The Virtualization Battle: News from Sun, Novell and Microsoft - and Red Hat joins in
The battle in the virtualization market enters a new phase: Sun Microsystems released new versions of its virtualization software Sun xVM. And a few days ago Red Hat announced its takeover of Qumranet, makers of the virtualizer KVM. Meanwhile Microsoft and Novell are teaming up to counter with their own Microsoft Hyper-V and Suse Linux Enterprise Server offerings.
Today Sun Microsystems issued a new version of its server virtualizer Sun xVM along with its accompanying management solution xVM Ops Center 2.0. At the same time, the company wants to create a new open source community through its xVMserver.org developer hub. This announcement follows just days after Sun announced their desktop virtualizer xVM VirtualBox 2.0. The software hails from its acquisition in early 2008 of Innotek. Through its new community platform, the company seeks to attract more developers in a collaborative effort. Sun xVM VirtualBox and Ops Center are open source and free for downloading from www.openxvm.org. Sun is targeting its virtualization portfolio for the x86 and Sparc platforms along with Windows, Linux and Solaris. And this is currently a hotly contested market.
The same day as the Sun press release, Microsoft and Novell issued a joint announcement: the two companies want to sell a combined Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Microsoft virtualizer Hyper-V. To add to this, Dell wants to test and evaluate the solution, having joined the team back in May. Although content wise this announcement offered nothing new, the partners issued an additional announcement at the end of August that restated their collaboration in even stronger terms. Even on this occasion they continued to stress openly their cooperation in the virtualization market. In June, Novell joined Microsoft's certification program, and the theme is still at the top of the daily agenda at their joint research center. This news is certainly interesting in light of a new Linux offering: less than a week ago Red Hat announced its buy-out of virtualization vendor Qumranet.
By acquiring Qumranet, Red Hat integrates its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) with Solid ICE. KVM has already been part of the Linux kernel for over two years and therefore, in the Linux vendor's view, offers a unique competitive edge in hardware offerings and development times. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst asserts in his press conference, this puts his company at eye level with Microsoft. Here again it seeks to clarify its target market: according to Red Hat's concept, it wants to virtualize both Windows and Linux servers and desktops, and this under Red Hat infrastructure management.
Issue 210/2018
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News
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Released
The latest release is focused on hybrid cloud.
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Microsoft Releases a Linux-Based OS
The company is building a new IoT environment powered by Linux.
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Solomon Hykes Leaves Docker
In a surprise move, Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker has left the company.
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Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal
The company announces a GitHub page with links to source code for all its projects
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Gnome 3.28 Released
The latest GNOME rolls out with better contact management and new features for handling virtual machines.
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Install Firefox in a Snap on Linux
Mozilla has picked the Snap package system to deliver its application to Linux users.
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OpenStack Queens Released
The new release comes with new features for mission critical workloads.
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Kali Linux Comes to Windows
The Kali Linux developers even managed to run full blown XFCE desktop via WSL.
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Ubuntu to Start Collecting Some Data with Ubuntu 18.04
It will be an ‘opt-out’ feature.
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CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announces a paper describing their model for a serverless ecosystem.