Michael Warrilow at Hydrasight makes a strong case for why management tools need to support heterogeneous hypervisors. His strongest argument, in my mind, is the affinity of specific jobs to specific hypervisors. An example is Oracle’s database support only on Oracle’s version of Xen. In the realm of virtual lab management and the application lifecycle, the affinity of specific jobs to hypervisors couples with the natural heterogeneity of the production data center environment to make support for such heterogeneity a key requirement for replicating production application configurations in a virtual lab. We also believe that the ubiquity of Visual Studio as a development environment in the enterprise will result in broad deployment of Windows Server 2008 in development – which will give Hyper-V a strong initial foothold and will create new opportunities for using virtualization in unit, integration and functional testing.
What do you think?
Link: The inevitability of heterogeneous hypervisor management
Dan Kusnetzky at ZDnet talks about virtual lab management and Surgient as a precursor to lights-out fully automated datacenters.
Surgient announced three new patents had been awarded. The patents cover fundamental methods of managing and coordinating virtual machines and virtualization infrastructure.
At virtualization.info, Alessandro Perilli presents a very nice wrap-up of what was predicted for 2007 versus what really came to pass. One of his comments is that analysts were wrong to suggest that automation of virtual environments would play a strong role in managing virtual resources in 2007. While he’s right that it was not “key” in 07 and certainly he is correct that most virtual resources are not managed in an automated fashion, I really disagree with the overall characterization of automation as unimportant. Certainly much of the buzz currently around virtualization is centered on the automation of virtualization (be it site recovery, orchestration or virtual lab management). Beyond that I believe that automation is a buying impetus as well. I guess we’ll see in 2008!
David Marshall interviews me in his InfoWorld Virtualization Report blog, regarding Surgient’s recent announcement of a strong third quarter for virtual lab management applicaitons.
Surgient announced that it achieved record growth in the third quarter of 2007. With a record number of new deals in the third quarter, including the company’s first seven figure license deal, Surgient is on pace for 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Surgient third quarter bookings grew to almost three times the bookings for the same quarter in 2006.
