Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems

PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.

Citrix XenClient Enters the Ring

Citrix Xenclient enters the bare metal hypervisor for desktops devices market and challenges the incumbents – Neocleus and VirtualComputer. As a solution to reducing management costs and improving the user experience such a funtion is undoubtedly a contender to change the way you think about your PC lifecycle management.

VMware Spring + Google: Dramatic PaaS Progress and New SMT Concerns

Java based applications can now be moved between not only a SpringSource TC-Server Java platform on VMware vSphere, but also between the same platform on VMForce, and now Google AppEngine. This level of support from VMware, Salesforce.com, and now Google is starting to make SpringSource look like the early leading technology for PaaS Clouds. This is a significant advance in the state of PaaS clouds as there were previously no examples that offered such broad support for one platform by such a diverse set of industry leaders. However as is always the case, platform advances have outstripped security, management and performance assurance capabilities.

CPU Contention in a VMware Virtual Environment

With virtualization technology we, the system administrators, have a lot of tools available to make our day to day operation and administration of our environments easier to work with and speeds up the time it takes to do a lot of administration tasks. Take for example the ability we have to add resources to a virtual machine. You can add processors, memory and or increase disk space within a matter of minutes and very little downtime. On a physical host you would need to purchase the hardware first and wait for it to arrive and then schedule the downtime to add the resources to the machine. This speed and power can be both a blessing and a curse. Once application owners understand how easy it is to add resources to the virtual machines then comes the requests for additional resources any time the application owners think there is the slightest bit of need for any additional resources.

GestaltIT Tech Field Day: Virtualization Line Up

I participated in GestaltIT’s TechFieldDay which is a sort of inverse conference, where the bloggers and independent analysts go to the vendors and then discuss the information they have received. We visited the following virtualization vendors:
* vKernel where we were introduced to their Predictive Capacity Planning tools
* EMC where we discussed integration of storage into the virtualization management tools as well as other hypervisor integrations
* Cisco where CVN and CVE were discussed in detail.