Post Web-2.0

I saw the article "Gartner touts Web 2.0, scoffs at sequel: Web 3.0 just a marketing ploy, but collaborative tools are here to stay" and thought: well, I've been thinking what's next too.

I don't think the trend is more of Web xyz. Web 1.0 started off as server centered services. And Web 2.0 became more user centered and interactive. So call "social networking" is really giving control to the users of the servers.

I believe the next step is user driven web view. Just as current mashups allows many things to come together in one page (i.e., one server), the next step is giving tools to the users to let the mashups take place at per browser level: I will connect up the web sites I want to see and this "view" I can share with my friends but there may not be a central place to get this "view." This will decentralize the Web perspective and take many views off line (or not easily available by tools like web spiders or search engine "seekers"). In fact, from the web spiders' view, the web will become defragmented and harder to ferret out what's hot or not. Maybe domain name resolution or IP traffic would have to be monitored to see what is really hot since these per user views may be completely private.

I'm starting to look at open source browsers and see what I can use to make steps towards this new world order. I've looked at Webkit (and related Adobe's AIR) but I think I'll stick with Firefox for now. Firefox has its set of problems but seems to be supported by most web sites such that people can use it painlessly. Plus it works on Windows and Linux and even OS X. [Don't expect much progress since I'm busy at work and home, unfortunately.]

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtualization at home and at work

"Virtualization homes in on desktops" points out how virtualization can have a place at home, like having a secure partition for online banking applications. They do point out one weakness of virtualization: requirements for lots of memory (each partition need to have independent set of memory, which can add up when you have more than 2 partitions -- there are ways to make the read only memories to be sharable (like same copy of the OS), but it's all easier said than done since current crop of OS wasn't written for virtualization).

And slightly older news: "VMware dangles next-gen virtualization goodies." Ideas for fault-tolerance would be a great usage for virtualiztaion.

So, there are few areas of virtualization which can use some work: Unfortunately, I don't have the energy to give it much thought, these days (you can see that I haven't been posting much recently).

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtualization week: VMware and more

This week, VMware hosted a conference this week and much news came out. Things that stood out for me:

1. Hypervisor in the hardware: Companies are now looking to have their hypervisor (virtualization software) be part of the hardware. Unfortunately, IBM already has a leg up on them all since their hypervisor is found in their various PowerPC hardware [and probably any new x86 hardware, if they are still making any more of such servers].
   
2. JeOS (Just Enough Operating System): Canonical is releasing JeOS, a virtualization-specific Ubuntu Linux. This is a variation of KVM, but hopefully will be less painful to use than KVM (which requires specialized QEMU). Unfortunately, there are no official info about it (that I can see with Google, this morning).
   
3. Virtualization standard container proposed: Partitions (the instance of OS+apps running on the virtual machines) are saved in proprietary formats today, but Xen, VMware and Microsoft are going to standardize with one format. That's good for users of hypervisors, esp. if hypervisors becomes plug and play, or you want to move a partition from one hardware with Xen and another hardware with Viridian. Pretty soon they'll be talking about run-time version management.
   

Lots of good news coming out for the world of virtualization.

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Future of Virtualization

Now that VMware has gone IPO and XenSource bought by Citrix, virtualization has made it to the financial press. However, the future isn't so clear since there are other players like Microsoft with their Viridian and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (SCVMM07) [which will support Xen and VMware in the future] and smaller companies like Virtual Iron Software.

And don't forget the granddaddy of them all: IBM. They have released at least 2 public versions of their hypervisor: rHype and sHype (via Xen). Since they have been at it for few decades on their mainframes and workstations, you can be sure they have both the depth and the breadth in understanding virtualization.

With all that written, virtualization "out in the wild" is rather a new phenomenon. The x86 virtualization hardware like Intel's Vanderpool and AMD's Pacifica came out in large volume in 2006 and even today people are still trying to figure out what it means and how best to use virtualization.

This is like the web in 1995, when Netscape IPO'd. Internet was around before browsers but the momentum started with Netscape browser in 1994. Microsoft piled on with Internet Explorer, and many others joined the race (like Opera and Apple's Safari). Today, Netscape morphed into Mozilla with Firefox browser. And Google rules the web "world."

So, 12 years from now, it's hard to say what virtualization would look like. I believe that there will be many shakeouts along with new comers to usurp the current front runners. And as with the web winners [of 2007] (like Google, Ebay, Amazon and Myspace), I personally won't place any specific bets on where virtualization will lead to in the future...for now....

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.