10 things you should know about virtualization

Virtualization has been a major buzzword in the IT world for a few years. Microsoft already has Virtual Server and Virtual PC, as well as stiff competition on the virtualization front from VMWare and Citrix/XenSource.

With all these options, taking the plunge into virtualization can be a big and confusing step. Here are a few things you should know about virtualization and virtualization software before you start to plan a deployment.

#1: Virtualization is a broad term with many meanings

Virtualization software can be used for a number of purposes. Server consolidation (running multiple logical servers on a single physical machine) is a popular way to save money on hardware costs and make backup and administration easier, and that’s what we’re primarily focused on in this article. However, other uses include:

• Desktop virtualization, for running client operating systems in a VM for training purposes or for support of legacy software or hardware.
• Virtual testing environments, which provide a cost-effective way to test new software, patches, etc., before rolling them out on your production network.
• Presentation virtualization, by which you can run an application in one location and control it from another, with processing being done on a server and only graphics and end-user I/O handled at the client end.
• Application virtualization, which separates the application configuration layer from the operating system so that applications can be run on client machines without being installed.
• Storage virtualization, whereby a SAN solution is used to provide storage for virtual servers, rather than depending on the hard disks in the physical server.

#2: Not all VM software is created equal

An array of virtualization programs are available, and the one(s) you need depends on exactly what you need to do. You might want to run a virtual machine on top of your desktop operating system, running a different OS, either to try out a new OS or because you have some applications that won’t run in one of the operating systems.

For example, if you’re using Windows XP as your desktop OS, you could install Vista in a VM to get to know its features. Or if you’re running Vista but you have an application you occasionally need to use that isn’t compatible with it, you could run XP in a VM with that application installed. For simple uses like this, a low-cost or free VM program, such as VMWare Workstation or Microsoft’s Virtual PC, will work fine.

On the other hand, if you need to consolidate several servers and thus need maximum scalability and security, along with sophisticated management features, you should use a more robust VM solution, such as VMWare’s ESX Servers, Microsoft’s Virtual Server or (when it’s available) the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008. For relatively simple server virtualization scenarios, you can use the free VMWare Server.

#3: Check licensing requirements first!

As far as licensing is concerned, most software vendors consider a VM to be no different from a physical computer. In other words, you’ll still need a software license for every instance of the operating system or application you install, whether on a separate physical machine or in a VM on the same machine.

There may also be restrictions in the EULA of either the guest or host OS regarding virtualization. For example, when Windows Vista was released, the licensing agreements for the Home Basic and Home Premium versions prohibited running those operating systems in VMs, but Microsoft has since changed those licensing terms in response to customer input.

Windows Server 2008’s EULA provides for a certain number of virtual images that can be run on the OS, depending on the edition. This ranges from none on Web edition to one on Standard, four on Enterprise, and an unlimited number on Datacenter and Itanium editions.

#4: Be sure your applications are supported

Another issue that needs to be addressed up front is whether the application vendor will support running its software in a virtual machine. Because VMs use emulated generic hardware and don’t provide access to the real hardware, applications running in VMs may not be able to utilize the full power of the installed video card, for example, or may not be able to connect to some of the peripherals connected to the host OS.

#5: Virtualization goes beyond Windows

There are many virtualization technologies and some of them run on operating systems other than Windows. You can also run non-Windows guest operating systems in a VM on a Windows host machine. VMWare can run on Linux, and Microsoft previously made a version of Virtual PC for Macintosh (but did not port it to the Intel-based Macs). Parallels Desktop provides support for running Windows VMs on Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation supports many versions of Windows and Linux as both host and guest. Parallels Virtuozzo is a server virtualization option available in both Linux and Windows versions. Other virtualization solutions include:

• Xen (now owned by Citrix), which is one of the most popular hypervisor solutions for Linux.
• Q, an open source program based on the QEMU open source emulation software, for running Windows or Linux on a Mac.
• Open VZ, for creating virtual servers in the Linux environment.

#6: Virtualization can increase security

Isolating server roles in separate virtual machines instead of running many server applications on the same operating system instance can provide added security. You can also set up a VM to create an isolated environment (a “sandbox”), where you can run applications that might pose a security risk.

