Type or click something in the comfort of your home or office, and a machine quite a ways away takes care of the hard stuff – this is the type of virtualization in which Calista specializes.  Or will specialize, anyway, since an "About Us" section reveals that its "first products are scheduled to ship in 2008."

This state of affairs looks a little odd, but in an interview with Wendy Tanaka, Roger Kay, the president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, explained, "Microsoft needs to get something into the market quickly."  Also, any penny-counting onlookers are likely to feel better as a result of Kay’s estimate that Microsoft paid less than $100 million for Calista.

Solid details remain undisclosed, of course, at least pending a release or official announcement from either Microsoft or Calista.  Still, that price would fall in line with Steve Ballmer’s promise to buy about one hundred companies over the next five years for between $50 million and $1 billion each.

In related news, Microsoft is also said to have established a new partnership with Citrix Systems in pursuit of the same virtualization goals.

In this article we will take a look at the technology to see how it can provide a great deal of flexibility and cost effectiveness for IT professionals and software developers.

Virtualization technology allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single host computer. These virtual machines can run different operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and UNIX. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware resources (e.g., CPU, RAM, Hard Drive, etc) allowing the operating system to run as if it were installed on a physical machine.

The benefits of Virtualization technology are far reaching. Many organizations have moved to the virtual machine solution to consolidate multiple servers, running side by side on a single physical machine. Server consolidation allows IT professionals to fully utilize server resources, while isolating virtual machines and allowing them to run different operating systems and applications. Software developers utilize virtual machine technology to quickly test applications on different operating systems, without the hassle of setting up multiple physical machines for testing or taking the risk of causing problems by testing in a production environment.

You can run Virtualization software on pretty much any platform. Once the software is installed it is simple to create virtual machine instances. Virtual machines are just a set of files located on the host machine. You configure your virtual machine settings on the host computer, install the operating system and you are ready to go. It is a very common practice to use a master image of a virtual machine. This master image can be a fully configured machine, with the operating system and all required applications installed. You can then rapidly deploy virtual machines by copying the master image to multiple Virtualization hosts to provide zero downtime and 100% server availability.

There are a number of Virtualization products available. VMWare, which is probably the most popular, recently announced that it will be releasing a free version of its GSX Server product. This will allow any organization to host virtual machines on either Windows or Linux hosts. Other Virtualization products include Microsoft’s Virtual Server and SWsoft’s Virtuozzo, just to name a few.

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From Wikipedia:

“Small and medium size businesses, traditionally slower to adopt emerging technology because of limited resources and IT budgets, through education, are now embracing virtualization at the same rate as large businesses. A recent IBM customer survey found that as many as half of all SMB customers are either currently using virtualization technology or are planning to implement at least one virtualization function within the next year.”

From the release:

IBM today announced a virtualization education and sales initiative designed to ease the adoption of virtualization technologies by small and medium businesses (SMB). The program includes adding new capabilities and enablement programs to more than 40 IBM Business Partner Innovation Centers that are selling IBM’s Virtualization Engine portfolio.

IBM’s virtualization portfolio is designed to help increase the availability, resiliency and utilization of clients’ infrastructures. Already, more than 65 percent of IBM’s virtualization sales are driven by IBM Business Partners targeting small and medium size business clients.

Leading industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that 40 percent of midsize businesses will reduce their server population by at least 20 percent in the next year through virtualization.

The new IBM Virtualization Test Drive program is designed to help partners more easily sell IBM’s Virtualization Engine portfolio. To kick off the partner program, IBM is using selected Business Partner Innovation Centers throughout North America to demonstrate to SMB customers the benefits of virtualizing their server and storage infrastructures.

The program includes assistance in setting up a center of competence, technical and industry education, sales enablement and support and tools to help IBM Business Partners assist their clients to design and implement virtualization solutions around IBM’s Virtualization Engine portfolio. The IBM Business Partners can also provide a “real world” environment in their innovation centers to simulate client scenarios and test applications.

