News: Piston Cloud and Gridcentric Partner to Deliver First Commercial OpenStack VDI Platform

Piston Cloud Computing raised a few eyebrows on Tuesday with the announcement that it was extending its Piston Enterprise OS (PentOS) to provide a platform for hosting virtual desktops (VDI) through an exclusive licensing deal with Toronto-based Gridcentric for its innovative Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology.

Red Hat 6 Beta – Look No XEN

The Red Hat 6 Beta is out, and there is no Xen in it, only KVM. It can operate as a guest in an existing Xen environment, but it cannot act as a Xen host. A few minority interests still cling to Xen, but ultimately it makes no sense for most Linux distributions to ship with Xen. Novell will stick with Xen for a while, and also Oracle, because they are no friend of Red Hat, but when the hypervisor wars become old news, they will quietly move to KVM. It’s easier. In future we fully expect to be talking about Xen/Linux in the past tense.

Virtualizing Linux on IBM Mainframe – Now more affordable than ever!

IBM has reduced the price of its Mainframe/Linux platform, providing an IBM price point and feature benchmark against which to compare the consolidated offerings which are starting to emerge from competing vendors, such as the Acadia group (Cisco, EMC, or VMware) and HP/Microsoft.

VirtualBox OSE 3.0 – Still a viable Open Source option?

In trying to re-use some old server hardware I re-vsisted VirtualBox/Ubuntu, a viable and completely free Open Source option for non-virtualization-enabled hardware. It is a neat solution, simple and well-supported, but the open source version of VirtualBox is nobbled to make it extremely awkward to use, in a different way to VMware’s nobbling of the non-Open Source (but also free) ESXi.

Now is the time, for Oracle/Sun to put all the features of VirtualBox into the Open Source version, and let it live on, perhaps not for use on Linux servers, but as free virtualization platform for other operating systems on Windows. If Apple ever loosens up the licencing on MacOS, it could turn 15 million PCs into Macs – overnight.