Is Virtualization all about the OS?

Interesting how much of the fighting talk around virtualization vendors seems to be happening in the Australian media these days. After an interview with an Australian VMware exec in which he says that Windows will be dead in about 5 to 10 years (read here).
The rebuttal now comes from one of Microsoft's new buddies Red Hat. Who would've thought that about a year ago eh? The most unlikely alliances seem to be formed, in an effort to try and reverse the seemingly unstoppable march of VMware in the enterprise.
Its a natural reaction perhaps that the OS vendors 'attack' from their 'comfort zone', that what they know best (the OS). Actually, its interesting that Microsoft lets others make the more outrages claims, such as:

"Virtualisation is all about how applications interface with the operating system. This is one thing that Microsoft agrees 100 per cent with us on."

Silly me, now why did I think it was all about uncoupling the applications from the underlying hardware and making them portable? Hmmm crazy idea...

"We are in a unique position because we are strong in virtualisation and we are strong in the operating system area with Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

No doubt that Red Hat has some server market share and that they have been successful in cobbling together a few pieces of Open Source software. Ironic perhaps to think that one of the reasons of their success is that people might have seen them as their savior from Microsoft.

"We and Microsoft we are the only two vendors with all the pieces together for a full virtualisation system."

I guess he's conveniently forgetting Microsoft's other buddy here (Novell/Suse), not to mention many others (Sun, etc...)

"Many other vendors are putting hypervisors in the market by themselves without the operating system. That's like having just a mousepad and no mouse - there's not much you can do with it," Cormier says. "To some extent that's what VMware is.

What else can you say about such a laughable statement...

Whether or not a company survives and thrives in the future, is a subtle combination of a number of factors. They definitely need to either have vision ('out of the box' thinking kind of new ideas) and the ability to execute on their vision or be very fast followers to be successful.
There will always be some that try it with what I can negativists strategies, where they attempt to paint themselves as the winners, based on more quantitive than qualitative measures and without adding any new content to the larger industry discussion.

Mobile Service Providers Price Comparison

Considering my wildly varying mobile phone bill, my new HTC Touch Diamond and considering my monthly phone usage, I decided to conduct a comparison review of the major providers in Belgium. It doesn't look good for my particular usage profile (I have regular int'l coms with Malaysia) in that I don't seem to be able come in much below the 100€ mark...
Anyways below is the result.
Would be interested to hear from others with similar usage profiles.
Cheers for now.

IT Infrastructure Assessment Methodology

IT Forum Barcelona 2006

The link above is a test Link to a picture taken at Microsoft's IT forum.

The History

In my work I have recently had to complete a number of IT Infrastructure assessments for clients and I thought that I would document some of my findings in an effort to start building an online Toolbox or reference site if you will, with thoughts, ideas, processess and possibly links to tools to help in future endeavors.

 

Data Collection

The very first problem that faces the assessor is what data to collect, even before the obvious next question of how to collect it. The key thing here is to not collect too much data (and believe me this is all too easily done) but instead focus and zoom in on the key data that in the end will drive and determine the shape of your solution.

 

Some typical examples of key driving criteria:

• Number of users
• Number of devices (and type)
• Number of servers (and type)
• Number of sites
• Bandwidth between these sites
• Number of printers (queues)
• Number of Groups
• Number of Mailboxes
• Number of Shares
• Etc...

 

Assessment Stage

The most important thing in this stage is to 'slice and dice' the data collected and work on formatting and presentation of this data in order to start extracting a conclusion (the conclusion can also be incorporate a proposal for a new solution).

 

Presentation Stage

This is typically the last stage in which the outcome of the previous stage is presented to the customer. Some key things to do would be to develop you final conclusion in digestable material (often a presentation accompanied by a more elaborate document) and have the preview checked off by the customer to get their buy in and ensure a that what you have come up with is not out of line with the expectations of the customer. Should things not be as expected, there is still time to adjust the conclusion and bring it completely in line.

 

to be continued...