* Virtualization in the news
Virtualization in the past year grew up from science projects to enterprise-wide deployment. Here’s a review of last year’s movers and shakers in the virtualization industry:
Diane Greene, president of VMware was named one of Network World’s most powerful people in networking, as part of the magazine’s annual Power issue. Read this Network World interview with Greene in which she talks about where VMware is heading.
Network World also named server virtualization as one of the most powerful technologies in 2006.
The technology received a boost last October when Intel and AMD introduced virtualization capabilities into their processors. And most recently, analysts said that server virtualization would become ubiquitous.
Although most of the virtualization news in 2006 revolved around VMware, other companies and initiatives also made news. Virtual Iron in October announced a competitor to VMware based on the open source Xen hypervisor.
Xen also found a commercial supporter, XenSource, which in November unveiled virtualization software and support for Windows and Linux servers. In July, Novell beat Red Hat to be the first Linux distributor to release a Linux server with Xen included. Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Xen (read Network World’s test of SLES 10 here) was followed by Red Hat’s Xen-included Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which was released as a first public beta in September.
Meanwhile, Microsoft last month released a new build of its Longhorn server with built-in virtualization.
Last month, it was announced that KVM – the Kernel-based Virtual Machine – would be included in Version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel. KVM differs from Xen because KVM is designed to be part of Linux and uses Linux’s existing scheduler and memory management, whereas Xen is an external hypervisor (see this story for more info).
Also in December, Sun announced that this year, it plans to add Xen to Solaris 10.
Management software for virtual environments also made it big last year. Hyperic launched software that manages VMware virtual machines, and Altiris announced virtual machine management capability in its Altiris Server Management Suite.
Virtualization is expected to make even more headlines this year as companies move it into mainstream deployment.