Virtual machines are also commonly used for creating “honeypots” or “honeynets.” These are systems or entire networks set up to emulate a production environment with the intention of attracting attackers (and at the same time, diverting them away from the real production resources).

#7: Virtualization can increase availability and aid in disaster recovery

Backing up virtual machine images and restoring them is much easier and faster than traditional disaster recovery methods that require reinstalling the operating system and applications and then restoring data. The VM can be restored to the same physical machine or to a different one in case of hardware failure. Less downtime means higher availability and greater worker productivity.

#8: VMs need more resources

It may seem obvious, but the more virtual machines you want to run simultaneously, the more hardware resources you’ll need on that machine. Each running VM and its guest OS and applications will use RAM and processor cycles, so you’ll need large amounts of memory and one or more fast processors to be able to allocate the proper resources to each VM.

To run multiple resource-hungry servers on one machine, you’ll need a machine with hardware that’s capable of supporting multiple processors and large amounts of RAM and you must be running a host OS that can handle these.

#9: 64 bits are better than 32

For server virtualization, consider deploying a 64-bit host operating system. 64-bit processors support a larger memory address space, and Windows 64-bit operating systems support much larger amounts of RAM (and in some cases, more processors) than their 32-bit counterparts. If you plan to use Windows Server 2008’s Hyper-V role for virtualization, you have no choice. It will be available only in the x64 versions of the OS.

#10: Many resources are available for planning your virtualization deployment

Virtualization is a huge topic, and this article is only meant to provide an overview of your options. Luckily, there are many resources on the Web that can help you understand virtualization concepts and provide more information about specific virtualization products. The following list should get you started:

• General virtualization information and news
• Application virtualization
• Presentation virtualization
• Server virtualization (server consolidation)
• Desktop virtualization
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Microsoft Virtual Server
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Windows 2008 Virtualization and Consolidation
• VMWare
• Xen
• Parallels

How IT leaders are modernizing their business intelligence systems

Here's what a state-of-the-art business intelligence (BI) system looks like: A customer service rep takes a call from a customer looking for an explanation of a medical bill. The rep taps some keys and data quickly flows into her screen. The customer gets a thorough answer and hangs up, satisfied.

That's one example of how a multi-year project to install a best-of-breed business intelligence system has unfolded at Montana State Fund, the largest provider of workers' compensation coverage in the state. "In under a minute, [the CSR] put together some parameters and pulled up a quick screen-generated report," said Al Parisian, CIO of the Helena-based company. "She had a comprehensive, authoritative answer that was compelling because it was factual."

The latest BI systems -- flexible, robust, user friendly -- are moving to tie together more data stores of more data types than ever before, even from transactional systems. They are letting business users easily query them in the course of their jobs. They are proving their value day in and day out with every business decision made, every customer satisfied.

And at many organizations, they are also far from reality.

Unlike Parisian, who basically got to start from scratch in building his BI system, many IT executives grapple with proliferating, complex BI environments. With a mix of reporting tools, data silos and technology requiring IT-built queries, these business intelligence systems can pose daunting challenges from an architectural and organizational standpoint when it comes to adding next-generation functionality.

Consider the situation at digital video recorder company TiVo Inc., where IT wants to break down information silos but isn't sure yet how to implement a cost-effective BI platform. Or Grafton School Inc., a health care nonprofit, where analysts manipulate data in Excel and await an upcoming electronic health system purchase to boost their firepower.

Their road to nirvana -- stores of clean, rich, integrated data accessed easily by those who need it -- is a journey that's barely begun.

Get the data right

Three years ago, that was also the case at Montana State Fund, where 280 employees manage insurance for some 27,000 policyholders. "We went from having literally just a few people using an old operational data store system (for which the reporting front end had broken) to having 20% of company staff using the BI system today," Parisian said.

Today's best-of-breed system, which includes components from Oracle Corp. and SAP BusinessObjects, has been in the works for 2½ years. Starting the project with a consulting firm -- Millbrook Inc., which did the company's data modeling -- was the most important decision Montana State Fund made, said Parisian, who is a member of Millbrook's Business Intelligence Executive Customer Council.

"The quality of your decisions is directly correlated to the data that goes in to them," Parisian said. "Any company around more than a couple of years has legacy data problems coming out the kazoo. You're going to have all kinds of junk."

