VMware, MS Hang Back as Others Catch Up on Virtualization

There are two ways to look at the rush of secondary and tertiary products coming into the virtualization market-especially this week and next week.

Symantec, for example, bought nSuite to give its products a greater ability to ask for and manage connections between servers, virtual servers and the various types of endpoints that connect to either one. Israeli remote-access software developer Ceedo announced a product designed to let end users connect to Citrix app servers securely, even without a pre-installed client on their own machines.

Citrix may raise its prices. A UK company is putting a virtualized data center into the cloud. OpenCloud Computing has announced its OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine, which appears to be an attempt to virtualize a data center, rather than just a server.

After years of supporting VMware, VMLogix announced its LabManager VM lab-management software would support Hyper-V as well as VMware.

Backup vendor Veeam announced a V-specific version of its products.

And Virtual Iron is getting ready to announce (Monday) LivePower-a new feature for its virtualization software designed to automatically consolidate VMs into hosts with spare capacity in order to use as few servers and as little electricity as possible.

(This is, of course, to completely ignore, for once, the continuing Microsoft-VMware spitting match which, this week, is over which vendor's stuff is cheaper, the inexpensive Microsoft software, or new, inexpensive version of VMware's.)

The first is that virtualization is the hottest fad in computing and every vendor with technology that can be made relevant on even the most shallow level will past a "Now Virtualized" sticker on the box and try to get in on the frenzy.

That's not only the most obvious interpretation, it's also the most defensible historically. There's plenty of innovation in the computer business, but there's even more "innovation," that the "innovators" compare to Levi and Strauss selling gear to miners, but is actually more like coopers and wheelwrights following the pioneers West to do exactly the same thing they'd always done, but with poorer facilities, fewer tools and at higher prices.

There are a million real-IT examples, but the most ridiculous is actually the iPhone (and iPod, actually)-a genuine innovation that spawned a million new packages for headsets and keyboards and chargers and headsets that are exactly the same as the ones already on the market except for the annoyingly proprietary add-ons Commisar Jobs requires for all Apple hardware, lest it be mistaken for anything pedestrian, easy to use or cost-effective. (Why, for an example to the example, do iPods still use proprietary hardware/power interfaces when accessories ranging from keyboard mini-fans to MP3s to terabyte-scale portable storage devices do just fine with standard USB A or B plugs?)

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