virtual machine

Microsoft's No. 1 rival is a household name, Google. But a strong candidate for No. 2 is a company scarcely known outside the technology industry: VMware.

"VMware is definitely a threat," said Gary Chen, an analyst at IDC, a research firm. "After Google, it is the company Microsoft fears most."

Google and VMware, which is based in Palo Alto, California, pose a broadly similar challenge to Microsoft, by potentially undermining the dominance of its most lucrative desktop software and operating systems. Google represents the attack from above, while VMware is the assault from beneath.

Citrix Systems is working with Microsoft in the enterprise virtualization market with Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V.

The new product adds advanced management and automation functions to the Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms. The goal is to help customers transform virtualized data centers into "more dynamic delivery centers." The capabilities use all the virtualization buzzwords, like lab automation, dynamic provisioning, work flow orchestration, and storage-system integration.

Citrix Systems on Wednesday said it's developing an application and desktop virtualization solution optimized for Intel Core 2 desktops and Centrino 2 laptops with Intel vPro technology, under the code name Project Independence.

Specifically, Citrix plans to develop a new class of virtualization solutions that optimize the delivery of applications and desktops to millions of Intel-powered devices. Citrix's goal is to reduce desktop management costs, a message that may resonate with corporations in a down economy.

Canonical has announced that it will release its latest Ubuntu updates for desktop and server editions on Oct. 30.

According to the Linux-based operating system's commercial distribution sponsor, the free download of Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition has been specifically tailored to fulfill the connectivity needs of today's digital lifestyle. For example, users of the new desktop OS will be able to move seamlessly from wired and Wi-Fi networks onto 3G cell-phone networks while on the go, noted Canonical Chief Operating Officer Jane Silber.

Virtualization is the number-one strategic technology for 2009, Gartner said at its Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this week.

Gartner analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends it predicts will be strategic for most organizations, defining "strategic technology" as having the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.

Taking it a step further, Gartner defines "significant impact" to include factors such as high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

It can be awful to have your Windows computer infected with malicious software, but it is almost as bad suffering the daily burdens imposed by the security software designed to protect you.

Too often, security programs significantly slow down the computer, causing lags in booting up the machine, launching programs and receiving e-mail. Not only that, they can be incredibly annoying, popping up frequent messages or asking questions in techie lingo.

Citrix Systems has rolled out XenServer 5 -- a next-generation server platform that promises to reduce the complexity of virtualization deployments. To keep things simple, XenServer 5 integrates new configuration wizards and intuitive interfaces, together with point-and-click conversion of physical servers into virtual machines.

Red Hat on Thursday announced the acquisition of Qumranet, paying about $107 million in cash for the privately held company.

Qumranet is a virtualization company that is best known for its KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In combination, these two Qumranet products offer a virtualization platform for enterprise customers.

VMware warned customers this week that it had discovered what amounted to a virtual bomb ticking down within the latest builds of ESX. Its ESX is a "bare-metal" hypervisor for enterprise applications that partitions physical servers into multiple virtual machines, each of which represents a complete system containing processors, memory, networking, storage and BIOS.

New appliances provide an alternative to typical Fibre Channel and iSCSI approaches. Running virtual machines on network file systems (NFS) provides a number of architectural advantages, starting with the fact that virtual machines use files to store their image information. Since network-attached storage (NAS) systems are built from the ground up for file management, the administrative time and resources to oversee a large number of virtual machine files is less than what is required to manually assign and place those files on individual logical unit numbers (LUNs).