The Enterprise Server Impact Of Intel/AMD Settlement Remains To Be Seen

As an infrastructure and operations professional, it’s hard not to like the terms of the settlement between Intel and AMD but the implications for your buying strategy and roadmap aren’t that clear yet. The rules of engagement spelled out in the Intel 8K make it clear that server vendors are free to select the CPUs that best fit their design goals and to carry as wide a portfolio of AMD-based servers as they feel the market demands. Server vendors can also market AMD to their heart’s content without fear of retribution from Intel (if the accusations from the past are true — something Intel isn’t admitting through this settlement). It also means that the two companies can stop aiming so many legal weapons at each other and redirect those funds and management brain cells to accelerating innovation. The $1.25B influx to AMD will be a very welcome shot in the R&D arm, too.
That’s all goodness that may lead to greater adoption of AMD-based servers in the future by enterprises. It doesn’t mean we can expect equivalency in performance or purpose between them, though. All it does is spell out the rules of engagement for fair play.

It also doesn’t ensure full compatibility between AMD and Intel processors and this is where one question in particular lies unanswered.

According to the 8K, Section 2.3 on Technical impairments:
“Intel shall not include any Artificial Performance Impairment in any Intel product…mean[ing] an affirmative engineering or design action by Intel (but not a failure to act) that (i) degrades the performance or operation of a Specified AMD product, (ii) is not a consequence of an Intel Product Benefit and (iii) is made intentionally to degrade the performance or operation of a Specified AMD Product. For purposes of this Section 2.3, “Product Benefit” shall mean any benefit, advantage, or improvement in terms of performance, operation, price, cost, manufacturability, reliability, compatibility, or ability to operate or enhance the operation of another product.”

The key word here is “compatibility.” Case in point: virtualization live migration. Intel VT, the set of instruction sets in the Xeon CPU family that helps with the performance of virtual infrastructures and enables live migrations from server to server are not compatible with AMD-V technologies that do the same thing (roughly). What this means today is that with Intel’s implementation you can’t live migrate from an Intel-based server to an AMD-based server. AMD-V actually lets you migrate from AMD to Intel, but you can’t move back. As a result of this you are probably building out your server virtualization pool today purely with Intel-based servers.

So here’s the question: “Is the incompatibility of virtual infrastructure implementations an Artificial Performance Impairment or simply different approaches to delivering Product Benefit?”

The Intel 8K then states:
“In no circumstances shall this Section 2.3 impose or be construed to impose any obligation on
Intel to (i) take any act that would provide a Product Benefit to any AMD or other non-Intel product,
either when such AMD or non-Intel product is used alone or in combination with any other product, (ii)optimize any products for Specified AMD Products, or (iii) provide any technical information, documents, or know how to AMD.”

Hmm. This seems to state that Intel is under no obligation to address this particular example if the resolution provides a Product Benefit to AMD. And it further states in that same “(i)” that such Product Benefit includes cases of the products being used in combination – which describes the case of Intel and AMD servers in a shared virtual pool. It further states that Intel doesn’t have to provide any technical information, documents or know how to AMD through which they could take the initiative themselves to solve this problem.

If AMD can’t penetrate any enterprise’s virtual server pool because the feature of live migration doesn’t work across server families, that would seem to me to be a serious Artificial Market Impairment. But does that fit the terms of the settlement that state Artificial Performance Impairment must be proven? Hmm.

This is just one example of the types of questions and scenarios Intel and AMD’s lawyers and technical experts will have to apply to this agreement. And answers to these types of questions will be imperative for enterprises to understand as they can have significant impacts on buying behavior. 

Until these types of scenarios are played out the impact of this settlement on enterprise buyers remains unsettled.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

You can follow James on  here

Your New Client Security Analyst

After seven years, my colleague Natalie Lambert is leaving Forrester. In the year that I have been at Forrester, she has been a good team-mate, sounding board for ideas, gleeful mischief-maker, and collaborator on shared research topics. I will miss her insights and energy, and I wish her the best as she begins her next adventure.

Natalie covered quite a bit of ground: client security, client management, endpoint virtualization, Bring-Your-Own-PC programs, full disk encryption and several other topics. While it would be impossible to fill her shoes, I am strapping on my hip waders and immersing myself in several of her research topics.