Once it had installed a coordinated set of products as a brand-new BI suite, the team ran the bulk of its data through extract, transform and load. Now, elements of that data show up as a series of data marts that make up the BI platform. Parisian said 1,800 different elements make up the system's data, and Montana State Fund is currently adding 600 more -- for example, medical payment details for workers. "Upon completing this we think we'll have a rigorous model," he said. "It's being used every day."

Types of data vary widely in any company, as do the needs of employees using that data. But a change in data types is a key trend in business intelligence now, according to Franz Aman, vice president of intelligence platform product marketing at SAP BusinessObjects.

Aman pointed to the oft-cited statistic that 80% of an organization's information is unstructured data -- the emails, Web pages and customer phone discussions that are the lifeblood of many interactions yet not captured by BI. SAP BusinessObjects is investing in this area with what Aman calls "sentiment extraction" -- technology that mines unstructured data to enable the customer service department to gauge the mood of customers who call, for example, and from there report on their satisfaction levels.

Dyke Hensen likes to cite what he calls "high-definitional data" as driving change for business intelligence systems. Hensen, chief marketing officer at PivotLink Corp., a BI Software as a Service vendor, noted that a shoe store isn't selling just a pair of shoes, but a pair of size nine-and-a-half, blue, lace-up shoes, sold with a certain promotional code. "It's a description of an element," Hensen explained. "It's high-attributional, high-dimensional data. These problems are challenging, and they don't fit in a spreadsheet or a SQL server database. People want to report on that information."

Richard Rothschild, senior director of IT at Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo, hears that call. He said he'd like to eliminate siloed reporting and get more specific answers from customer analytics information to improve the bottom line. "I'd love to be able to see what effect a marketing plan has on revenue and retaining customers," Rothschild said, "and here's the data that says it's working."

But the hurdles, he said, are "how to get disparate pieces of data together in a more cohesive space, and technically how do you solve that and come up with a project that will get approved and implemented." Finding the right way to streamline data is a challenge under a budget, too. Rothschild said finding a project that isn't super expensive or doesn't use a lot of resources is key for TiVo, which has about 550 employees.

CIO Bill Davis at Winchester, Va.-based Grafton, which provides health care to developmentally disabled children and adults, has seen the demand for data growing, too; Grafton's analysts would like to access data about client behaviors, symptoms and goals, for instance. An electronic medical/health record system now on the boards will offer built-in reporting and BI capabilities that will take his team's capabilities beyond the Excel files now in use. "We'll have a lot more information than what we have now," Davis said. "The ideal in two to three years would be that we'd have data mapped and loaded, with a dashboard that any analyst or savvy manager could use."

But for many organizations, more systems and more data aren't what's needed.

Reduce complexity

For many, the first step to a new generation of BI is to reduce complexity. Often, that means getting all users on the same platform.
How? Parisian turned off the built-in reporting functions in the core applications at Montana State Fund. "There was a lot of screaming and howling," he acknowledged.

"But we are going to see more and more advantages to our company, as long as we show discipline not to flip on those other screens," he added. Now, all reporting gets done at the BI layer, so everyone uses the same data and does his own reporting vs. seeking custom reports. "It's reduced the amount of noise and fighting over limited resources," Parisian said. A bonus: When the company needs to replace applications, "we don't have to shop for something that has management reports as part of its infrastructure."

Grafton, with 650 employees, has reduced complexity in-house with a tried-and-true BI tool: Microsoft Excel. "We have job streams that run every night and grab data from three different systems to make two big files," Davis said. "Our managers and analysts download them and then parse them through Excel in various ways." It works well, he said, because the IT team doesn't have to generate custom reports.

Even when the electronic health system is up and live, Excel will still have its place. "We'll end up using that as the end engine, but we need something else to get it there," he said. "Say what you want to, Excel can do an awful lot for the majority of our users."

Consider cost

Indeed, Excel is perennially popular for many reasons -- cost among them. New, comprehensive BI systems can be quite expensive and therefore not an option for many businesses, even when BI is a top business priority. So if system replacement (Montana State Fund) or application-based analytics (Grafton) isn't in the cards, another way to move BI ahead is through Software as a Service (SaaS) providers.

