Look at Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Word Perfect, and Netware.

Lat time I looked Java was pretty ubiquitous and going strong. I’m not saying .net and other development platforms are not viable. Xen, KVM and VMWare are all worthwhile alternatives, and IMO, there is no real reason for any one technology to have 90% market share, especially when it is old, proprietary and expensive.

Xen is relatively new in the marketplace (at least a commercial version) but it IS an open standard for the most part, and being supported by lots of players.

VMware has the market share it does because of uncontested longevity alone, and not because of either superiority or value.

I tend to disagree being in a VMware shop myself. We have numerous VMware systems hosting dozens of servers and we are constantly going back to the well for more money to purchase more licenses from them. This is becoming very expensive!

Looking at Xen as an alternative seems to make financial sense of things again as virtualization sprawl continues…

Recently, I took on a new task during the beginning of a much larger project for a BI implementation and found myself looking down the barrel of Oracle and virtualization. We must hold multiple instances of DEV and PROD. How to do this you ask?

Well, it seems as though the question had already been answered unbeknownst to me. It seems that Oracle has their own way of supporting their applications–Use their infrastructure!

Without following this direction, one may find they will have a hard time receiving proper support from Oracle if they decide to go down the VMware route with Oracle apps loaded upon a VMware-based virtualization engine.

Anyway, enough babbling about that. We installed Oracle VM 2.1.1 and it is a product which has been erected from the base code of Xen. Although it is the Xen hypervisor, the actual management and front-end of this solution is Oracle’s creation–Oracle VM Manager. This is nice web-based GUI for managing the whole kit-n-kaboodle and has proven to be useful after we ironed out some issues during the installation.

The point I wil make here is that Oracle is making use of Xen–Not VMware! So, since Oracle is an 800lb. gorilla in many a datacenters, you had better move over for some use of Xen because with Oracle behind it there will be quite a following before too long…
Oh, and by the way, Don’t forget the banannas

Lee

Number 1 KVM and lguest in the Linux kernel. These two techs are starting to offer exactly what Xen offers without needing Xen.

Next most decimating cgroups being added to the Linux kernel. 1 kernel many distributions.

Note vmware living in market is going to face the same problem. Why is KVM and lguest so good for Linux no special start up needed if you wake up you need virtualisation you can just use it.

I tried to point this out (from a different perspective) in my debate with Mr. Crosby, but you’ve done a great job with this. Here’s my response:

“Take heed, Citrix. I maintain your CTO is blinded by what can only be described as a denial of market realities and an undying (arrogant) allegiance to what some might consider to be an architecturally superior product on some fronts, but a lacking solution on many others.

Securing the hypervisor is definitely important. However, securing both the hypervisor and the assets that sit on top of it by providing the most extensible, effective and manageable means of doing so is really what’s important to customers. Sometimes, it has to be about more than where you came from. Sometimes it’s about where you’re going.”

You can read the whole post here:
 <a href="http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/pushing-virtu-1.html" title="http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/pushing-virtu-1.html" target="_blank">http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog…</a>

/Hoff