Monthly Archives: August 2007

Infrastructure Architecture, Open Source

The virtual worlds of VMware and XenSource

How about this? The Portable Consultant actually addressing an interesting development or two in the world of Infrastructure Architecture ~ Design & Deployment!

virtual competitors
Item One is the IPO of VMware which, The Economist assures us, is not a repeat of the Internet Bubble years despite the fact that the stock rose 76% on the first day.

Item Two is the acquisition of privately held XenSource by Citrix which is seen by The Motley Fool as a reasonable response to the changing technology that threatens their main product line.

virtual uses in the data centre and at home
As a technical architect I had been waiting for some time for VMware and similar virtualization options to catch on for server virtualization. Amongst my customers this has been happening during the past couple of years. As a parent I have been using VMware Workstation for several years now as a way to isolate my child from upsetting my fragile Windows configuration on the family PC.

the future of XenSource
It is interesting that a company based on proprietary software, Citrix, has looked to a company based on open source, XenSource, to save its bacon. This further validates the open source business model. It will be interesting to see how Citrix now deals with its new open source property and the open source based businesses and communities that have been instrumental in the success of XenSource including Novell and Red Hat.

Cheers,
-pmh

New Paradigms, YukYuks

Dell goes virtual… users go broke?

The Portable Consultant just read about Dell’s plans to increase support for virtualization in their PCs.

The article is another case of technology overtaking common sense. While virtualization is indeed a great tool, for certain jobs and in certain situations, the article’s description of users running multiple operating systems sounds like the kind of fantasy usually reserved for those quarterly results calls tech firms put on for the financial analysts:

“One virtual machine might run Windows Vista and handle every day computing tasks, while another could be used only to browse the Internet, limiting any security threats to the parameters of the virtual machine — which could be deleted.

“A third virtual machine might run a version of Linux that is compatible with programs on the user’s work computer. And a fourth virtual machine might run Windows XP software that is not compatible with the Windows Vista machine.”

-Reuters.com: Dell eyes PCs running Linux, Windows at same time

Ok, now stop laughing at the thought of paying for a second, older Microsoft OS in order to run the software that the Vista Ultimate fails to run long enough to total up how much this Dream PC is cost you in operating systems.

Note that we no longer use our main copy of Windows for Internet surfing… too dangerous! …we need an expendable copy! (By the way, Sandboxie does this reasonably well for free – or $25 USD if you choose to register. A USB key with SanDisk’s U3 or Lexar’s PowerToGo is another alternative).

The author must be smoking something really fine if he sees a world in which we want to run MS Windows even though our office system is Linux.

A great article, all ’round… this one goes in my ‘YukYuk’ archive.

Cheers,
-pmh