OSNews

Consider commercial offerings...

The Silicon Valley rumor mill says that Microsoft is interested in acquiring Citrix (who recently acquired XenSource). I'm interested in how Xen and Viridian could fit together in the same portfolio, or how Citrix fits together with SoftGrid, or what any of this would mean for Microsoft's relationship with SWSoft (Virtuozzo).

I don't necessarily think that Microsoft is all that late to the party. Yes, the virtualization gold rush has peaked, and the hype should die down with the possible exception of VMware spinning out from under EMC as its market cap skyrockets past its parent company (isn't capitalism fun?). But the best available data suggests that less than 15% of enterprise IT shops have adopted x86 virtualization to any extent in a production environment. Most of the initial uptake revenues are yet to be realized.

While it's never a good idea to dismiss Microsoft, the odds are stacked against them initially. Virtualization will drive the x86 server market toward larger SMP boxes (initially 4 and 8-socket), and Microsoft doesn't have much experience in scaling to 32 logical CPUs and beyond. Their competitors have significant head-starts and/or loads of mature code.

Viridian has two potential advantages: First, it might feature slicker, more integrated management tools than the competition. But perhaps more importantly, Viridian has the exclusive opportunity to exploit paravirtualized Windows guests to an extent that isn't possible for their competitors. If Viridian can offer lower overhead when running Windows guests, that will be a significant advantage. However, it's practically impossible for a hypervisor implementation to beat OS-level implementations like Virtuozzo.

Another uncertainty is whether Windows servers will be a popular target for workload consolidation compared to Linux or Solaris servers. Licensing is more likely to be a factor here than platform technology or the nature of the workloads. Finally, there may be a trend toward OEMs such as Dell and HP providing OOTB hardware virtualization, most likely through partnerships with VMware or the Xen vendors rather than through Microsoft.

As the virtualization love-in fades and the x86 server space adjusts to its new paradigm, the only safe bet is that bigger SMP boxes are coming. Watch out for SWSoft, because one of these days the analysts will warm up to them (or realize they exist). Watch out for Qumranet, which I believe is developing (in stealth mode) a KVM-based clustered mainframe solution based on Intel and Cisco hardware.

Oh, and since virtualization is so last-month, the hype mill has moved on to "green computing". It's not easy being green...