Archive for September, 2008

OK, I’m pulling a joke here. For about two years the debate has been about the hypervisor becoming commiditized. That is to say the software that runs virtual machines was becoming practically “worthless” from a software licensing perspective – and has lead to ESX3i and HyperV becoming free. Personally, I don’t think its worthless – its more an example that these software companies see more value in giving software away to capture market share than trying revenues from sales. The money is to be made elsewhere, in the management layer. Anyway, it seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry has a VDI offering. In fact I’ve been think of writing one, because everyone else has one. But with some many players joining the market offering esssentially the same thing – that sure to drive down prices – as long as your smart enough to play one vendor off another…

Joining the stable of VDI offerings in recent weeks Novell announced “Zenworks Application Virtualization” and TriCerat have released a “VDI Management Solutions”. Symantec have added a broking system together with streaming application virtualization tool called AppStream…

So Redhat bought KVM. Does that mean Xen is dead? What happened to all these rumours about VMware buying Redhat. Those rumours seemed to disappear as quick as a Cloud on sunny day.

Mike DiPetrillo makes some interesting comments about Citrix skipping a few release numbers in Citrix XenApp. It’s not the first time Citrix has monkeyed around with release numbers before, some of us will remember how the rename and renumbered MetaFrame 1.8, so it would match up with the MetaFrame XP, Presentation Server and XenApp server renames and renumbers.

I guess all vendors do this, erm – including VMware. For example although VMware precured VDI solution from Propero, which became VDM 2.0 – but what happend to VDM 1.0? I guess that was the first version of Prepero. I notice that in the Vi4 Beta, VirtualCenter is version 4. But were currently on version 2.5!?!?! The reality is that people who are technical dont’ give a damn about release numbers – unless version 2.0.1 doesn’t work work with 2.4.1. Version numbers are marketing people. After all doesn’t Vi3 sounds wierd when VirtualCenter is 2.5?

Well, the vi3book is now out and (occasionally) available on Amazon.com. There’s been such a huge demand for the Oglesby-Herold-Laverick book Amazon were unable to keep up with the demand. If your going to VMworld this year, myself and Ron & Scott will be doing book signing at the VMworld Bookstore. This morning I wentto my local publisher and worked on a cover for my new book on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager product. If all goes to plan there will 50 special “Authors Edition” copies of the SRM Book for sale at the VMworld Bookstore. The price will reflect the cost of such small print run and shipping costs from the UK to the US. I should just about cover my costs.

The idea is to do a little bit promotion of the book, and give those who are really interested a chance to read and comment on the book while it is still in the “reviewing” phase. So it’s still a little rough around the edge at the moment – heck I haven’t even sat with the paper copy which is sat on my desk right now since that was only done this morning! As for an offical release, that will come some short time after VMworld. I’m probably going to get my publisher to print about 500-1000 copies and sell them directly from my website and see how that goes. The original plan was to print and distribute via lulu.com but I’ve kind of got the publishing bug, and I was suprised how cost-effective it becomes once you print a significant number. I haven’t completely given up on the idea of lulu.com as critically they have the option to buy an ISBN number and get listed on Amazon.com. These first 500-1000 copies will be purchasble through my site – probably using paypal to collect the monies together with a listing on ebay.com to show up on google searches.