One of the sea changes taking place in our consulting practice is helping our clients investigate server virtualization.
A few years ago, this would have been an outrageous suggestion ... but between VMware, Parallels, and Xen, it's now possible to run almost any reasonably current OS on top of any current hardware platform.
A couple of my clients are looking into combining several Windows-based applications requiring dedicated servers, into a single physical server running the "bare metal" version of VMWare, which will in turn host three or four of these pesky "This product requires a DEDICATED server" applications.
For a couple of years now, Novell has been telegraphing its intention to stop supporting NetWare as a native OS, and after a certain date, will only support NetWare running as a virtual machine under Xen. (Possibly also under VMWare, but I haven't heard a decision on that yet.)
Since it's getting increasingly difficult to find hardware support for NetWare (Qlogic won't make an iSCSI TOE card that will boot NetWare, for example, although I happen to know they have it working in the lab), the increasingly robust support offered by virtualization suddenly makes a good deal of business sense.
I have one customer who's looking at installing an iSCSI based SAN to run legacy NetWare boxes under VMWare Infrastructure, booting VMware natively off of the iSCSI SAN, and then booting NetWare servers as virtual machines.
As ciddyguy has already pointed out ... it's only a matter of time before someone either reverse engineers the Mac BIOS or waves enough money at Apple to allow creation of a virtual machine platform that will support booting MacOS.
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Date: 2006-09-05 11:09 pm (UTC)A few years ago, this would have been an outrageous suggestion ... but between VMware, Parallels, and Xen, it's now possible to run almost any reasonably current OS on top of any current hardware platform.
A couple of my clients are looking into combining several Windows-based applications requiring dedicated servers, into a single physical server running the "bare metal" version of VMWare, which will in turn host three or four of these pesky "This product requires a DEDICATED server" applications.
For a couple of years now, Novell has been telegraphing its intention to stop supporting NetWare as a native OS, and after a certain date, will only support NetWare running as a virtual machine under Xen. (Possibly also under VMWare, but I haven't heard a decision on that yet.)
Since it's getting increasingly difficult to find hardware support for NetWare (Qlogic won't make an iSCSI TOE card that will boot NetWare, for example, although I happen to know they have it working in the lab), the increasingly robust support offered by virtualization suddenly makes a good deal of business sense.
I have one customer who's looking at installing an iSCSI based SAN to run legacy NetWare boxes under VMWare Infrastructure, booting VMware natively off of the iSCSI SAN, and then booting NetWare servers as virtual machines.
As