Specifically: henceforth, I will cover all client security topics for Forrester. These include:

• data leak prevention (DLP) on the client
• full disk encryption
• client security (anti-malware and anti-virus)

I am pleased to cover client security topics again. I wrote extensively about client security for three-and-a-half years before coming to Forrester. Among other things, I correctly predicted that Windows Vista would have no effect on the Windows security aftermarket — six months before Vista launched. And in 2006 and 2007, I anticipated the rapid move of anti-virus to the cloud, which we see today in Panda Security’s “collective intelligence,” in McAfee’s Artemis project, Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network, and in new startups like Immunet. For cloud coverage of client security, I will partner with Chenxi Wang, but security topics that have anything to do with stuff sitting on endpoints, I will be your analyst.

I will not take on any of Natalie’s IT operations topics, such as BYOPC, mobile management, client management. These areas will be covered by other analysts on the infrastructure and operations (I&O) research team, chiefly Chris Silva and Ben Gray. Rather than speak for them, I will let them speak for themselves. I will collaborate with Ben and Chris on security strategies and best practices as it affects their topics.

I will also retain my coverage of data security topics, notably data leak prevention (DLP) and enterprise rights management. A few subjects will transition to my other colleagues on the Security and Risk team. We will likely announce details after we conclude those discussions.

In the meantime, Forrester customers who would like clarification on what the shift in security coverage means for you should contact their client services representative. I would be happy to speak with you! But the short answer is that not much is changing. You will talk to me rather than Natalie. She provided excellent coverage of client security topics, and I will strive to do the same.

 

[posted by Andrew Jaquith]

CA Buys NetQoS: A New Network Management Juggernaut?

CA is a vendor that already enjoys a leading position in overall network management. Its 2005 acquisition of Concord, which brought along the assets of the previously acquired Aprisma, instantly moved CA from an also-ran to one of the clear leaders. Concord was good, and CA has an impressive track record of growing that business since the acquisition. Still, there were some weaknesses with regard to more advanced performance analysis.

On September 14, 2009, CA finally addressed these performance gaps by announcing its intent to acquire NetQoS for $200 million. Based in Austin, TX, NetQoS is one of those exciting small companies that proved there is a better approach to many of the challenges we face. It is one of the true innovators in performance management of both infrastructure and applications.

The combination of the two is a compelling proposition for network management. CA’s Spectrum is recognized as a leader in fault management, both in sheer installed base as well as technical merit. The eHealth side of the business (the original core Concord business) has been popular for performance monitoring and reporting, but the analysis from NetQoS is far superior. This is where the action now shifts in network management as well as other domains such as virtual servers, storage, and applications. The merged product line positions CA in a formidable position to capitalize on the growth areas of network management.

Network Management is a corner of the IT Management Software market that has been written off by many as boring and obsolete, yet we project that 2009 sales of network management products will be slightly less than $3.5B, or 17% of the overall IT Management Software market. This represents a 4% increase in raw spending over 2008. Granted, Forrester’s growth projection for 2009 in the broader IT management software market is 9.5%, so network management is lagging behind the overall market. Still, almost no IT spending is on the increase this year, so this is notable. Clearly, there is still demand. Network Management is hardly a dead market!

Certainly, many vendors are strong point players, but only a few can provide broad-based network monitoring and analysis for both fault and performance management, as well as configuration and change management. These powerhouses include:

• HP, which holds a longstanding leadership position centered around Network Node Manager and bolstered by the Network Automation product that came with Opsware (which it acquired with Rendition Networks).


• IBM, through the 2005 acquisition of Micromuse, gave it superb network discovery and fault management, along with a good set of performance monitoring capabilities. Prior to Micromuse, IBM’s Tivoli division was very weak in the network domain. Now it is clearly in the lead pack.


• EMC, the storage king that made its foray into the network with its 2005 Smarts acquisition. Smarts was, and still is, a phenomenal product for network fault management. In 2007, EMC added to its arsenal with the Voyence acquisition for NCCM. It still lacks a compelling performance-oriented story, but it is also among the leaders in network management.

We believe CA will augment much of its product line with NetQoS rather than replace it. There are obvious overlaps, but more opportunities to strengthen what already exists.

Is the new CA a potentially undisputed leader in network management? Possibly. The fault and performance combination is tough to beat. If a stronger network configuration and change management component existed in the CA portfolio, linked by its Unified Service Model and orchestrated by components of its Spectrum Automation Manager, the answer to the question would be a firm, “Yes.”

