Virtualisation: Reviews

Ever since VMware coined the term, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has conjured images of large data centers, beefy servers, centralized storage, and complex software stacks. It's a given that each VDI installation requires numerous servers, software packages, and storage systems in order to provide desktop virtualization for more than a small handful of users, so VDI just has to be both expensive and complicated to deploy. Right?

The potential benefits of public clouds are obvious to most IT execs, but so are the pitfalls -- outages, security concerns, compliance issues, and questions about performance, management, service-level agreements and billing. At this point, it's fair to say that most IT execs are wary of entrusting sensitive data or important applications to the public cloud.

With virtualization taking over the computing world, enterprises everywhere are finding that virtual machines spread across an organization need to be managed as much as their physical computers are. Companies are also figuring out that these virtual machines have special needs and requirements that can multiply very quickly as servers are added, moved, changed or removed.

Revolutionary. Cutting edge. State of the art. These are words and phrases that are bandied around so very many products in the IT field that they become useless, bland, expected. The truth is that truly revolutionary products are few and far between. That said, Cisco's Unified Computing System fits the bill.

The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 servers are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced.

VMware vSphere 4, out today, is a big release, with plenty of new features and changes, but it's not your run-of-the-mill major update. The new features, which range from VM clustering to agentless VM backup, are especially significant in that they may mark the moment when virtualisation shifted from the effort to provide a stable replica of a traditional infrastructure to significantly enhancing the capabilities of a virtual environment.

NComputing X550 Desktop

On Tuesday, Microsoft released to manufacturing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The final code will be shipped on November 1. The company bills the software as one-stop organization, allowing administrators to set up and deploy new virtual machines and manage hosts and other virtual infrastructure elements from one console.

Both hypervisors we tested have requirements for the hardware they can run on and the virtual machines they can support.

We used the same host platform, an HP DL580 G5 (four-socket, 16-core Intel Xeon CPUs) server – for the qualitative portion of this test as we did in the quantitative portion of our test published earlier this month.

When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion.

It seems that the whole world has been talking about VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), with very different views of what VDI actually means. If virtualization itself is an adolescent, VDI is still an infant, and thus there are still plenty of growing pains to come.

With the recent release of Microsoft's Hyper-V shaking up the hypervisor market, we decided to conduct a two-part evaluation pitting virtualization vendors against each other on performance as well as on features such as usability, management and migration.

Virtualization is becoming increasingly important in the datacenter as a way to respond quickly to the varying server demands. Depending on time of day and day of the week, as well as events in progress and many other factors, loads on any given machine may vary by factors of 100 or 1,000 or more. Giving a server more or less computing power, running multiple instances of the same server for load balancing purposes, or allowing failover from one virtual instance to another are increasingly important capabilities.

No 1U, two-socket rack server bests Apple's Xserve in its price range. No two-socket Intel desktop can touch the MacBook Pro for its combination of durability, efficiency, expandability, and quiet operation.

VMware Infrastructure 3