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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. 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 Thin clients: The time is now Consider your current computing situation. A few hardy souls reading this are squinting at their Blackberries, cell phones, or even iPhones and scrolling furiously from screen to screen. Most of you, though, are staring at a standard computer monitor, which is tethered to a conventional, full-featured PC -- of either the desktop or notebook flavor. July 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualizing the desktop Everyone wants to escape the horror of rising energy costs. So why not run fewer servers? That’s the no-brainer benefit of server virtualization and consolidation, which is already saving forward-looking companies big bucks in kilowatt hours of electricity, not to mention in hardware and server administration. No wonder so many enterprises are eying fresh virtualization territory: the humble desktop. July 23, 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 Blogosphere pans, praises Safari 3 Apple's just-released public beta of the Safari 3 Web browser -- the first version to run on Windows as well as Mac OS X -- is drawing fervent and sometimes heated reactions from early testers. The following is an unexpurgated sample of what bloggers, ranging from grumpy Windows users to Mac fanboys, had to say in the immediate aftermath of Monday's Safari 3 announcement: June 13, 9:55 a.m. PDT 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Jamie Bernardin As the CTO and founder of software maker DataSynapse, Jamie Bernardin frequently finds himself trying to convince IT leaders and administrators to do something they've been hardwired not to: Stop thinking about managing their servers. June 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT HDS blends virtualization with thin provisioning In a move aimed at the ongoing data deluge and datacenter I/O bottlenecks today's enterprises face, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has revamped its storage virtualization strategy in the form of the Hitachi USP (Universal Storage Platform) V, adding thin provisioning to the mix. May 14, 6:30 p.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 Microsoft cuts virtualization features Microsoft today announced it will shed functionality from its Windows Server virtualization software in an effort to make good on the company's recent promise of a second-half release. May 10, 4:40 p.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 Light makes right for virtual machine performance Runtime performance is an aspect of virtual machine qualification that often goes overlooked. Many IT shops wrongly assume that virtualization performance is tied to the underlying hardware, discounting the impact of the controlling virtual machine monitor or hypervisor. In reality, the efficiency of the virtualization layer can literally make or break the scalability of a virtual machine-based deployment. And as the test results show, it’s often the lightest-weight solution that delivers the best raw VM performance. March 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Desktop virtualization tools vie for position Long ago, before the era of hardware slices and server farms, virtualization was a desktop thing. From SoftPC to Windows on Windows, desktop virtualization was primarily a tool for developers and support personnel ... people who had a compelling reason to run more than one environment concurrently on their PCs or Macs. Then along came VMware and the VDI (Virtual Desktop Initiative). Suddenly, virtualizing the desktop became the Next Big Thing in TCO reduction, and the big boys and their big plans stole much of the attention away from the traditional desktop virtualization model. March 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Dark days before daylight-saving time Guess this is the big week to write about the daylight-saving time snafu. For those who might have missed it, DST starts on March 11 this year -- three weeks earlier than usual -- and ends on November 4, a week later than usual. It's a mite late to be worrying about prepping your systems for the change now, if you ask me. If you're hearing cries of "What do we do?!" from the executive floors feel free to throw a scornful glance or two. Bottom line: If they're complaining now, those guys waited a too long. February 28, 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 Thinstall removes barriers to application virtualization Have you heard? Thin is “in” again. From VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) to RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to SVS (Software Virtualization Service), the ghosts of thin client computing are being resurrected like a scene out of “Field of Dreams.” Only this time they’re looking to ride the virtualization bandwagon and recapture some of their former glory. February 16, 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 Does VMware for Macs have a chance? VMware reports strong initial interest in its virtualization software designed to run on the Mac computer platform, but skeptics doubt it will improve Apple's share of the enterprise market. January 4, 4:22 p.