By attending training sessions at the IBM Business Partner’s Innovation Centers, clients can see that IBM’s Virtualization Engine offerings go beyond the abilities of most competitive offerings: The IBM technology portfolio can reduce both planned and unplanned outages, ease data migrations and lower the costs for disaster recovery sites as well as manage an entire virtualized infrastructure

Clients around the world are deploying IBM’s end-to-end virtualization technologies, often combining various hardware and software from various providers, to make one system look and act like multiple systems or make multiple systems look and be act like one system, simplifying the management and operation of their technology infrastructure

Micro Strategies Inc., with facilities in New Jersey and Massachusetts, was one of the first IBM Business Partners to take advantage of the new program. Micro Strategies attended IBM’s first Teach the Teacher workshop, where they completed an intensive course of training on how virtualization technologies can solve client problems and provide benefits to businesses. Only three weeks following the training, Micro Strategies, Inc. hosted its first monthly virtualization test drive session for its customers.

“We have found an 80 percent sales success rate when our clients come in to experience solutions first hand, and we have already received sales leads from our first virtualization test drive session.” said Anthony Bongiovanni, President, Micro Strategies Inc. “With IBM’s new Virtualization Test Drive program, we are helping customers understand the TCO of virtualization technologies as well as use the technology in a risk-free environment.”

IBM is expanding the program to Europe and plans to roll out the “Virtualization Test Drive” partner program worldwide later this year. The partner program augments IBM’s broad internal sales force that focuses on selling IBM’s Virtualization Engine portfolio.

You used to pick stocks. You watched them perform, you bought and sold based on that performance, and you always tried to optimize the outcome. You most likely also did this as a self-created part-time job, since you probably were paid to do something else. Regardless, you did it – and it was almost feasible when you had a few stocks to watch, but once you had dozens or hundreds or thousands, it becomes an exercise in futility.

Most people with real jobs don’t do that as much anymore. They buy mutual funds. They can create objectives for their overall performance requirements and have a single view into the fund in order to make macro decisions. People don’t have to worry about watching all 100 stocks in the fund – because someone else does it – with the help of automation. In our virtual view, we really just judge the fund manager. We don’t look at the individual components (stocks), we view it holistically. Imagine if every time the fund manager wanted to make a change – for all the right reasons, they had to call us and ask us permission. How inefficient that would be. What if every time a change was made to one stock, it kept me the individual from performing my job until that change was complete? That would get you fired I think.

Infrastructure virtualization is the mutual fund. Instead of stocks think about file servers or block devices. There are tons of them out there, each one managed individually. How inefficient. By virtualizing the file and/or block world, we can put a portal up to the user. When we need to move their data from one box to another (for good reason or bad) – today we stop them from doing their job. By creating an abstraction layer the user doesn’t need to be affected when we make the move – just like when we sold or bought an individual stock within our mutual fund – we don’t know it. All we care about is that we are up, we can work, and the performance is acceptable. The IT manager (or the fund manager) is judged on the overall availability and performance of the holistic shop – not one box, just like we wouldn’t judge the fund manager on the performance of one stock.

Applying technology behind the scenes to automate processes in order to optimize the overall performance and economic return on the fund is not different than trying to do the same for the IT infrastructure. Keeping the moves from affecting the productivity of the “user” is always a good idea. Fund managers use computers to track the individual stock assets and apply intelligence to make decisions on them – i.e. if the price hits X then sell, Y then buy, etc. – all within the holistic portfolio’s mission. This is like ILM for a mutual fund. In our world, once we obviated the need to screw up the individual users life by micro managing infrastructure, wouldn’t it be great if we applied automated intelligence to that infrastructure behind the scenes? Our policy might be “if a file gets hit X number of times in this time frame, move it from A to B or replicate it to D – and once it cools off, put it back” or “if we haven’t accessed this file for Y period, move it from expensive asset 1 to cheapo asset 4″. You get the point.

Perhaps the biggest thing to take out of this train of thought is that it is inevitable. There were lots of people who made a fortune on Wall St. doing things “the old fashioned way” who fought the advancement of technology. They lost. You can still design a car by hand, but no one does. You can still not use electronic banking, but why? Would you use an accountant that didn’t use a computer today? Change scares people, but change for efficiency improvements cannot be stopped.

It would be foolish continue to do things the same way in IT even if we weren’t adding new stuff constantly. IT Infrastructure Virtualization will happen because it must happen. Sure, there will be some folks left behind, clinging to their abacus’s, but that’s the price of progress.

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Steve Duplessie is the author of the “Steve’s IT Rants” blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Microsoft kicks off the 15th annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) with Bill Gates keynoting the event and more information about the company’s virtualization becoming available.

