Chris Wolf from Burton Group did a nice wrap-up post on the virtualization panel at the Catalyst Europe conference that featured our CEO, Dan McCall. We were pleased that virtual machine interoperability was a key topic of discussion. This is an area that is near and dear to us. Chris highlighted the fact that Citrix has taken steps on the server side to make virtual machines created on XenServer capable of running on Microsoft Hyper-V without conversion.
These types of initiatives are extremely positive in our view, as anything that makes life easier for corporations to deploy virtualization in multi-vendor environments is ultimately good for all of us. Each virtualization vendor would love to “own” an account, and the customers themselves would likely prefer to standardize on a specific virtualization technology. However, the reality is that vendor relationships evolve, companies acquire other companies, and IT environments ultimately end up looking a bit more complex than anyone would prefer.
At Virtual Computer, we have been focused on interoperability since day one. We felt it was necessary to deliver a solution to the marketplace that would interoperate with major virtualization platforms natively without conversions. We incorporated into our client-optimized bare metal hypervisor full, conversion-free interoperability with Microsoft virtualization technologies such as Hyper-V, Virtual Server, and Virtual PC. We are also very pleased by the efforts going on in the DMTF and the virtualization industry to define a common interchange format – OVF – that would facilitate interoperability between various virtualization platforms.
Bottom line people should stop obsessing about choosing the “right” virtualization technology – interoperability between platforms removes the angst of the decision. And at the end of the day virtualization technology is just that – a technology; and what kind of solution one delivers with that technology is what really matters the most.
