An Overview of Virtualization Technologies

PCM2 writes "Virtualization is all the rage these days. All the major Linux players are getting into the game with support for Xen, while Sun has Solaris Containers, Microsoft has Virtual PC, and VMware arguably leads the whole market with its high end tools. Even AMD and Intel are jumping onto the bandwagon. InfoWorld is running a special report on virtualization that gives an overview of all these options and more. Is it just a trend, or will server virtualization be the way to go in the near future?"

Comments

Of course it's a trend

[Flying pig]

Yesterday's mainframe, today's rackmount server, tomorrow's desktop. As computers get faster, software functions at ever higher levels of abstraction. The holy grail is when you have the array of blade servers which you can grow or shrink on the fly, the sea of running operating systems, and the application that spreads itself across the lowest loaded operating systems as needed. Fault tolerance, load balancing, all out of the box.

With the growing evidence of the human brain's ability to rewire itself and route around failures on the fly, and the effective virtualisation of perception (why do I appear to see a three dimensional picture of the world when I have only 2 curved arrays of photosensors?) we are probably just following a well trodden evolutionary path.

And IBM? Where are they?

[ptitvert]

What kind of article is that?

They talk about VMWare, Intel/AMD, the future Solaris on E10000, other things... but where is IBM?
They can do Virtualization for at least 3 years with their Regatta technology (P670, P690 (Power 4 technology), P530, P550, P560, P570, P575, P590, P595 (Power 5 technology)) and their OS AIX 5L.

they are able to give a few percentage of a cpu to virtual server, with their Virtual IO server, they also are able to virtualize network and disks. They can do workload management between virtual servers. Add/remove disks/cpu/memory in real time.

etc...

So for a complete discussion an overview of the virtualization in the industry, IBM is now a big player, and they are now surpassing SOLARIS & HP in the "closed" unix world.

So for me this overview is not complete and should not have passed the "draft" version until someone was looking at the actual and running alternatives.

L.G.