Ahead of the conference, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Softricity, whose virtualization technology has been incorporated into Systems Management Server 2003 R2 beta.

“We look at virtualization as key technology to help customers achieve self-managing dynamic systems,” said Bob Muglia. Microsoft’s senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business.

Windows Server virtualization will be available with the release of the “Longhorn” version. By providing a “hypervisor,” a thin layer of software running on a server, users can run Longhorn and multiple operating systems from a single physical machine.

The inclusion of this technology marks a sea change in Microsoft’s thinking. Previously the company has done its best to encourage the exclusive use of its products for all potential applications within an enterprise.

But as the Linux operating system, which is freely available in numerous distributions, gained in popularity, system administrators began turning to it to run applications like the Apache web server or the MySQL database. Linux supports a lot of older hardware, and the cost savings of putting an older machine back into production instead of purchasing new servers could not be beat.

Microsoft has recognized this and seems to be going for a compromise with virtualization. Run the Longhorn server and its hypervisor, and put Linux on the same device. It could be a partial victory for Microsoft and the OEMs that will sell servers with Longhorn to corporate customers.

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Perhaps the most interesting conclusion I’ve come too is that all virtualization (computer, anyhow) solutions we’ve ever come up with have followed identical financial paths. First, they attempt to solve capital expense related problems. Second, the attempt to solve operating expense related problems. And third, somewhat related to second, they attempt to keep people from jumping off buildings – or solving people scale problems.

A storage example would be Volume Manager. VM came about because of capital economics – i.e. when Seagate came out with a 4GB disk drive that was only 1.5X the cost of a 2GB disk drive, people bought them – lowering their capital cost per MB. The problem was that the operating system could only deal with a 2GB disk, so in reality what you added was a more expensive 2GB disk – until VM made it look like (2) 2GB disks. Phase two of storage virtualization was when we came out with RAID arrays – taking a ton of disks and putting them into a single box making it look like whatever we wanted. By doing that we got huge operating efficiencies, because managing a million individual disks is harder than managing one big box. Now we are at stage three, where we have a million big boxes, and people are going to jump of the building.

We are focused on keeping people from killing themselves, so most of the solutions to the Multi-box management problem are just moving the virtualization element to the next step in the process – looking at the boxes instead of the disks, etc. That will help, but it’s not the end game, it just is like all the others, a band-aid.

Servers are now doing what storage did years ago. Servers cost too much and we have too many, so use virtual machines instead. Smart. Not new, but smart. Mainframes and big Unix boxes have been doing this since the dawn of time. Now we can do it on Windows and you’d think we’ve seen the second coming.

What we need is the 4Th motivation -which no one has figured out yet – and that is the ability to virtualize AND control the entire layer – be it storage, server, network, or whatever. That means much more than making one thing look like something else – it requires deep, intimate knowledge of all the underlying infrastructure so that while it masks the complexity from you and I, behind the scenes it controls it – the way an operating system does in your PC. Then you have real business value – that’s when we stop doing tactical IT infrastructure stuff and all our efforts go into doing something with the data we have to drive down costs, make more money, or solve world peace – something a tad more meaningful than mastering an array GUI.

This is hard, of course, as recently pointed out in this blog by Greg Nawrocki who comments about another claim about virtualization and cold fusion, by upstart Crosswalk. I read the Crosswalk release, and heck it sounds awesome, but even if you nailed one layer, you have to be able to have understanding deep enough to coordinate between all the primary virtualization layers – be they server, storage, or network.

Howard Smiths blog, Forked Path talks about all sorts of stuff that shows the difficulty of the big picture interdepencies.

This is a good virtualization specific site that spends more time on server side stuff, but it’s stuff you’ll need to know.

A big part of the problem ultimately is that the different virtualization layers have much different players, and they are solving much different problems without much concern about the other. If you build a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? 15 years ago you bought your system, application, network, and storage from the same guy, but no one does that anymore. They were forced to deal with each other, or perish. The virtualization guys – who’s market is still too nascent, don’t have to deal with each other yet. VMware is about a close as it comes since they are owned by EMC – but if you talk to an old time VMwarian, they don’t know jack about storage, and certainly nothing about networks.

It’s really hard to make things really easy.

