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SWsoft sees future in multiplatform management SWsoft, the company behind the Parallels Desktop virtualization software for Macintosh, expects to release a beta version of a server edition of the software in the next four to six weeks. It is also working on new management tools for the datacenter that will control other vendors' virtualization products. From big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtualFrom big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtual While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes.  September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualization on the front lines When InfoWorld held its first Virtualization Executive Forum in September 2006, we were hard-pressed to find companies willing to talk about their virtualization efforts. It was just too early. Until companies can point to a success, they're not going to let a bunch of reporters crawl all over their infrastructure taking notes. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Purdue pursues long-term cost savings Like other adopters of server virtualization, Purdue University was concerned that its datacenter would hit the wall, exceeding physical space, power, and cooling limits. The use of EMC VMware let it combine 140 physical servers into three Hewlett-Packard DL-585 servers, a 40:1 compression ratio, says Mike Rubesch, director of IT infrastructure systems. "It helps postpone the inevitable," he adds. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Corralling VMware virtual machines The proliferation of VMs in today's datacenter has many IT professionals scratching their heads as to the true extent of virtualization's hold on day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, the complexity of virtualized environments, if left unchecked, could very well overwhelm those operations, hindering the enterprise's ability to make good on the promise of virtualization. September 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Best of open source in platforms and middleware Open source cut its teeth on operating systems, earned its street cred on Linux and Apache, and never looked back, continuing ever since to extend the kingdom to databases, middleware, and newfangled platforms such as hypervisors for server virtualization. Our Bossies in platforms and middleware recognize a few old faces, and some fairly new ones. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Pano Logic virtual desktops run without software A Silicon Valley startup claims to boost computing security and reduce electric costs with a virtual desktop PC that uses no software or processor. August 27, 9:13 a.m. PDT The cool new look in datacenter design Datacenter design is undergoing a significant transformation. The fundamentals of the datacenter -- servers, cooling systems, UPSes -- remain the same, but their implementations are rapidly changing, thanks in large part to the one variable cost in the server room: energy. July 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Xen masters take aim at VMware It seems all roads lead to virtualization these days. From every conceivable angle, computing resources are being collapsed into abstraction layers that enable greater flexibility, and storage, application, server, and desktop virtualization vendors are riding the wave. The biggest push and most appealing opportunity is server virtualization, and the biggest and most appealing vendor is VMware. VMware isn't just the biggest player, however; it's also the most expensive option. July 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT Borland, VMware team on testing for virtualization With virtualization growing in popularity, Borland Software and VMWare are partnering to accommodate the unique application testing needs presented by this paradigm. July 8, 9:01 p.m. PDT VMware Fusion Beta 4 for OS X shows off desktop virtualization chops It could be argued that VMware has played second fiddle to no one since its inception. In the decade after the first VMware products hit the market, all other comers have found competing with the virtualization giant to be tough going. June 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Fast and mean virtual machines One question mark always hanging over virtual servers is I/O performance. Unless the underlying OS and file system are specifically designed to handle a virtualization load, disk I/O can be problematic. With products like VMware ESX 3, the I/O subsystem drivers are tuned to a virtualization load, handling the widely disparate requests faster and more fluidly than the stock subsystem found in Windows Server and most Linux distributions. This isn’t a fault of these operating systems or their file systems, it’s simply a facet of the virtualization picture: A VM load is far different than a standard server load. May 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Startup enters I/O virtualization fray Virtualization startup 3Leaf Systems today announced its flagship V-8000 Virtual I/O Server, as well as $20 million in Series B investment, led by Intel Capital. May 1, 12:33 p.m. PDT Oracle seeks faster grids with Tangosol buy In buying Tangosol, Oracle wants to provide computer grids with linear performance and scalability improvements when users add servers to their configuration, Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian said on Friday morning. March 23, 12:00 p.m. PST Update: VMware questions rivals' virtualization strategies The president of virtualization software leader VMware on Wednesday questioned the strategy of rivals that are integrating virtualization functionality into their operating systems. March 8, 4:51 a.m. PST Virtualization: Linux's killer app I came away from InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum last week with two conclusions. First, server virtualization is definitely a big deal. This time last year, customers and ISVs still seemed to be struggling to come to terms with this new approach to deploying and managing servers; today it's full speed ahead. And, second, nowhere is virtualization hotter than in the Linux market. February 19, 3:00 a.m. PST 12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise Technologies that push the envelope of the plausible capture our curiosity almost as quickly as the would-be crackpots who dare to concoct them become targets of our derision. February 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Application and desktop virtualizers With application virtualization, apps no longer need to be installed on desktop PCs. Desktop virtualization delivers entire desktop environments to clients. Also, blade hardware and thin client solution vendors provide VMware VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and other virtualized desktop solutions, including ClearCube Technology, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NComputing, NEC, Neoware, Sun Microsystems, and Wyse Technology. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Server virtualization specialists The major players — including BMC, Computer Associates, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and Unisys — all have their own virtualization solutions. The vendors listed below have built their companies on server virtualization and, in many cases, datacenter automation. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Virtualization reality check Mike Williams considered his virtualization project a success after consolidating 17 U.S. datacenters into three. But then the traffic jams started. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Going virtual It’s virtualization week here at InfoWorld Central — and there’s virtually no escape. We kick off with “Virtualization under the hood,” a multipart primer to server, storage, app, and desktop virtualization. We’ve also overhauled our virtualization portal, adding regular updates, links to additional resources, and David Marshall’s blog and podcast. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Server virtualization In today’s complex IT environments, server virtualization simply makes sense. Redundant server hardware can rapidly fill enterprise datacenters to capacity; each new purchase drives up power and cooling costs even as it saps the bottom line. Dividing physical servers into virtual servers is one way to restore sanity and keep IT expenditures under control. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST IT is calling the shots again The start of 2007 finds IT vendors at the top of the food chain squirming at being treated like the help. Vendor royalty such as Microsoft, Dell, and Intel, along with consultants who have insinuated themselves as IT’s empowered insider, don’t like it when you hold strategy meetings without inviting them. Besides, it seemed clear to them that continuing to play up to IT’s appetite for convenience, expediency, and avoiding risk was a solid basis for their long-term road maps. January 10, 3:00 a.m. PST Bank on virtualization for bottom-line relief Companies not making a virtualization play in 2007 stand to spend far too much maintaining their datacenters. The ongoing energy squeeze has many enterprises already making the switch to virtualization — and for good reason, as innovation in the CPU industry and recent maturation of competing technologies are proving that server virtualization leads to significant energy-consumption relief. January 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Virtualization: The road to production 2006 will be viewed as the year server virtualization broke out of the labs and QA centers and into production environments in IT shops all over the world. For the largest to the smallest infrastructures, it’s been a banner year for server consolidation. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft, Version 2007 Happy holidays, everyone. I'm writing this from The Inn at Spanish Bay, right off of 17-Mile Drive near Carmel, Calif. Man, if only I'd bought Microsoft stock in high school, maybe I could afford to live here now. But I didn't, so all I can do is visit. December 28, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 Year in Reviews: Platforms Novell’s Suse Linux 10 was the landmark operating system launch of the year, giving us a bigger and badder Linux server and a startlingly smooth Linux desktop. We also got good looks at Microsoft Vista and Windows Longhorn betas, and at BEA’s venerable WebLogic 9.1. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Fergenschmeir Ltd. goes virtual The proof-of-concept was hatched the day that Craig Windham, CFO of our legendary and fictitious enterprise Fergenschmeir Inc., called John Traylor, CFO of Fergenschmeir Ltd. (a wholly owned subsidiary) and not-so-politely asked about the most recent electrical bills. The message was clear: Your datacenter costs too much — do something about it. December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Exclusive: Virtual enlightenment through Xen Xen has had a relatively rough road since it began as a research project at the University of Cambridge. Early releases of the open source virtualization package were quite buggy, yet highly touted by major players in the Linux field, which has led many to view the project skeptically. December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST VMware goes beyond the hypervisor Few IT technologies are evolving as fast as virtualization. In fact, even the major CPU manufacturers are pushing the envelope. Every new processor revision from Intel and AMD moves more virtualization code from the OS into microcode. Soon, nearly all of the major virtualization tasks currently handled by kernel and user-space code will be on the chips themselves, and hardware-based server virtualization will be as commonplace as RAID controllers. A quad-core CPU will come to be seen not as four processors for a single OS, but rather as a single processor each for four virtual servers. So what’s beyond that door? December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Prepping IT resources for virtualization One of the more difficult tasks when planning for a migration to a virtual datacenter is calculating the resources necessary to produce a stable and scalable result. PlateSpin’s PowerRecon is a good example of a software tool to help determine these numbers. PowerRecon runs on a dedicated server and hooks into existing servers in the datacenter via WMI and SSH, generating performance data over time and using that information to gauge the virtualization host server requirements. It can tell you how many virtual server hosts will be needed to successfully reproduce the physical environment in the virtual realm. December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Deep dive into VMware's virtual infrastructure The selling points of x86 server virtualization are by now common knowledge. By moving systems off dedicated, underutilized servers, and using virtual machines to consolidate them on fewer boxes, you can reduce power, cooling, and space requirements, and you can save a bundle in hardware costs. After the bean counting, VMs can help ease provisioning, load balancing, and disaster recovery. December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST What's in a name? No matter how well versed you are in tech jargon, the second paragraph of Paul Venezia’s “Deep Dive into VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure” will send you scurrying to Wikipedia for clarification. The sentence in