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 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 Lower cost rivals challenge VMware lead Virtual Iron and XenSource both are introducing new virtualization software to undercut on price the dominant player in the field, VMware. December 11, 5:24 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 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 Consolidate, outsource, or both? Datacenter consolidation is the mega-solution for bringing IT costs, man-agement, and disaster recovery under control, but depending on a company’s goals and size, outsourcing can also play a useful complementary role. “Outsourcing should definitely be part of the decision process,” says Michael Bell, research vice president at Gartner. “Once you make the decision to consolidate or relocate, it then becomes a question of whether you should build a new datacenter, buy one, lease one, or outsource it.” November 20, 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 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 Surgient delivers virtual test labs Test-lab automation software that leverages virtualization to ease fundamental IT operations has started to emerge. September 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Vizioncore's got VMware's back Technically, backing up virtual servers running on VMware ESX and Infrastructure server should be simple, given that they’re just disk images, not actual disks. In practice, however, it’s not quite so straightforward. VMware virtual machines are constantly writing changes to that disk image, and unless you have backup agent software running within the VM itself, backing up those disk images is like trying to hit a moving target. This is where Vizioncore’s esxRanger 2.0 comes into play. September 21, 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 Desktop virtualization: Making PCs manageable Managing PCs has always been painful, but the job has gotten considerably nastier thanks to an endless parade of application upgrades, operating system patches, and anti-threat updates. Even with network-based installation and patch management tools to ease the burden, IT spends far too much time at the desktop itself, dealing with shenanigans involving personal software, multiple versions of Java or ActiveX controls, driver or DLL conflicts, malware infections, misconfigured hardware, and more. 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 test benches ease QA Desktop virtualization can ease IT’s own efforts, not just lighten the burden of end-user support. Testing is a prime example. Setting up and tearing down development and QA environments is hard, time-consuming work. But with desktop virtualization, developers and QA staff can quickly create a new environment or load a preconfigured one from a library. They can even create snapshots of an existing environment’s state for troubleshooting purposes. 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 NSA takes the blame, Google protects its name When a flaming Dell Inspiron turned his Ford pickup into a Pop-Tart, Thomas Forqueran became an unlikely media celebrity. The 62-year-old was interviewed by MSNBC and The New York Times, among others -- but you read about him here first. He says Dell offered to reimburse him for a truck rental and give him a new laptop. He replied, “Yes and no, thanks,” respectively. I wonder if a fire extinguisher was part of the package. August 25, 3:00 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 Parallels pushes virtualization into overdrive Client virtualization meets many needs -- security sandboxing, development, client lockdown, access to platform-locked applications or content, and safe remote access, to name but a few. But it is accepted that client software virtualization is too slow and resource-hungry to be of practical use to professionals. As a result, client virtualization has gone virtually nowhere. August 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualization free-for-all Barely 10 years ago, I ventured that all systems would be virtualized, and that IT law would dictate that no OS may have unregulated direct contact with system or storage hardware. July 19, 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 Server virtualization enters its adolescence Every six months or so, InfoWorld editors gather to catalog the seven to 10 tech topics we'll focus on both in print and online. Most of those topics are mainstays: Storage is a perennial, as is security (in some shape or form). Ditto for SOA, InfoWorld's bread and butter and the inspiration for our regular SOA Executive Forums. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT PlateSpin, Leostream ease the move to virtual datacenters When planning a datacenter migration from P2V (physical to virtual), rebuilding servers in the virtual realm to take over for their physical counterparts is a task that must be accomplished manually — a complex, arduous, and money-burning effort. So what could be simpler than running a few apps on the target physical servers and magically watching them boot in the virtual realm? June 30, 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 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 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 Charting startup investment trends Several clear trends emerged as we reviewed hundreds of startups in the course of researching this article. Venture capitalists have poured smart money into a host of enterprise technology areas, but security, virtualization, and -- cutting across tech categories -- open source have been the big winners. May 15, 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 XenSource rolls out cross-platform virtualization Thanks to its paravirtualization technology, the Xen open source hypervisor has won acclaim as a speedy competitor to commercial server-virtualization products such as Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware. The paravirtualization approach uses a thin layer between the hardware and the operating system, with an I/O virtualization scheme that employs a single set of drivers used by all “guest” operating systems. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Virtualization and the client conundrum If you view system virtualization as an escalating priority, this is a good time to stop and think about client systems and applications before dipping your brush and drawing that first block in your grand virtualization architecture. May 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Next up for virtualization vendors: the desktop EMC subsidiary VMware, which trailblazed the way for broader adoption of server virtualization, is hoping to now drive virtualization of the desktop with the help of numerous other hardware and software companies. April 24, 4:04 a.m. PDT > Platforms |
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