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Steve Duplessie is the author of the “Steve’s IT Rants” blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Hu says that users at a CIO panel commented that “the next step in virtualization is virtualized environments. Where you can swap out a compliance environment for instance and then bring it back later when it is needed”.

Exactly. When we speak about virtualization in specific tactical terms, such as storage virtualization for migration purposes, or server virtualization for consolidation purposes, we lose the higher potential of the concept – which is really to do two things: First, it should abstract the user from the infrastructure on thier way to and from the data they care about, and second, behind that abstraction should be a living, breathing, morphable blob that can alter itself in order to best fullfil the requirments from the top of the stack (user) or the bottom (data).

I like the fact that people are talking about the V word more openly, and with less visible disdain – even if it is in terms that are still too simplistic – such as “improved utilization”. Eventually people will come to grips with the fact that a fully integrated “Enterprise IT Virtualization” strategy will be the IT equivilant of the industrial revolution.

I wrote more on it in this weeks CW column.

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Steve Duplessie is the author of the “Steve’s IT Rants” blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.

The price is a mere $25.00 (downloaded version), which makes it hard to have any complaint if it works at all. It does work, though I’ll still complain, albeit more about minor packaging details than the product itself.

The first problem was ordering. OpenOSX offers downloadable versions (that’s the $25.00 option) or shipped CD’s for more money. I didn’t want to wait for CD’s, so I chose the download. They have PayPal as a payment option, which is always appreciated for small orders like this. I got an immediate acknowledgement of my payment from PayPal, and was returned to a splash page.

Um, hello – what now? Nothing on the splash page told me where to go to download the product, so I assumed another email would arrive with those instructions. Well, eventually it did, but that was five hours later. The email gave me a url and a login/password for that. From there, I downloaded the OpenOSX Wintel product and a bunch of disk images (packed as .sitx files).

You can’t open the OpenSX download without a password because it’s encrypted. Notice this is not the password they sent to gain access to the directory for the download. To get this password, you need to send them back an email which effectively confirms that you have downloaded the product. Several hours later, you get the encryption password and can actually install the emulator.

Seems like a heck of a lot of protection for a $25.00 product, doesn’t it?

OK, I had the product. The web site says:

Our WinTel product includes the following separate disk images with
10 different popular open source x86 operating systems pre-installed

Well, that’s a bit of puffery. You do get the images (assuming you downloaded the .sitx files), but they are older versions and they aren’t exactly “pre-installed”. Unpacking the software does give you a couple of images that just need to be double-clicked, but for the rest, you need the .sitx files.

Stuffit Expander is what you need to unpack the .sitx files. On my Mac, I hadn’t yet installed that, so the files downloaded as .sitx.txt fles. You can open those with Stuffit (control click and choose “Open With”) but it’s easier if you rename them as .sitx first. Either way, Stuffit is quite amusing on the larger files: it says things like it will take some 22,000 hours to unpack, and the number keeps getting larger! Obviously some overflow or a sign mismatch due to Intel vs. PPC.

You end up with package files which you can double click and that action will stick the actual disk image in the Disk Images folder of your OpenOSX in Applications. Great fun, but I guess it could be worse.

But wait: there’s still more to do! What you get from this is commpressed tar files that need to be copied from the very inconvenient place the package installer put them (because it’s hard to get at them from Finder) and uncompressed and untarred. Will this ever end? Well, yeah, it ends here. Finally, you have .ddimg files usable with OpenOSX Wintel.

Once you have an image, you can fire up OpenOSX Wintel, and tell it to boot that image as the C: drive. Bingo, there you are, running Dos, Linux or BSD under your OS X. Cool, fun, and very handy.

I’d like to try Windows as soon as I can find a legal copy – I have several here somewhere, but can’t put my hands on them. I’d hate to have to go buy a copy when I know I have at least two unencumbered (that is, they were not bought as upgrades or with an OEM PC) sets buried here.. but it may come to that.

At $25.00, I don’t expect miracles. I’ll be more than happy if I can read man pages, run a few shell scripts, and I don’t expect or need much more. For me, this is just convenience when I want to check syntax across different OSes or compare older versions – that’s all I need. If it can do more, I’ll be ecstatic.

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

“Conservative estimates show that servers typically operate at between 15 and 25 percent of CPU capacity, but with virtualization that could improved to 80 percent,” said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat.

