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XenSource ‘Simply Virtualize’

The XenSource ‘Simply Virtualize‘ tour made it’s way to NZ this week, with a 3 hour set of presentations at Microsoft House yesterday afternoon. We had a good catchup with John Glendenning from XenSource on Monday, but I can’t talk about most of that.

The presenters at the event were XenSource, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Platespin and ExpresData hosted the event. The tour seems to be done in conjunction with IBM elsewhere, but was done with Sun here in NZ.

John Glendenning from XenSource gave a brief introduction to XenSource and Xen Enterprise, and also some points about where development is heading. One point is the planned interoperability with Veridian, the Microsoft virtualization stack. The Microsoft presentation followed, which focussed entirely on MS’s various virtualization technologies – presentation, application, server, etc. It had some interesting aspects, but was a tiny bit out of place I thought.  Sun had a good set of slides on their AMD-V platforms, including their new blade infrastructure which will support opteron, xeon (when they come out later in the year) and ultrasparc blades. Platespin then gave a fairly quick, but comprehensive overview of their P2V / V2V and capacity planning and management tools. James Johnstone from ExpressData finished up with a demo of Xen Enterprise and Windows XP guests running on a SunFire x4200 M2.

Things that I got from the various presentations:

  • Microsoft’s SoftGrid Application Virtualization software suite looks damn useful, and I can think of at least one site we could have used it this year.
  • Sun are coming out with Xeon-based servers soon, as well as AMD’s quad-core range being on the horizon
  • Sun have a blade range that has a fully modular IO system – the PCI infrastructure is abstracted away from the blade.
  • Platespin’s PowerConvert and PowerRecon products look very useful, and they are aggresively adding new features.

From Platespin’s presentation and some of the points that MS came out with it is very clear that the virtualization technology you choose for server virtualization is definitely not the final decision to make, nor should it be. The virtualization ecosystem is massive already – mostly due to the number of ISVs VMWare has on board. These ISVs are now targetting Xen Enterprise as a platform as well, and are bringing their already mature technology to focus on the alternative platforms. This gives Xen Enterprise quite a bit of credibility, as the management tools don’t have to be rebuilt – vendors like Platespin, Leostream, Mountain View Data, Marathon etc can target Xen with relative ease.

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