Novel and Microsoft

[Technomage]

On Friday 03 November 2006 08:05, George Toft wrote:
> My $0.015 (not quite 2 cents) worth . . .
>
> Like the article points out, virtualization is a huge trend in the IT
> industry.  Full virtualization (VMWare, MS Virtual Server) are slow
> compared to paravirtualization (Xen).  Companies are looking to
> consolidate and virtualize servers, so if Microsoft partners with a
> Linux company that already has a paravirt product, then they sell more
> OS licenses.

oh yeah. I've been using paravirt here at home for over a year (I am one of 
the beta testers for xensource here).

>
> Red Hat states that with paravirtualization under Xen 3.0.3, near native
> speeds are achievable.  Anyone who has used VMWare knows it is nowhere
> near native-speed.  In my own Xen experiments, it is very responsive and
> snappy.  [Side note - I went to Fry's to price out a mobo/CPU/RAM combo
> that would support Xen - just $800!!!]

I am looking at a motherboard from tyan (the tomcat series) that would using 
my old HT pentium 4 (and it is looking at running me about $235 just for the 
board). getting server-grade equipment isn't cheap, but any can do better 
than fry's (sorry for the dig here, but fry's isn't all that great when it 
comes to computer hardware).

>
> There are two Linux vendors that support Xen - SuSE (AKA Novell) and Red
> Hat (well, not yet, but they will next year when RHEL5 comes out).  The
> MS/Novell team will perfect running Windows under Xen and take the
> market by storm.  95% of Fortune 500 companies use Novell products (saw
> that somewhere).  100% use Microsoft.  These two companies are already
> deep inside corporate America.  Red Hat isn't.

Xensource has their own OS (based on a linux kernel) and they have a 
commercial product that will support any guest os (windows included).

also, to amend you statement there, even OpenBSD is comming online to support 
xen  (there was a recent report that a successful port of the xen kernel was 
made to openBSD, although not many of the xen tools have been ported as yet).


>
> The next few years are going to be really interesting.

its already interesting. :)