“Our customers, who already see Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the choice for lower cost of ownership, will be able to ride this next wave of virtualization to further reduce costs and increase operational efficiency. Red Hat’s strategy is to methodically target and reduce every cost driver associated with deploying IT infrastructure, we believe integrated virtualization will be a major milestone in this effort.”

Red Hat will tightly integrate virtualization capabilities with its operating system and ensure all aspects of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, from management tools and installation to software management, will enable customers to deploy virtualized environments easily and effectively. Consistent with Red Hat’s open source model, the company will provide seamless integration and support for the Xen virtualization technology developed by the open source community. Specific details of the integrated virtualization initiative include:

A complete platform to implement server consolidation, reducing costs and improving service levels.

A comprehensive development and QA environment, which allows developers to substantially reduce the time and complexity of writing and testing code on diverse target systems.

Support for hardware abstraction, which allows IT managers to reap the benefits of the latest hardware using existing software stacks, without the expense of extensive qualification and migration processes.

“Virtualization, a technology with it’s roots in mainframe computing, is expected to bring new levels of performance, security and utilization to x86 systems, designed to delivering measurable business value to our customers,” said Joe Menard, Corporate Vice President, Software Strategy, AMD.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to collaboratively support the adoption of virtualization technology across our broad ecosystem, we are working with Red Hat to tightly integrate virtualization as a core technology in its Linux offerings, with full support for the AMD64 architecture and its hardware-enabled technology. This is what our customers are asking for, and we expect they will be very happy with the combination of Red Hat Integrated Virtualization on AMD64-based platforms.”

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These new Intel dual core cpu’s are going to change our computing world, and Apple is sitting in the catbird seat.

Intel put virtualization support into its latest cpu’s. Originally, they called this “Vanderpool”, but have unfortunately dropped that nomenclature and are now just referring to it as “Intel Virtualisation Technology” or “VT”. That’s unfortunate, because it makes it much more diffficult to Google. Maybe that’s why this stuff sometimes seems like a well kept secret?

The simple fact is that whether it’s Vanderpool or Intel VT, these new processors will make it much easier to build virtual machines. Companies like Xen will be taking advantage of that, as will VMWare and no doubt a host of others.

So your new Dell with a Dual Core CPU will be able to run multiple OSes easily. That’s great, but it’s much more important that the new Intel Macs have this also. Forget dual booting. Forget Virtual PC. Those are totally unimportant now. Intel Macs will only need VM software to run Windows, Linux, BSD, or just about any hobby OS. And if Apple plays it smart, their machines will be the only machines that can do it all: Windows, OS X, Linux et al.

Oh, yeah, I know: Google will show you plenty of matches for pirating OS X onto plain old PC’s. That’s true, but remember that use will always be at least unsanctioned and probably in violation of OS X licensing. It may also be somewhat buggy. Only a real Apple Intel Mac will be sure to run OS X.

But will Windows run well under a virtual machine on OS X? Really, it has to: Microsoft can’t do anything to jeopardize vm’s success, and why would they care anyway? Microsoft doesn’t sell hardware, and is just as happy to sell Windows for installation into a virtual machine as into a Dell PC. Maybe even happier, because that market might not have to be discounted as much.

So that immediately sets up Intel Macs as the obvious platform of choice for developers and support people. Many businesses now have Macs in the Art Department and PC’s everywhere else; the Intel Macs make it possible and desirable to standardize on one platform. The wave builds, doesn’t it?

The “pirate” OS X installs will do nothing but help this along. If people are able to run an unauthorized copy of OS X in a virtual machine on their Dell PC and they like what they see, why wouldn’t they buy a real Intel Mac when upgrade time comes around? They will.

The possible flaw here is Apple’s need to support vm’s also. At the moment, that need may not be as strong as it is for Microsoft, but it does exist, so that may leave Apple entirely dependent on licensing to keep OS X off non-Apple hardware. If popularity builds as I think it will, Apple could find itself in a tough position where it has even more pressure to stop building hardware and switch to a os provider only.

Who knows, maybe somebody like Google comes along with an OS that is nothing but a browser, email and media center machine as sold, but that has strong support for virtual machines. Maybe Google buys Apple just for that reason. Maybe our whole computing world is about to change radically.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com