Stories about: Citrix

Citrix Systems on Tuesday announced Project Kensho, a set of tools that will allow virtual environments to be more independent of hypervisors.

Citrix Systems has announced Project Kensho, a set of tools that will allow virtual environments to be more independent of hypervisors.

Standards wars, such as the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle, can keep many potential users on the sidelines until a winner is declared. Virtualization software vendors are trying to avoid just such a battle over the adoption of virtual appliances.

Here's an irony: With XP's expiration date now 10 days past, you'd think Microsoft could take a deep breath, wipe the sweat off its brow, and enjoy some relative peace and quiet. Wrong. The software giant launched its Vista Compatibility Center this week -- and promptly fell on its face when the site was down for a whole day.

In tapping a former Microsoft executive to lead VMware's battle against the Redmond giant, VMware's EMC-controlled board of directors decided co-founder Diane Greene lacked the business savvy to win a struggle for market share, analysts say.

Hyper-V lives! Is Microsoft ready to prove it has what it takes in the virtualization arena? As I mentioned last week, Sun is on board: Read this quote from Sun's Senior Director of xVM, Vijay Sarathy. However, the company challenged Microsoft to answer some serious questions about its virtualization technology -- such as how Hyper-V can compete with the open source Xen-based alternatives and whether a Windows-only virtualization technology can hack it in today's increasingly heterogeneous datacenters.

Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option.

Whether you call them application delivery controllers, application accelerators, application traffic managers, or just load balancers, the solutions for scaling out Web sites and improving the performance of Web applications have come a long way from their humble beginnings. The result is a great deal of choice in the marketplace, from bare-bones appliances with basic functionality to high-capacity switch-based systems that handle Web traffic in wildly sophisticated ways.

It may look like Windows Vista. It shares the same code base as Vista. It even rolls in Vista's first Service Pack. But in terms of customer adoption plans, Windows Server 2008 is no Vista.

Microsoft announced on Thursday that Hyper-V was released to manufacturing, and then about two seconds later the media frenzy began.

With the release Thursday of Hyper-V as a free download to Windows Server 2008 users, Microsoft is drastically undercutting the prices of x86 server virtualization pioneer VMware. But while Microsoft provides good enough capabilities for many use cases, there are still numerous reasons for an enterprise to choose VMware, analysts say.