question: “[We subjected] the software ... to one of our real-world, ‘Fergenschmeir’ test scenarios.” December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST VI3 Review Extra: VMware administrator's features On top of the live virtual machine migration, automated load balancing, and high-availability capabilities explored in our main article, VMware Infrastructure 3 has a number of other features that will be important to IT. Here's a rundown: December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Simplify the workplace with IT datacenter consolidation TRW Automotive, a Tier One global supplier of auto safety products, had a big control problem. “We had always operated as a dozen or so largely independent business units, each with its own systems,” says Joe Drouin, vice president and CIO. “As a result, we had dozens of mission-critical applications, including multiple flavors of SAP, running in dozens of different places.” November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Patricia Dunn pleads not guilty Patricia Dunn, the former chairman of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) pleaded not guilty Wednesday morning local time to four felony charges related to the HP board spying scandal. November 15, 10:01 a.m. PST Arvato Mobile bets the server farm on virtualization Lots of companies these days are stretching their hardware and energy dollars by consolidating print, file, DNS, and Web servers on virtualization platforms such as VMware. But not many companies boast of running their entire production infrastructure on virtual machines. An exception is Arvato Mobile, a division of Bertelsmann AG that builds mobile solutions for network operators, media companies, and Internet portals and delivers digital entertainment content to consumers around the globe. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Sun needs to find some sizzle Last week I attended an interesting dinnertime event at Silicon Valley's Churchill Club. For the sake of full disclosure, I’m on the club’s board of directors. The main attraction was Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, being ably interviewed by New York Times journalist John Markoff. November 10, 3:00 a.m. PST Down the virtual rabbit hole Virtualization is designed to render differences between systems irrelevant, but this is a good-news/bad-news arrangement. The good news is that IT can treat every server as an x86, with all x86 systems being standard. The bad news relates to the new difficulties we face in diagnosing and treating serious, but nonfatal illness when virtualization covers the source of the problem. November 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Sowing the seeds of open source storage Those of you who weren't able to attend the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in New York last week missed out on a fascinating show. A panel discussion I moderated on virtualization and Linux demonstrated that the open source community remains very much interested and engaged with this topic. But one thing that struck me and several of my colleagues, based on audience reaction to the various sessions, was just how early we are yet in the lifecycle of virtualization technologies. October 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT The next wave of software licensing Note: This story has been corrected since its initial publication online. See end of article for details. September 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: Scalent Virtual Operating Environment puts new twist on the adaptive datacenter Not many products truly deliver what they promise. Scalent V/OE (Virtual Operating Environment) 2.0, however, comes as close to keeping its pledge as anything I’ve seen. Scalent is attempting -- and succeeding -- at reaching the pinnacle of datacenter management: a truly adaptive infrastructure. September 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtually anonymous Doug Dineley is the quintessential inside guy. Though you may not know it, if you’ve been reading InfoWorld for any length of time, you’ve benefited from the fruits of his labor. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Server virtualization: Doing more with less Virtualization has gone mainstream. According to The Yankee Group’s 2006 Global Server Virtualization Survey of 750 businesses, 62 percent of respondents said they already had a virtualization solution in place or were in the process of migrating to one. Only 4 percent did not have plans to tap server virtualization. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtual databases: An alternative solution Server virtualization is an efficient way to save on server hardware costs, real estate, and management resources, but it isn’t the only way. Just ask the folks at Avanade, a systems integrator specializing in Microsoft solutions. For one government customer, Avanade had originally designed hundreds of SQL Servers in highly available MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Server) clusters, but the system was spiraling out of control. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT VMware comes to Apple VMware is bringing its virtualization technology to Intel-based Apple computers, giving Mac users the ability to run multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines alongside Mac OS X. August 9, 10:41 a.m. PDT VMware and Xen clash over Linux virtualization patch Things don't always go smoothly when you try to mix the world of open source with the world of proprietary commercial software. Sometimes those worlds collide. All too often, proprietary vendors are all too willing to ride roughshod over open source to further their own interests. And then again, sometimes it works the other way around. August 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Solaris Containers fill servers to the limit Sun Microsystems first added virtualization features to its proprietary Unix OS with Solaris Domains, a technology that was found only on expensive, heavyweight Sun hardware such as the E10000. That’s much too large a platform for most installations, however. With Solaris Containers, Sun has brought similar functionality to the mainstream. Containers run on Solaris 10 in either the Sparc or x86 flavors and, combined with the introduction of the multicore Sun Sparc T1 processor, have breathed new life into Sun’s virtualization strategy. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Xen 3.0 makes paravirtualization mainstream Before the Xen project popped up on my radar three years ago, I’d never heard of paravirtualization. In this technique, an altered version of an operating system redirects privileged operations -- the bare metal code that restructures virtual memory and communicates with devices -- to a thin “hypervisor” layer, instead of sending them directly to the CPU. It’s far, far more efficient than intercepting and redirecting privileged operations at the CPU instruction level, as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and other hardware emulation-based virtualization solutions must do. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualization gaining momentum in the enterprise What’s all the fuss about virtual machines? From AMD to Intel, Microsoft to Novell to Red Hat, every major OS and hardware platform vendor today has a stake in the virtualization game. But the truth is that running multiple virtual systems on a single physical workstation or server is simply passé. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtuozzo caters to high-volume server environments SWsoft’s Virtuozzo was a hit in the InfoWorld Test Center labs. It handles large numbers of virtual servers running on a single host system, and sports a great suite of management tools and open APIs to make automation simple. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT AMD and Intel bake virtualization into chips Hardware-assisted virtualization, now available from both AMD and Intel, is not a breakthrough but the beginning of one. AMD’s SVM (Secure Virtual Machine) and Intel’s VT (Virtualization Technology) signal a sea change in CPU design assumptions and the architectures that result. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft looks to Longhorn for virtualization speed-up Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 is built along the same lines as VMware but requires Windows Server 2003 as the host OS and, unlike VMware ESX Server, it cannot run in a bare-metal scenario. The latest release adds a fairly nifty Web UI and support for Linux VMs (virtual machines); it is also available as a free download. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT VMware maintains lead with Virtual Infrastructure 3 VMware has long led the x86 virtualization market with its line of hardware emulation-based products. VMware Workstation and Server require a “host” OS -- either Linux or Windows -- to run “guest” VMs (virtual machines) for a variety of OS environments, including BSD, Linux, NetWare, Unix, and Windows. The company’s enterprise-targeted ESX Server product takes a slightly different approach, however. Instead of requiring a host OS, it is essentially a very thin and tightly controlled Linux-based OS that installs on a bare-metal system. Thus, it is relatively limited in hardware support, but it requires less overhead to host each virtual system and can support more concurrent virtual server instances. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM's System x servers step toward virtualization After many years of venerable service, IBM is retiring the xSeries server line. In fact, IBM is retiring the "Series" nomenclature altogether, rebranding their entire mainstream server line "System x." June 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft steps in to VMware's virtualization arena I recently commented to a Microsoft technology manager, "Hey, we're thinking about doing a shootout-style lab test on something in virtualization." June 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT 'Baby steps' best approach to virtualization The best way for corporations to embrace virtualization is by adopting the technology gradually, taking "baby steps" until the concept is well understood internally, according to a systems engineer at a leading U.S. insurance company. June 6, 1:48 p.m. PDT VMware pushing further into systems infrastructure Virtualization software vendor VMware Inc. plans to extend its reach into additional systems-infrastructure areas following the unveiling of its VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) suite Monday. June 5, 3:48 p.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Russell Daniels As CTO and vice president of HP’s software business, Russell Daniels has a service-oriented perspective normally associated with applications -- rather than, say, his flagship OpenView product. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Keeping thin clients synced from coast to coast I once consulted for a medical-records company that was rolling out thin clients to nearly 50 offices around the United States. The goal was to build a large Citrix MetaFrame farm over WAN links to the main datacenter, which was located outside Boston, providing a Windows desktop for every user without dealing with hardware problems at each site. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Virtualization helps swing an Exchange upgrade A while ago I was asked to help a customer upgrade an aged Exchange 2000 installation to new hardware and Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition. My customer secured the new server loaded up with SBS 2003; my job was to integrate it into the existing AD (Active Directory) forest and move all the users’ e-mail into the new Exchange system. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Datacenter power crunch If you watch the nightly news, it’s hard to miss the relentless coverage about rising energy prices and the “pain at the pump.” Occasionally they’ll mention how oil companies are working to add refinery capacity or improve efficiency. Basically, it’s a simple story of supply and demand, and old habits die hard. May 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Fabric7 promises high-end servers at low cost Server virtualization technologies are getting monstrous amounts of buzz because they encourage cost savings, permit greater deployment flexibility, and increase utilization rates. Today, most virtualization technologies focus on software implementations, but a fledgling server vendor called Fabric7 is taking a different, hardware-based approach. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Akimbi virtualizes the application test bench In the average datacenter, a lot of IT resources are spent on preproduction application testing. Servers, networks, databases, and applications must all be deployed, followed by a series of installs and uninstalls for various versions of the application environment being put through its paces. The more homegrown applications you create, the more staff hours you burn on this repetitive but crucial work. “It’s all quite churny,” says James Phillips, CEO of Akimbi. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Cassatt extends virtualization management Virtualization software startup Cassatt on Monday launched new software to help manage virtual machines from EMC subsidiary VMware, Microsoft, and the Xen open-source project. April 17, 8:18 a.m. PDT > Platforms |
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