More importantly, the NetQoS technology promises a stronger position beyond network management. The need to gain better insight to performance, and especially application performance, is one of the most overwhelming issues still facing IT. If CA properly leverages the NetQoS portfolio, it can significantly bolster its server and application performance story. Many of the analytical algorithms extend beyond the network, so other management domains can benefit. NetQoS brings some attractive application performance management technology that should mesh with CA’s Wily product line. Here again there is some overlap that must be reconciled, although the two work in different ways and a hybrid that takes the best of both is very appealing.

NetQoS has been successful because it innovated in an area that most other vendors ignored. It is a relatively small company, but we expect it to have a big positive impact on CA and its customers.

By Glenn O'Donnell

Check out Glenn's research

You should follow me on  here

BYOPC: Remote Access For The Masses

(Reblogged from Natalie Lambert's personal blog I Brought My Own PC)

I was talking with a large enterprise today that has a remote access solution in place so that employees, not in the office, can access their applications from their home machine. So why, I asked, was BYOPC such a foreign concept? Think about it…a home machine is just another “unmanaged” device. This “unmanaged” device is simply requesting access to applications that will enable the employee to get her job done.

I think most organizations are over-thinking BYOPC. Yes, it may mean making more applications available to employees over Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server, formerly Metaframe) or Microsoft Terminal Services, but it is not an entirely new architecture like people think. Most companies already have these types of solutions in place today for remote access and complex applications, so why not expand this implementation? Alternatively, many organizations are already looking at hosted desktop virtualization (also known as VDI) for contractors, offshore employees, call centers, etc., why not expand the implementation to provide a managed desktop environment to an employee-owned unmanaged device? I mean, isn’t this exactly what a contractor or an offshore employee has?

I know I am over-simplifying he technology underpinnings of (and the costs associated with) BYOPC, but the concept is not new. Yes, BYOPC will require you rethink the capacity of your remote access solution, but you don’t have to rethink the architecture. Honestly, my interest would be if Microsoft Direct Access can solve the capacity issues…what do you think?

By Natalie Lambert

Check out Natalie's research

You should follow me on  here

Green Storage Has Limited ROI, But Supports Overall Efficiency

I care deeply about the environment, certainly more than I care personally about money, so it pains me to say that in most cases, making storage decisions based on power expenditure alone is not rational behavior. The world is driven by economics, and the stark reality is that the cost of power is only a drop in the bucket compared to the amount organizations spend on acquiring and managing their enterprise storage systems. Maybe someday a consumption tax or cap and trade system will tip the balance towards more responsible consumption of non-renewable resources, but in the meantime, the pricing of power (especially in the US) doesn’t give much economic incentive for good behavior. In fact, according to a report Forrester published recently, the amount of money typically spent on electricity to power and cool a TB of storage is only about 1% of the cost of buying that TB of storage (or about 4% of the annualized cost of buying that storage given that you only have to buy the TB once every 3-5 years but you power it every year). So, unfortunately for the environment, power cost itself doesn’t provide a very strong incentive for storage efficiency.

Fortunately though, the things that enterprises can do to reduce their power consumption costs are often the exact same things they can do to reduce the capital and operating expenses of their overall storage environment. Focusing on improving utilization (measured as the quantity of data written divided by the quantity of storage on hand) and increased usage of dense drives are the most straightforward and effective ways to reduce hardware acquisition costs as well as power consumption. There are many ways to achieve these objectives such as thin provisioning, reporting and reclamation to improve utilization, and tiering or wide striping to enable more use of dense drives. Whatever the motivation — economic, altruistic, or a combination of both — organizations that put significant focus on their utilization and dense drive ratios are likely to spend less money and be greener at the same time. And that’s good for everybody.

By Andrew Reichman

Check out Andrew's research

Configuresoft Nicely Fills an EMC Gap

EMC continues to tease the market with its management software ambitions, taking another step this week to build on its portfolio. On May 27, EMC announced its intent to acquire Configuresoft, a vendor of server configuration and change management (CCM) software. Forrester views this as a positive development for both companies but we eagerly await more.

