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An Overview of Virtualization Technology
Jane Walker writes to tell us that TechTarget has a short writeup on virtualization and some of the ins and outs of using this technology effectively. From the article: "Virtualization is a hot topic in the enterprise space these days. It's being touted as the solution to every problem from server proliferation to CPU underutilization to application isolation. While the technology does indeed have many benefits, it's not without drawbacks."
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. This article would have been interesting, say, 18 months ago... but with VT and Pacifica, things are different now. Without at least mentioning those, it's not very useful.
Anyone have a pointer to a good writeup on the differences between VT, Pacifica, and regular old software virtualization?
I agree with you and even take it a step further. The article could not be more plain in that even though it was dated 4/7/2006, it did not take events of the last month into account which makes it totally useless in my opinion.
Three major announcements in the last month have radically changed server virtualization and made the article obsolete:
1. VMWare renamed GSX to Virtual Server and made it free.
2. Microsoft made their Virtual Server free.
3. Microsoft announced support for certain Linux distributions in their Virtual Server product.
The parts of the article that show it's obsolete in light of the above facts:
An open source solution will win the cost battle almost every time
If you want to use Linux as your host OS, you'll definitely have to go with VMware.
Also, for my own personal review - I'm a pretty heavy Microsoft user and was excited about them making Virtual Server free. Evaluating VMWare's free product against Microsoft makes Microsoft look pretty unpolished though. For instance, compare VMWare's P2V application to convert Physical to Virtual servers against Microsoft's offering which requires having a spare server lying around which must run Windows Server 2003 Enterprise with Automated Deployment Services. Give me a break - the cost becomes so prohibitive it's not even worth it. Microsoft may get there but right now their product looks like what it is - a bunch of things hastily thrown together. VMWare's products have coherence.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I noticed that whenever virtualization comes up, no one ever mentions CoLinux. I've tried it once and was quite impressed. It takes a different approach entirely--rather than running in a virtualized environment, it is actually a port of the Linux kernel to run as a Windows process. (Some hardware is virtualized by this method, however, such as the network interface.) Are there any advantages to this approach? In terms of reliability, speed, etc.?
Just curious.