Virtualization Everywhere

By Doug Barney

I promised last newsletter to give a full report of the recent VMworld show in San Francisco put on by VMware Inc. of Palo Alto. This puppy was big, with an estimated 11,500 attendees. It also attracted everyone from IBM to Cisco and even VMware rival Microsoft as exhibitors. Over 100 companies, large and small, showed off new inventions.

We’ve already talked about VMware’s own announcement of a virtualization tool that works directly off hardware, making it fast, small, and easy to install.

But the real action came from third parties. AMD continued to push the multicore envelope with a new quadcore that has built-in support for Microsoft, Xen, and, of course, VMware virtualization.

Network powerhouse Cisco wants a piece of the virtualization pie, and plans to link network gear such as its VFrame Data Center with VMware. This way virtual servers can map to Cisco switches making the servers easier to monitor and manage.

Finally VMware made a move that Microsoft may find impossible to match – it released large chunks of VMware code as open source. Rather than release the whole hypervisor, it opened up VM Tools, which affect the way guest operating systems are hosted.

Are you using virtualization, and if so what and how? Send your thoughts to barneymailto:[email protected].