While EMC must still make additional developmental moves to graduate into the “anchor” class of management vendors, its M&A activity has proven it is a formidable player in configuration and change management across a number of technology domains. Obviously, EMC has strength in storage, but it has also become a key vendor in the network domain with its Smarts (2005) and Voyence (2007) acquisitions, and its purchase of nLayers (2006) gives it some of the best visibility into the application domain. Servers have been a notable gap even though some good “skunk works” monitoring technology was developed within its Smarts team. Server CCM was one big domain missing from the portfolio.

This acquisition does not come as much of a surprise. The two vendors inked an OEM agreement in 2008 that resulted in EMC’s Server Configuration Manager and Configuration Analytics Manager, a re-branding of Configuresoft’s technologies. By following through with full acquisition, the bond becomes stronger and any vendor risk is much lower. The near-term actual fulfillment of the technology itself should be little changed, however. Over the next several months, EMC must continue to consolidate its many parts into a cohesive CCM strategy and integrated product family. The current tools are each very strong, but the collective suite is still fragmented.

One hopeful step in the direction of consolidation is the CMDB that EMC gained with its Infra (2008) acquisition. Many questions remain about how this CMDB strategy will play out, but EMC has the right parts to assemble into what is potentially one of the strongest CCM families in the industry. Early indications suggest the EMC people charged with this evolution are on the right philosophical track toward building a properly federated configuration management system (CMS). We implore EMC’s leadership to give them the power to execute on fulfilling this vision. This includes the freedom to build federation to third party tools, an absolute necessity to lead in the CMS market.

This consolidated CCM is notable, as the configuration and change management processes collectively form the basic core of every function performed in IT. If you do not master these, all other processes will suffer. Conversely, excellent configuration information is a catalyst toward IT excellence that must be fortified with strong analytics and change controls.

Configuresoft includes some very impressive policy analysis capabilities, a much-needed but often overlooked use case for the configuration information delivered by such products. This is one of the more promising outcomes of combining the Configuresoft, Voyence, and internally developed EMC configuration policy analysis products. It also presents a challenge to EMC, as each of these brings good but disjointed features that need to be reconciled. Will the final policy analysis engine be Configuresoft’s, Voyence’s, or something completely different, maybe a hybrid of all of these? This is a big question that does note necessarily have an easy answer.

Finally, the biggest question of them all is how EMC will parlay this CCM power into a broader, integrated management strategy. We believe the technology acquired with Smarts is a powerful asset that has not been leveraged to its potential within the EMC family. EMC missed a grand opportunity to extend more aggressively into the server and application domains for monitoring and root cause analysis (RCA). It is not too late to revisit this direction. Demand is still extremely high for application RCA. We know such RCA is far from easy, but EMC has many of the right parts to compete well if it gives this market the right attention.

To achieve this, EMC must develop or acquire performance management capabilities in the various domains, including applications. This has been a glaring hole in the EMC portfolio for years and its competitors (especially CA) have been capitalizing on this weakness. It must also present a forceful IT process automation (ITPA) capability to assemble the many CCM pieces involved. Configuresoft and Voyence are great components to this story and Infra has some decent ITPA elements, but it needs better ITPA linkages and flow automation along the lines of Opalis and the run book automation technologies acquired and developed by BMC, CA, and HP.

Forrester applauds the Configuresoft acquisition, as well as the others made by EMC’s resource management software group (RMSG). It is clear that EMC is building a truly powerful CCM story. We hope the company will get more aggressive at building atop this strong foundation. 2009 is proving to be an opportune time for M&A and EMC has some of the better potential to be a major player in IT management software. It must now prove to a skeptical market that it can execute with enough vigor to overtake the competition.

By Glenn O'Donnell

Check out Glenn's research

Free Webinar On Server Virtualization

In my conversations with organizations implementing server virtualization, I've found that there seems to be a gap opening between the number of virtual machines firms are willing to run on a server, and the maximum number that could still reasonably fit on there. It looks like this will be aggravated by newer servers that can run twice as many virtual machines, along with more mature virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere that will support up to a TB of physical RAM. How long will it be before IT is expected to support 50 or 75 VMs per server?

If you want to learn more about this topic, please join my complimentary Webinar, "Forrester’s Top Three Recommendations For Implementing Server Virtualization" on June 11th at 11AM EST. You can register for the session by visiting:

www.forrester.com/virtualizationwebinar

By Galen Schreck

Check out Galen's research.

Are Big Boxes Better For Server Virtualization?

