Virtualization Means Different Things To Different Observers

VMWare today announced a raft of new virtualization offerings, but InformationWeek, CNET, and PC World reported on the news in very different ways.CNET News.com went green, focusing on the experimental new Distributed Power Management feature, which "Monitors how hard servers are working and moves virtual machines to new machines to let unneeded servers be shut down." that should save energy as well as wear and tear on the servers.

InformationWeek concentrated on VMWare "extending its popular VMotion tool's migration capability to storage as well as physical servers." The idea is that a running disk array can be moved from one physical server to another without disrupting end users. VMotion for Storage can migrate stored virtual machine files across different types of storage running under VMFS, including iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and direct attached storage.

At PC WORLD, the story was three new SMB "acceleration kits," based on the VMware Infrastructure 3 virtualization suite for servers and storage networks.

For more on virtualization, check out Information Week's feature on VMware, XenSource, and The Future Of Virtualization.