xen

Red Hat has released the first beta edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, with updates to virtualization, scalability, and power efficiency, among others.

The operating system was made available for download on Wednesday. It is the first to drop the Xen hypervisor in favor of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) developed by Qumranet, which was purchased by Red Hat in 2008.

Red Hat added the KVM hypervisor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) alongside Xen with version 5.4, which was introduced in September. It has been testing virtualization products based on KVM since last June.

Read more of &… Read more

There was a day when information technology personnel toiled behind the scenes to make their corporate computing infrastructure work.

But in the Internet era, those experts increasingly are getting starring roles in corporate computing leadership rather than being supporting cast members. Such is the case for Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing.

"It becomes more a topic at cocktail parties," he said of his present job, which he took shortly after Yahoo formed the group in June 2008. "I was at a wine tasting, and an acquaintance said, 'I did a search on … Read more

The Xen.org community has announced plans to build a new cloud platform for service providers, as the basis of an initiative designed to help private and public cloud services cooperate using open standards.

The planned Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), announced on Monday, will combine enhanced security, storage, and network virtualization capabilities with the Xen hypervisor--a piece of open-source software used for running virtualized operating systems on server hardware.

However, a key goal of the wider XCP initiative is to use open standards from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to package virtual appliances in a hypervisor-independent format that can … Read more

What is the value of an open-source asset? Over the past several years, and most recently with SpringSource, we've seen a number of open-source companies acquired at valuations of 10x or better. Did the buyers get their money's worth?

It's a tricky question to answer--and likely depends upon far more data than I have at my disposal. It also depends on the acquiring company executing, which has not been the case with Yahoo (which bought Zimbra) or Sun Microsystems (which bought MySQL). No open-source company can offer a panacea for an acquiring company's failure to execute.… Read more

No other investor has had as much success in open-source software as Peter Fenton, general partner at Benchmark Capital.

A competitive triathlete, Fenton has turned the standard marathon of open-source business-building into a sprint, churning out four big open-source sales--JBoss ($350 million), Zimbra ($350 million), XenSource ($500 million), and SpringSource ($420 million)--while most investors have yet to turn a profit on any.

Not that Fenton is a one-trick pony. He also just sold FriendFeed to Facebook and sits on the board of Twitter. It's fair to say that Fenton can now afford a second Aston Martin.

But Fenton … Read more

Could VMware be the next Novell? That's the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.

I'll let you read Cappuccio's excellent post for his full argument, but the crux of it is that in the face of dominant but pricey technology, many buyers will turn to "good enough" to fill their needs. For Novell, that competition to its 90 percent market … Read more

Last week's announcement of enhancements to Citrix Cloud Center (C3) at Citrix Synergy 2009 was one that made me sit up and take notice. Awhile ago, I proclaimed that the era of the "cloud OS" had begun, and I called out VMware vCloud, Citrix, C3 and 3TERA AppLogic as examples of what would eventually become cloud operating systems.

Strangely, however, Citrix (and the former XenSource team) has been strangely silent since that post. Yeah, there have been one or two "announcements" that basically positioned existing Citrix technologies as being cloud infrastructure, but all in all … Read more

Citrix has introduced updates to XenServer, its free virtualization platform, and to Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, its virtualization management package.

The new 5.5 release of XenServer, which Citrix began offering as a free download in February, is designed to provide easier virtualization management and broader integration with enterprise systems, the company said in its announcement Wednesday. This includes hooks that allow third-party products to interact with XenServer to provide full or incremental in-guest, file backups of virtual machines. Image backups are supported too.

In addition, it lets admins carry out GUI-based snapshots from the XenCenter management console. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The consumerization of the Web will be as disruptive to distributed computing as distributed computing was to the mainframe. That was the central theme of Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton's keynote speech at this week's Synergy 2009 conference.

This is an oversimplification, of course. Over the years, companies have run their business software in many different ways--not all of which are easily categorized as either mainframe-like or PC-like. One whole era of computing architectures during roughly the 1980s commonly went by the term "client-server." However, if we think of how distributed computing in the enterprise … Read more