vmware's little hypervisor kicks MS-bloated butt

The blogosphere's started to fill with references to the ongoing "who's smaller" hypervisor footprint-spat going on between MS & VMware. I've listed some relevant url's below, and made a (very) few comments:

MICROSOFT
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/08/12/hypervisor-footprint-debate-part-1-microsoft-hyper-v-server-2008-vmware-esxi-3-5.aspx

and part2 and part3.

Comments: YUK! shame on an MS program manager for scoring a big own-goal with some wish-they-were-reasonable arguments. fact: there are arguments for both sides. For example, should I use little slip-stream patches vs total image patches. After reading the reader comments on the MS blog & the VMware response below, I'm persuaded that VMware have the edge in both the argument and the methodology.

Interested parties owe it to themselves to review both sides of the argument before making up the mind.

VMWARE
http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2009/08/our-position-on-hypervisor-footprints-patching-vulnerabilities-and-whatever-else-microsoft-wants-to-throw-into-a-blog-post.html

and to think: I'm actually a Hyper-V fan!!! I just hate to see propoganda-rant filling up my RSS feeds.

cheers,
gray

Citrix chief architect puts the kaibosh on Microsoft detractors (Briforum '09)

I'm @ Briforum 2009, the preferred conference for SBC-computing techies, held this year at the Hilton Chicago, IL.

Sitting in on Brad Pederson's overview interview about the history of Citrix technology advances, I was surprised to hear his take on reasons why MS shook Citrix's tree back in 1997.

While some may point the finger at MS strong-arm tactics & potential-revenue hunting, Brad commented that MS may have had a higher priority. He made the point that NT was at that time "getting successful" (I would say, "taking off like a rocket in the enterprise"). His observation was that MS was primarily concerned with potential future fragmentation of the NT kernel, and had drawn a lesson from what had happened with UNIX-flavor vendoring, which had hurt individual UNIX vendors.

I'm not going to go into the ins & outs of what Citrix was doing with the NT kernel at the time, and why this could be an issue. A great article on this subject & the crisis, published by USA Today and written at the time by Kevin Maney, can be found here at

http://citrixblogger.org/2007/02/28/citrix-microsoft-crisis-1997-usa-today-article.

From my point of view though, in 1997 I was doing my MCSE on NT3.51. My dad was a UNIX-man, so I had an earful of various flavors available.

So Brad's comment sounded pretty valid, considering too that he's the chief architect at Citrix and has been with the company since 1989.

Good to see MS not always getting bad press for business strategies & takeover practices.

Attending BriForum 2009

I squeezed in my early-bird booking for Briforum 2009 late last week. I'll be a Briforum noob in Chicago later this year, but I have to admit to looking forward a good deal to hob-nobbing with the SBC gurus. ya ya.

Registration is still possible at http://briforum.com/html/register.html, but the price has gone up to $1495.

Recently, I was extremely impressed with Gabe's speedy response when I knocked over an email about some of the links not working on the 'ol www.briforum.com/videos site. I picked this up before my snowboarding holiday about a month ago, but only flagged it up to brianmadden.com when I got back to work last week. Gabe fixed the links within about a day!

Obviously, no-one else noticed or acted in the interim, which leads me to wonder how many people actually look at the vids & documents on that site regularly. It would be interesting to see some briforum/videos download stats at some point.

I can attest to the recorded sessions having revolutionised my understanding of SBC computing, notwithstanding the fact that I've been "fiddling" with most versions of Citrix since the Winview-assic period.

Citrix Xenapp Feature Comparison doc

After a number of requests to compare the feature-set of the various Xenapp versions & licensing levels, I re-located the feature-set comparison document. This sales document has been updated with Xenapp 5. The link is below:

http://www.citrix.com/site/resources/dynamic/salesdocs/CitrixPresentationServer_ComparativeMatrix.pdf