From time to time, someone will ask me if it makes sense to purchase a large (32+ CPU) server as a big virtualization host running a VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix hypervisor.

In a word, I think the answer is "no".

Here are a few reasons why:

• First, very few virtualization users that I’m aware of have selected anything larger than 4-socket systems. Massive servers with 32 processors simply cost too much on a per-VM basis, and since you end up dividing them up into smaller virtual machines, there’s not much benefit to go with a massive system. Most hypervisors don’t support more than four virtual processors per virtual machine (including VMware -- you have to purchase the top-of-the-line Enterprise Plus to get 8-way virtual SMP).
• Second, many of the HA features in large SMP systems can be provided by clustering or live migration capabilities in software.
• Third, having all that capacity in one box used to make it easier to reallocate resources between partitions -- but live migration across physical boxes makes that unnecessary as well.
• Lastly, some vendors have claimed that virtual environments built on big servers are easier to manage, since there are fewer physical endpoints to worry about. I think this is an older argument that dates back to when people purchased a Sun E10K to run a large number of websites. Ultimately, more automated management tools made it possible to run large numbers of scale-out servers at a similar cost.

Even among modular servers, there is some debate as to how big of a box you need. The recent release of the Intel Xeon 5500 allows you to manage a lot more memory with fewer physical CPUs. In order to provide the maximum amount of memory to their VMs, many companies purchased more processors than they needed -- simply so they could get enough RAM. Systems were still mostly memory bound, so with the release of the new Xeon 5500 that can address more DIMMS, we think that some firms will temporarily swing back towards systems with fewer CPUs. Plus, the CPUs have gotten much faster -- recent demonstrations by Intel are showing the new Xeon 5500-based servers running twice the workload of their prior models.

By Galen Schreck

Check out Galen's research.

VMware Wants To Be Your Network Operating System Of Choice

Whenever a company changes the name of their major product you often have to wonder what level of change they are trying to signal. In the case of VMware which changed ESX to vSphere yesterday, the signal is one of intent. They could have called it vWorldDomination but that might have been a bit too caustic. So instead they chose a global metaphor. Despite the subtlety, make no mistake, this version is a direct affront to how we have traditionally run our data centers with traditional operating systems and element-centric system management tools.

They made their case initially at VMWorld EMEA when they declared that a new “operating system” is needed in the virtualized data center and that the old model no longer applies. They called it Cloud OS but didn’t deliver on this vision. vSphere is the first step towards this new model in that it significantly shifts the focus from simply virtualizing workloads to managing and automating pools of VMs and shows how management at the virtual infrastructure layer can address data center efficiency in ways other layers can’t. It also moves the VM world closer to being able to manage business services that span VMs (although other tools like HP Operations Orchestrator and BMC BladeLogic still do this better) and track and diagnose their performance with AppSpeed, previously BeeHive, (although not as well as Hyperic).

Probably the biggest improvement in vSphere is its performance and scalability. There are a number of improvements to the maximum supported RAM and CPU configurations, as well as far better I/O throughput, and overall efficiency. In short, VMware can now claim that they can virtualize any application, no matter how performance hungry it is. Plus, VMware partners like Intel and Cisco have announced complimentary enhancements to address a variety of performance and ease of configuration issues.

Some of the key capabilities that enterprise customers should strongly consider include:

• vCenter Host Profiles -- Capture all the configuration details of a deployed virtual machine or collection of VMs and create a golden master that will enforce these configuration parameters when a service is reinstantiated, moved or duplicated.
• Thin provisioning with vStore -- Quick, what’s your storage to VM ratio today? What if you could cut this down by 90%? How many of your VMs share the same OS and middleware stack (or same applications). And your storing how many copies of that exact same software? 'Nuff said. While many enterprises take advantage of array-based thin provisioning to get some of these same benefits, vStore provides these vendors with an API to optimize thin provisioning for a vSphere environment.
• vShield Zones -- Distributed Resource Scheduling is a key technology for creating pools of resources and allowing VMs to automatically optimize their use of these resources. But managing a big homogeneous pool lets you set policies per app but not across groups of apps. Zones lets you create sub-pools for implementing these types of policies.
• vCloud -- while this is still mostly a future, VMware now has named a collection of hosting companies who plan to deploy VMware-based cloud computing in their data centers which will allow you to more easily take advantage of Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. The big gain they bring: Your vSphere and theirs are compatible and your existing vCenter-centric tools allow aggregation of your virtual pool and their clouds.
• Fault tolerance -- for applications that require zero downtime, VMware now offers a fault tolerant capability that can eliminate the need for specialized hardware or additional clustering technologies. The fault tolerance feature replicates your VM’s state to a shadow VM on separate hardware in the same data center. If the primary machine should fail, the shadow VM picks up with no disruption to users.

