June, 2009

Red Hat turning VMworld into KVMworld?

VMworld 2009 is still two months away, but at least one virtualization competitor is already planning to steal some thunder at the show.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) suite will hit general availability Sept. 1, according to LeMagIT — which, for those of you who don’t parlez francais, means “The IT Mag.” Sept. 1 is the first full day of VMworld 2009, when VMware typically makes most of its major announcements.

RHEV marks a shift from Xen to KVM as Red Hat’s open source virtualization technology of choice, as senior virtualization director Navin Thadani said on last week’s edition of This Week in Virtualization.

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Know your acronyms!

Next time you tell someone, “I’m a VCP and VMUG member who runs a next-generation COS and uses NPIV to offer a virtual HBA,” it better not be B.S.

Acronym overload is an unfortunate part of life in IT, especially in virtualization. But that doesn’t mean you can toss them around willy-nilly without knowing what they mean.

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VMware: Sorry for the Hyper-V crash video, Microsoft

Much has been made of Microsoft’s regular attacks against VMware, from its “VMware Costs Way Too Much” poker chips to its “Microsoft Mythbusters” video. The folks in Redmond even faced accusations that they were spreading lies about VMware last year.

So why is VMware apologizing to Microsoft?

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Cisco hires Christofer Hoff as virtualization director

Cisco Systems has a new virtualization and cloud computing director: Christofer Hoff, the security and virtualization expert and popular blogger.

Hoff, aka “Beaker,” runs the Rational Survivability blog and has held high-ranking security positions at several IT vendors and other firms — albeit none as big as Cisco. They include Unisys, Crossbeam Systems and the WesCorp federal credit union.

His hiring at Cisco comes as the networking giant is making its move into the virtualization and data center markets with its Unified Computing System.

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Mobile virtualization management: Valuable but not sexy

There’s been a lot of talk about mobile phone virtualization lately, thanks to the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) and the Citrix Receiver.

These new products hold a lot of promise. But for now, the best application of mobile phone virtualization is to use mobile devices to manage existing virtual environments. The latest release in this area of the market comes from Hyper9, which yesterday unveiled its Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM).

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Virtualization security fears grow

As people who deal with virtualization every day — you work with it, I write about it — it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that it’s a ubiquitous technology with infinite use cases and unending appeal.

Well, in the words of Lee Corso:

There are still quite a few people out there who don’t feel totally comfortable virtualizing everything. And they’re not all newbies who don’t know what they’re talking about.

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