"With the ways technology has advanced over the past few years, there's still going to be a lot of BI on premise," said Hensen of SaaS provider PivotLink. He said customers often augment existing BI implementations with cloud or SaaS tools, because it gives them the ability to mash up data, use Web 2.0 tools and reduce costs. "It doesn't mean we do everything," he said. "But the majority of BI is about better operating performance and getting managers closer to data, and that's a great opportunity for SaaS-based BI players."

Aman, of SAP BusinessObjects, said he sees a lot of customers doing hybrid BI deployments -- some pieces installed on-premise, and some available on demand. While data warehouses work better on premise, applications with small amounts of data moving back and forth might work well with a cloud or on-demand model, he said. "Some customers like the cloud for accounting purposes, because you pay as you go and get some capability quickly," Aman said.

However a company procures its BI, its ROI is tied closely to business results. When measuring the effectiveness of business intelligence programs, "The No. 1 criteria is to look at bottom-line business results," said William McKnight, practice manager at Irving, Texas-based consulting firm US-Analytics Solutions Group LLC. He acknowledges that can be difficult to measure. "Short of that, I would go by user sentiment. Is the data they need made available to them in the right format in a timely manner, and structured for their analytical requirements?"

User participation in aspects of system design is a well-known best practice. The team that chose BI for Montana State Fund, for example, included two executive sponsors, two project managers and two employee teams, each divided between the business and technology sides of the house. Increasingly, organizations are moving beyond this initial team to create a group, often called a "BI competency center," to keep the discipline top of mind on a continual basis.

It's "definitely not something that every company has -- far from it," McKnight said. "It's an idea that the technology team needs to be more flexible for its user community, and intelligently look into the future, making sure they're bringing all possible methods of BI to the table."

The future of BI is about helping users get specific information quickly, whether it comes out of email, a transaction database or a data warehouse. There are many ways to get there, but keeping the big picture in mind is key.
"If your data model is a matter of taking what you used to do and putting it into a BI data model, you're putting yourself into a small box," Parisian said. "Step back and look at all the data."

Six steps to adopting cloud computing services

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words. Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing, however it does have its own meaning if contextually used correctly. The conceptual overlap is partly due to technology changes, usages and implementations over the years.

Trends in usage of the terms from Google searches shows Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year. There has also been a decline in general interest of Grid, Utility and Distributed computing. Likely they will be around in usage for quit a while to come. But Cloud computing has become the new buzz word driven largely by marketing and service offerings from big corporate players like Google, IBM and Amazon.

The term cloud computing probably comes from the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. Cloud computing is associated with a higher level abstraction of the cloud. Instead of there being data pipes, routers and servers, there are now services. The underlying hardware and software of networking is of course still there but there are now higher level service capabilities available used to build applications. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed. Only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.

In essence this is distributed computing. An application is built using the resource from multiple services potentially from multiple locations. At this point, typically you still need to know the endpoint to access the services rather than having the cloud provide you available resources. This is also know as Software as a Service. Behind the service interface is usually a grid of computers to provide the resources. The grid is typically hosted by one company and consists of a homogeneous environment of hardware and software making it easier to support and maintain. (note: my definition of a grid is different from the wikipedia definition, but homogeneous environments in data centers is typically what I have run across). Once you start paying for the services and the resources utilized, well that’s utility computing.

Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource. What goes on in the cloud manages multiple infrastructures across multiple organizations and consists of one or more frameworks overlaid on top of the infrastructures tying them together. Frameworks provide mechanisms for:

• self-healing
  
  
• self monitoring
  
  
• resource registration and discovery
  
  
• service level agreement definitions
  
  
• automatic reconfiguration

The cloud is a virtualization of resources that maintains and manages itself. There are of course people resources to keep hardware, operation systems and networking in proper order. But from the perspective of a user or application developer only the cloud is referenced. The Assimilator project is a framework that executes across a heterogeneous environment in a local area network providing a local cloud environment. In the works is the addition of a network overlay to start providing an infrastructure across the Internet to help achieve the goal of true cloud computing.

