Virtual Machines 101: VMware vs. Microsoft

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 — say, Windows or Linux or both — can run on one physical machine. It allows computing chores to be done on fewer computers, using less electricity and taking up less space, promising a way to control costs at corporate data centers straining to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the Internet age.

The story also provides a high-level overview of the competitive landscape in the virtualization market, nestled within the framework of a favored tech journalism storyline - the upstart company "taking on" Microsoft. It's a worthwhile read, although I think describing VMware as a "young Silicon Valley company" probably provides more journalistic juice than the more accurate "a business unit of storage giant EMC." See additional discussion at Michael Parekh on IT and 24/7 Wall Street.

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By Rich Miller February 24, 2007 | Permalink | >Get Posts By E-mail

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Comments

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?

Posted by: Michael Dinsmore at February 25, 2007 02:02 PM

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 www.dell.com/podcast.

Posted by: ekorn at March 7, 2007 12:45 PM