The team at Sun continue to update VirtualBox – 3 releases in 1 month. Of these the 3.0.12 release (November 17) and the 3.1.2 release (December 17) were maintenance releases with bug-fixes, whereas the 3.1.0 release (November 30) was a fairly substantial release containing new features, including Live Migration.
From 2009 to 2014 Dr Mike Norman was the Analyst at The Virtualization Practice for Open Source Cloud Computing. He covered PaaS, IaaS and associated services such as Database as a Service from an open source development and DevOps perspective. He has hands-on experience in many open source cloud technologies, and an extensive background in application lifecycle tooling; automated testing – functional, non-functional and security; digital business and DevOps. in 2014 he moved on to become Cloud Services Architect at JP Morgan Chase.
Google Chromium OS – the Open Source Desktop Operating System for the Cloud?
It’s a different way of thinking about the Cloud, where the starting point is not the DataCenter, or the IT service, or the “user”, but the direct delivery of consumer services. Into this vision plays Chromium OS (released to Open Source on November 19th). Google devices delivering Google services (and other services intermediated by Google) from the Cloud to consumers.
Ulteo – Open Source Desktop Broker
Ulteo has just released Version 2 of its Open Virtual Desktop (OVD), an Open Source desktop broker product which is designed to deliver GUI applications running on Linux, Terminal Services and Windows to java-enabled browsers. Ulteo’s appeal is likely to be to more cost-conscious and linux-oriented organizations than the large enterprise customers of Citrix, VMware, Ericom, Systancia or Quest, but within these potentially new markets it can deliver many of the mangeability benefits of the existing proprietary products, and it has few competitors for its key feature of delivering both Linux and Terminal Services desktop applications through the same portal.
VMware Player – still no threat to VirtualBox
VMware Player is becoming more directly comparable to VirtualBox, and a possible competitor given VMware’s marketing dollars. However we anticipate both products will co-exist in the marketplace.
Open Source XenServer? ESXi to Follow?
Citrix has recently joined the Linux Foundation, and there is a report (which they seem to have endorsed) that they plan to open source XenServer. That’s not Xen, it’s XenServer – not the kernel, the product, the thing you stick on your server instead of ESXi, or sometimes vSphere.
It is entirely possible that Citrix’s lawyers have noticed that XenServer was so infected with GPL code that it was already Open Source anyway.
Cloudy Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)
There’s been a lot of press around the FREE Ubuntu 9.10 Linux distribution as a client operating system, and a wide set of comparisons made (typically by Mac or PC-using journalists) between Ubuntu and Windows 7, but 9.10 is also interesting from a broader virtualization and especially Cloud perspective. Ubuntu is managed by a UK company, Canonical, through a bona-fide foundation. Ubuntu will always be free, and is aligned with the Debian community.