Virtual Machines 101: VMware vs. Microsoft

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Virtual Machines 101: VMware vs. Microsoft

Virtual Machines 101: VMware vs. Microsoft
- By: Rich Miller
  February 24th, 2007
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Have you ever had trouble explaining virtualization, and why it matters? It’s not always a user-friendly topic for non-geeks. Steve Lohr’s profile of VMware in today’s New York Times provides an excellent overview of virtualization and its significance in the next few years, especially for data center management. It’s a great link to share with friends or colleagues who are still coming up to speed on virtualization, or who struggle to get past the jargon and gain clarity on key concepts. Here’s an excerpt:
A virtual machine essentially mimics a computer so that several copies of an operating system
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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Michael Dinsmore

Posted February 25th, 2007

Isn’t it better to have multi-threaded apps that can make use of the current multi-core architectures, than to have the additional overhead of separate OS instances?

I can understand using virtualization to run more than one OS on a machine, as different OSes (Linux, Windows) have their own benefits and application compatibilities.

But I think effort would be better spent at writing apps that could use more than one CPU (core) than to require a new OS instance for each running application as a way to make use of surplus cores.

Am I missing something?

ekorn

Posted March 7th, 2007

I heard a couple podcasts from Dell that I thought provided a prettty good perspective of VMware and the future of virtualization. Check them out at http://www.dell.com/podcast.