Virtualization and you

There is alot of hoopla in the tech industry over virtulization and how it will transform and is transforming IT. Some of it is true and some of it is not. I will let you sort that out. One thing I do see is 3 distinct players on the landscape in the enterprise space. VMware, Microsoft and Xen.

There are other players to be sure and there is alot of room to grow. Right now only one player dominates the landscape and that is easily VMware. Xen and Microsoft have a share of the market as well as the other various players. Parallels has what in recent weeks a declining user base because of a number of issues with their product and over hyping (the over hyping is my opinion and how they come off). By and large Microsoft, XEN and VMware have built or are building an ecosystem around which developers can build on.

The goal seems to be management tools. With those 3 players a large portion of development will be around the tools that manage VMs. After being at VMworld 2007, This is where it seems the market will head. Microsoft may get some portion of the market, but their obvious lukewarm support for *nix systems will be a major detriment.

Xen, while it has it's roots in the OSS community seems to be alienating the community with alliances with Microsoft, and selling itself to Citrix (yes they are a business and they do this from time to time). All things aside things seem promising for VMware at this point until Xen and Microsoft catch up technologically (Xen is not a true hypervisor despite their claims as well as Viridian more on that later).

Xen and Microsoft are passing their respective competing products to ESX as hypervisors. This is not exactly true. Xen provides a linux OS underneath their solution where Microsoft provides Windows underneath theirs. A common and easy to mistake misconception of ESX is that it too functions with a Linux kernel underneath it, when the reality is that aside from using grub (or lilo for ESX 2.x and below) VMware uses their own proprietary software layer to load the OS. The stripped down or modified Redhat is used as part of the service console and to provide a configuration management console for ESX. In a very real way this is a bare metal system.

Xens xenexpress claims to be the same thing. I suppose I could build a similar setup using a very stripped down OS and slapping VMware server on there and running it from the command line or managing it with Vmwares VI client (which you can do) from windows. This seems to be the basic concept for Xen.

Viridian I have not had much hands on time with so I will comment on that in a future update to this article.