But before you can really take advantage of these enhancements, enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals need to adopt more general best practices with their VMware environments such as booting VMs from network storage, activating DRS and getting comfortable with basic policies, taking greater advantage of VM templates and virtual appliances, leveraging VMware HA for recovery, and backing up with tools that leverage VMware’s backup APIs. You can’t move to a more efficiency future without preparing your environment for it.

By James Staten and Galen Schreck

Check out James' research and Galen's research.

Red Hat And Citrix Ratchet Up Open Source Virtualization Relevancy

The open source hypervisor landscape got a lot more interesting today after the latest announcements from Red Hat and Citrix. Both were shots across the bow of VMware’s juggernaut, but Red Hat’s volley may have overshot and struck Xen.org in the stern.

Citrix, the flag bearer for Xen.org, recently announced that two significant hypervisor features would be made available in the free version of its Xen distribution, XenServer – live migration and multi-node management. Neither of these capabilities are provided in the free version of VMware ESX and live migration won’t be available in Microsoft Hyper-V until Windows Server 2008 R2. Citrix is also busily placing calls to the major Linux distributors hoping to sign them up to commitments to replace the free Xen.org hypervisor with the free XenServer.

This last move is part of a larger overall strategy to move the Xen community forward and redefine compatibility and interoperability. At present, Xen community members can distribute compatible Xen derivatives that leverage a common hypervisor engine, the guts of what makes a hypervisor capable of hosting virtual machines. But most of the higher level functions, like storage and security integration and management and automation infrastructure are not part of this standard engine. Thus, incompatibilities reign among the Xen distributions. Try migrating an Amazon Machine Image over to Sun xVM and then to Oracle VM to see what I mean. Or try discovering and managing VMs running atop Citrix XenServer with your Virtual Iron tools.
 
A higher level of compatibility is needed across Xen distributions for this hypervisor to gain market momentum and legitimately challenge VMware and Hyper-V. Citrix is hoping to cement the free XenServer as this higher level implementation. Or, in other words, as the “de facto standard distribution.”

Which brings me to our friends in North Carolina. Red Hat angered the Xen community last year when it announced that KVM would be its go-forward hypervisor. While the company said it would continue to distribute Xen, it clearly was orienting its engineering resources to empower the newcomer. And today we received first word about those efforts.

While the market wasn’t awaiting news of a new hypervisor with bated breath, there is reason to turn an ear in Red Hat’s direction. It’s not because the hypervisor will debut with functionality arguably matching VMware ESX and XenServer, or because it is claiming greater scalability than these peers, but mainly because of the foundation upon which KVM is based.

You see, Xen has the notion of two elements: a very thin hypervisor that looks at the scheduling of CPU and memory, and Domain 0, which is responsible for management, networking and resource utilization.

Complexity (and the incompatibilities mentioned above) comes from the implementation of the two layers, how you innovate, and where you place new features. As a result, when new features are needed in the Xen hypervisor layer, they have to be created anew, even if that capability existed in the base OS running in Domain 0.

KVM comes from the point of view that all hypervisor-specific capabilities should be in this layer. All the things you need that already exist in an OS or should naturally be in an OS, should be in Domain 0.

Domain 0 for KVM is the official Linux kernel and thus it inherits all the hooks, capabilities and partner ecosystem built around the kernel. Security? Inherited. Scalability? Inherited. Compatibility with 1000s of third party applications? You get the idea. So this presumably will help KVM out-innovate its competition — Red Hat certainly hopes this will vault them into the position of leading open source alternative. Sound familiar?

However, as is usually the case, the devil will be found in the details. Red Hat will first release an embedded hypervisor which will have a stripped down Domain 0 of RHEL 5. It’s currently not known how much of that rich Linux partner ecosystem will find the hooks they need in that 64MB domain. Will what KVM inherits be what the embedded footprint takes away? We’ll find out in May.

By James Staten

Check out James' research