Grid Meter » The "Virtual" Week

August 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

The "Virtual" Week

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It was a crazy week in the virtualization world.

We see that Oracle is Losing Patience with both XenSource and Vmware and XenSource's CTO responding to that critcism.

We learn that XenSource and Red Hat kissed and made up. If you weren't watching closely, you may not even have even known they had a spat.

We hear that Microsoft's commitment to Virtualization is called into question and there is even some criticism that what Microsoft has brewing is non-differentiating and too little, too late.

I'm not going to turn this into a virtualization blog. There are others that do a fine job of that already. However, I am amazed at the speed at which major enterprise IT players are putting real efforts into this technology. It seems that it took a bit longer to coax Grid out of the halls of academia.

Why do I think this is the case? My immediate reactions:

• There is a lot of money in this space. We have some major players and major smart folks at these organizations; they wouldn't be concentrating on virtualization if the return wasn't there.
  
• The FUD hasn't worked. No shot at Microsoft but they've announced a virtualization product and virtualization manager coming in the next 12 - 18 months; usually when they do that they freeze the market and people wait to see what they've got. That's not happening this time around.
  
• It's not about virtualization for the sake of virtualization. Perhaps it's virtualization plus Grid equaling SOA, but I don't know for sure and I imagine these vendors don't either based on their wrangling. But this will be the interesting part to watch, companies are not going to just add a bunch of virtualized machines just to say they did. They've dealt with server sprawl, there is no way they will accept virtual-machine sprawl.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on August 4, 2006 08:08 AM

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