12.22.06

If you are interested in virtualization, VAR Business has a good high level article.  What I like is the relatively clear discussion of traditional VM architectures (like VMWare and Microsoft), versus the new hypervisor method (also VMWare and XenSource).

Oddly, the biggest challenge in virtualization is management.  That may seem like an obvious statement (isn’t it always managing the stuff that is difficult?), but it is truly amazing how far the technical side has progressed.  Imagine running Microsoft Office via Remote Desktop in a virtual Advanced Server 2003 that is really running on a 4 CPU server that is also running 7 other VMs of various flavors of Linux.  The fact that the biggest challenge is keeping track of where the server is and how to access it says a tremendous amount about the quality of virtualization technology!

A close runner-up to management, by the way, is licensing.  Deploying software into a virtualized environment is as challenging for the people buying licenses as it is for the system administrators.  Some companies, notably Microsoft, have tried to address this — but they have large, and justifiable, concerns about what virtualization might do to license revenues.