iron dropping development of their own hypervisor as reported here is a huge shift. A few other items of interest on the Virtual Iron story:
- Virtual Iron will focus entirely on supporting servers with VT or Pacifica extensions
- high speed interconnect can be anything (i.e. gigE, 10gigE or Infiniband). VFe 2.0 and earlier had supported infiniband only
This should help accelerate deployment and development of Xen, Virtual Iron has a good name, established products and many partnerships.
OpenVZ / Virtuozzo
OpenVZ announced zero downtime migration without the need for expensive SAN or NAS storage. SWSoft (make of Virtuozzo/OpenVZ) also announced their Datacenter Automation Suite. A quote from their press release:
After delivery, administrators use a web-based portal that allows departments and end users to configure and maintain these services. All resources and applications can be tracked to individual departments and users, so costs can be assigned to the appropriate business unit. The Datacenter Automation Suite can be easily extended through a flexible API.
I can see the drooling at the office already over that one, hi guys ;-)
Virtuozzo was announced as Best Virtualization Solution.
Dell
Dell CTO Kevin Kettler suggested (not that it’s new) that virtualization will play large roles in both enterprise servers and desktops. On the desktop side virtual machines will be used for secure, purpose specific machines – perhaps an Internet browser.
Xensource
Xensource announced that they are no longer developing their XenOptimizer product and that they will instead focus on XenEnterprise.
XenSource has licensed Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format to offer the ability to import virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server.
Microsoft funded some of the original research behind Xen and at one time there was a para-virtualized Windows running on Xen. Those days are long gone but could they be coming back? Might Microsoft jump on the Xen bandwagon themselves? Why reinvent the wheel and wait until 2008 (or is it 2009) to enter the hypervisor market?
It has become quite clear from the Xensource press releases that they wish to focus on the Windows market.
Holger Dyroff, one of Novell’s SUSE bigwigs had the following comment:
“Both Novell and XenSource are key contributors to the Xen open source project. XenEnterprise is a good solution for companies who want to predominantly deploy Windows on Xen. If you want to deploy Linux on Xen, then SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the platform of choice.”
Various articles on the Internet suggest that Xen is entirely focused on the Windows market – we aren’t so sure about this but certainly the Linux market will be tough since all of the enterprise vendors are likely to integrate many Xen management features.
Microsoft
This is certainly the funniest news (and least significant) – Microsoft will now support Linux virtual machines on their Virtual Server product.
Do check Microsoft’s knowledgebase article here if getting Linux support from Microsoft is of interest to you.