Steps to adopting cloud computing services

1. Assess IT software assets, then consider putting commodity and standalone applications in the cloud. The IT team should built a chart showing business users which applications they thought were differentiators and which ones they thought were commoditized and explained why applications they viewed as commodities were better suited for cloud services like email for LiveOffice. Standalone applications like HR/benefits and sales analytics were also better suited for the cloud.
   
   
2. Reorganize IT teams according to application functionality rather than brand. To prepare for a virtualized/cloud environment, eliminate application silos such as those for Oracle or Siebel applications. IT thinks their value is associated with an application rather than a skill, so we need to change the mind-set to skills that we want in this new paradigm, like data management, business intelligence and analytics and the ability to do end-to-end business processing rather than skills tied to a particular application.
   
   
3. Get a handle on your internal IT costs. What does email, ERP and clustered storage cost you internally? You need to know this before you can validate what it costs you in the cloud. Engage the finance department from the get-go to validate these costs internally compared with a services model.
   
   
4. To socialize the cloud computing concept around the business, figure out the terminology that business executives and users are familiar with. When we heard that business users were reading The New Age of Innovation and using terms such as R=G for Resources are Global, he started to adopt the same terminology to explain the benefits of the cloud. You need to sync up the vocabulary around the cloud and virtualization with what the business users are hearing about it.
   
   
5. Engage IT staff members by giving them a role in the process. Make testing cloud services a game for IT. pick several cloud applications for IT to test like sales analytics and HR/employee performance management and have no ground rules. Test whatever service on whatever provider you like.
   
   I can tell you that there is no better motivation for IT than to see the CIO/CTO doing it himself.
   
   
6. Engage stakeholders throughout the organization. Information security, legal and finance are just a few of the groups that need to be involved.
   It took us two months to figure out security issues in the cloud -- with a lot of trial an error. The consensus in general is that security is ultimately up to you -- most cloud providers leave security parameters up to the customer, whether they be a need for encryption or beyond.

Shareflow: It's Google Wave, And Available Now

From readwriteweb.com :

It was inevitable really. Ever since Google Wave burst on to the scene as the next hot thing, someone, somewhere was going to beat Google to the punch and release something comparable. That something is Shareflow, a new SaaS play by New York City-based startup Zenbe.

Whether or not Shareflow is simply an imitator is really beside the point. What matters is that it's available here and now, and it works.

Shareflow is a granular version of a flow-based collaboration; you can either view all flows or just single projects. In terms of content, it handles threaded comments, files of most types can be uploaded and previewed through Scribd's iPaper interface, there's Google Maps integration, images, and video. Like other Zenbe products, email integration is also a big component of Shareflow.

Part of the reason this doesn't look like an imitator is that the two major features that Shareflow doesn't really do very well are real-time document collaboration and chat, both of which are key parts of Wave.

Not A Wave-killer

It's doubtful Shareflow will be the game-changing tool that everyone has predicted Google Wave will be, and that's only natural, considering Zenbe isn't Google. Even if it was, the fact that Shareflow is proprietary means it will never get near the crazy level of adoption and interest that Wave will.

But open source or not, if you're desperate to start working in a manner that is similar to Wave, Shareflow might just scratch your itch until the big day arrives, just about two months from now.

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Trends in Enterprise Software

What trends will emerge around the enterprise software space as we head into what looks to be shaping up as a daunting 2009?

Here's a look at three trends I thinks have been playing out, and will continue to do so even more noticeably in 2010 against the backdrop of the troubled economy.

1. Increased software consolidation among big vendors opens opportunities for smaller providers.
   
   
   Consolidation has been the trend in the BI space, with Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and Sun Microsystems being acquired respectively by SAP, IBM, and Oracle.
   
   When mergers occur in any part of the software sector, customers may take a breath to see what is going to happen to the products they use as they are brought into the acquirers fold. In the BI (Business Intelligence) world, the mergers of the last 18 months have created just that kind of "pause" effect, and it's opening up a real window of opportunity for open source companies and other more nimble start-ups that represent more modern alternatives.
   
   Large software companies have business models that require them to keep pushing the largest enterprise software deals, the largest sales, which means building bigger suites of software, so there's greater complexity and bigger price points which fuels additional opportunities for open source companies where the model is simple, integrated architectures. The cost, long deployment windows and complexity of existing BI technology means that it hasn't worked its way deep into the enterprise. Only 15 percent of users in the enterprise typically engage with BI software.
   
