Virtualization Daily

For all their benefits, virtual appliances still need care and feeding. Linux administrators will need to seek out vendors they can trust. Like any significant investment, research and testing are necessary tools before any mission critical components of the data center are moved over, migrated or put under the auspices of a virtual appliance. For example, Oracle promises 50% less expensive support than what Red Hat can offer for RHEL5, but analysts have said their brand of Linux support is still unproven.

Now consider: What if that virtual hard disk had its own operating system and applications? In fact, what if you had multiple partitions and each one of them had its own operating system and applications. You could effectively run several computers with one CPU, motherboard, video card, network card and disk drive. That is the underlying logic and business case for hardware virtualization.

Enterprises will continue to adopt this software, which enables more than one OS to run side-by-side on a single server. Nearly every major hardware and software vendor — from IBM Corp. to Intel Corp. to Microsoft to virtualization giant VMWare Inc. — has a vested interest in virtualization, and expect its use to become more pervasive in 2007. However, as that happens, virtualization — along with related sever technology that contains multiple processors — will change the game for how software and hardware is priced, setting the stage for new pricing models across the industry.

Hey there, while working on the next release of PBA, I took a break and did something else. I just released a new version of the Xubuntu Dapper Drake VM. Packages are updated, the kernel has been updated to the latest 686 kernel (previously it was a 386 kernel), VMware tools are updated, and the size has been slightly reduced. I may create an Edgy Eft 6.10 version at some point if I sense that people would be interested in it.