The latest and greatest thing in the data center is apparently containers. For those of us with long enough teeth to remember the heady days of the early millennium, they look and smell a lot like Solaris Zones. Containers in their current incarnations are garnering a great deal of attention, especially in the DevOps world, …
Continue reading “Containers: Innovation or Evolution? Will They Rule the World?”
Who would have thought it? Parallels, the developer of the Mac-based hosted virtualization product, had a service provider business. As of March 24, 2015, Parallels has split it off from its core business of selling hosted virtualization to Mac users and marketed it as “Odin.” Yes, Odin, the Norse god, king of Asgard. At first …
Continue reading “Beware, All You Other Clouds: Odin Wants His Cloud Back”
Gray-haired desktop virtualization specialists may remember Parallels as the developer of Virtuozzo Containers, a containerized application hosting solution for Windows Server that provides a halfway house between RDSH sessions and full server virtualization. Parallels is back in the desktop virtualization news after having announced its acquisition of 2X Software. This move brings mobile device management, …
Desktop virtualization often focuses on solutions provided by Citrix and VMware. Quest’s vWorkspace is an enterprise ready solution and its partnering with the likes of Virtual Computer offer customers looking to reduce the cost and simplify their desktop service implementation.
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.
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.