   Now when you have to get BI to those 85 percent of individuals not touched by it, you can get to them with lighter-weight, less complex solutions that solve the needs of the average worker in general.
   
   
2. Enterprises will be more interested in SOA and Web services-driven architectures that define newer software offerings.
   
   Large vendors of proprietary architectures will have a hard time adjusting and taking advantage of Web based 2.0 architectures and such. Smaller, lighter weight and open-source vendors will move more agilely.
   
   While larger software companies tout those architectures as well,what they are doing primarily is extending their architectures and exposing Web services to others for integration with other large enterprise systems. From that standpoint, Web services provide that connective mechanism so different enterprise software can interact. It actually can occur, and that's a good thing. But, that's fundamentally different from designing products from the ground up that take advantage of being built in a compartmentalized way to be far more flexible.
   
   
3. Consumerization of information.
   
   This is the least obvious and by far the most important and compelling over the long term.
   
   This will have a deep impact not just on IT and the way it implements and deploys and manages systems, but also on vendors who seek to provide solutions for that environment.
   
   Individuals in the workplace will want their enterprise systems to better reflect the way they are able to access and use information in their consumer lives. For vendors, that means rolling out software in a different way, and building experiences in the Web 2.0 vein using rich media software layers and the like. If you don't have the elegance of the best desktop applications built into a pure Web design, you will disappoint many of these workers who expect better experiences in online or Web applications.
   

Is VMware The New Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com is more than simply the market leader for software-as-a-service (SaaS). While others (notably NetSuite) came to market sooner, Salesforce.com was the first company to successfully sell the idea of hosting software in its own data centers and delivering it as a service via the Internet on any kind of scale.

It did this by becoming the most vocal proponent of SaaS, and in so doing became arguably the biggest pole around which other SaaS vendors organized themselves.

VMware is in a similar position to where Salesforce.com found itself three or four years ago. It is the most recognized name in the industry, enjoys the largest market share, and has taken it upon itself to vaunt the virtues of the technology, which promises to lower customers’ power and hardware costs by replacing physical servers with virtual ones.

Like with Salesforce in those early days of SaaS, there is very little difference between talking up the virtues of virtualization and talking up the virtues of VMware. In the process, it is also helping niche vendors like Parallels, which specializes in virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI).

There is a critical distinction, however, between the respective standard-bearers. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, tilted against the very idea of traditional on-premise software (even proclaiming the “death of software“), but didn’t have to worry about a huge rival breathing down his neck.

His enemies were either established software vendors like Microsoft, which tried to deride the idea of SaaS, or the likes of SAP and Oracle, which offered hybrid versions but were years behind in terms of producing code that could support reliable cloud-based services.

VMware, on the other hand, has long been aware that Microsoft was looming, despite Redmond’s setbacks with bringing Hyper-V to market on time.

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Microsoft will become a significant player soon, and market research firm Gartner suggests it may even overcome VMware’s lead within five years.

VMware is using its head start by extending the use of virtualization all the way up the hardware stack, in many cases using partners to add expertise it doesn’t own.

Also like Salesforce.com, which created a business platform called the AppExchange to provide a venue for companies to sell complementary software service offerings, VMware is creating an ecosystem through alliances with the likes of Cisco and Intel that allow it round out its offering.

There is one important difference between them, however.

Companies that want to integrate their applications seamlessly with Salesforce.com’s platform have to develop programs using the company’s proprietary Apex programming language. Salesforce claims it needed to create Apex in order to improve its customers’ ability to customize their applications, but another consequence–whether intended or not–is that once customers build applications using Apex, they are less likely to defect to rival SaaS vendors where Apex is useless.

VMware, on the other hand, has committed to using standards-based technology to make it easier for potential partners to work with it.

This past week has seen rivalries in the space intensify, as VMware announced deals with Cisco and Intel, which Microsoft ally Citrix made news of its own by announcing that it would make its XenServer virtualization technology free of charge.

As the two companies start to lock horns in earnest, it remains to be seen whether VMware continues along a path of openness or succumbs to the temptation of circling the wagons by developing proprietary technology to lock in its customers.