November, 2009

Red Hat virtualization: No Windows Server 2008, RHEL management

The new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform made its debut yesterday, with Red Hat touting it as a “standalone, lightweight, high-performance hypervisor” that “provides a solid virtualization foundation for cloud deployments” and comes with software “for configuring, provisioning, managing and organizing virtualized Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.”

Sounds good so far, right? Well, there are a few things Red Hat neglected to mention in that press release. First, there’s this sentence buried in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization data sheet, about the system requirements for management servers:

“Windows Server 2008 not supported.”

Isn’t that kinda like coming out with a hot new car and saying, “unleaded gasoline not supported”?

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VMware: Hyper-V turns Windows into DOS

The trash talk in the Microsoft vs. VMware feud once reached Reggie Miller vs. Spike Lee heights. The two companies rarely passed up the opportunity to disparage, make fun of or even spread lies about each other.

But things had quieted down lately, and a lot of the more recent trash talk just rehashed old criticisms and insults. That is, until VMware issued its “Competitive News Flash” about Hyper-V R2, which compares “Microsoft myths” to “VMware realities.” (Hmm, where have we heard that before?)

The four-page document, marked “confidential,” is to help VMware resellers “understand VMware’s positioning in regards to Microsoft’s virtualization offerings and to respond to customer questions about Hyper-V R2.”

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