Virtualization Daily

SearchServerVirtualization has a pretty intresting article looking at virtualization usage in the data center.. Of particular interest was hearing about how Pacific Gas and Electric has a program to encourage companies to adopt virtualization.

PG&E is offering rebates of up to 50% of the cost of moving to virtualization, based on yearly energy savings. The limits to this program have just been raised to $4 million, meaning that it will support a significant infrastructure project. Best of all, businesses get the check immediately, even though the savings trickle in over a year.

That’s a very interesting development and something I hope starts to appear in states beyond California. There’s another article about this as well.

Also of interest is some of the news coming out of Microsoft about their new hypervisor based virtualization technology called Viridian. It appears to be pushing Windows away from the hardware and into a management domain.

In my opinion, this is a big switch for Microsoft, indicating a move away from its one-machine, one- operating system paradigm. Could Microsoft be joining the movement toward operating systems being an artifact of application choice? Can Microsoft support users’ freedom of choice, let the operating system be dictated by the application, allow users to simply run the desired OS in a virtualized environment? If so, this is a dramatic development, one that heralds a new type of computing that will enormously benefit users.

Here’s to hoping this is the case. The virtual appliance model is the vehicle to make that happen and the overhead of a full windows install just gets in the way. ComputerWorld also has an article up on this development.