Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Citrix and virtualisation

I've been interested in virtualisation for some time - I think it's the way things have to go not only at the lap/desk-top but also in the data centre. For personal computing it represents a way to truly secure Windows and at the server it allows a much more efficient/scalable computing.
Citrix are an interesting company - their WinFrame system for Windows is the optimal solution and so when they start talking about virtualisation you have to take notice. The link in the title has a very interesting video that you should watch.
....most interesting was Citrix's demo of their new virtualization solution XenClient for the Mac. Virtualization is the process by which you can run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer. It has been frequently used on the Mac to run Microsoft's Windows in conjunction with Mac OS X. Citrix first started publicizing their plans for a new kind of Virtualization called "Type 1 hypervisor" back in January.

The technology promises to offer a faster and more secure virtualization environment than existing solutions. Parallel's and VMWare's solutions are considered "Type 2 hypervisors" which must run under a host operating system such as Mac OS X. While this simplifies the implementation, it also results in potential security vulnerabilities as well as a performance penalty due to the added level of abstraction. In contrast, "Type 1 hypervisors" run directly on the "bare metal" hardware.

Previously; VMWare Server, VMWare and Ubuntu, XP SP3 & Parallel.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Been reading a lot about VMWare's wares recently, love the VMotion tool where you can migrate a running server/service across hardware plaforms with no downtime. Perfect for maintainance of boxes and DR.

Was hoping to catch you at BVE to show you this - http://www.nextio.com/ - hardware MPIOV. Basically its PCIe switching where you can connect multiple machines to a PCI chassis and they can share the PCIe cards inside. So indstead of a pair of Fibre HBAs or 10Gb NICs for each server you can buy as many as your bandwidth needs then share them between all the servers attached. Consolidating say 10 cards down to a pair, saving hardware and its associated overheads and also infrastructure (less ports needed on switches etc).

Unknown said...

google "FT" with VMware's newest version. It does for a virtual machine what M$ Cluster does for a Windows instance. Plus, as well as desktop and data center virtualization, VMware is already demo'ing cell phone virtualization so you can have your work/home environments separate, moveable, etc.