Originally published February 23 2006
Three virtualization firms work to make computers more efficient
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Market leader VMware will make its GSX Server virtualization software free. Virtualization allows a computer to run multiple jobs at once on a single server, which cuts administrative expense and electricity bills.
Three companies selling virtualisation software will try to advance their respective fortunes on Monday with new software, a new partnership and a new promotion.
All three companies --- Virtual Iron, SWsoft and VMware --- sell software designed to let computers run more efficiently by providing applications a virtual foundation instead of the real one the applications think they're using.
That virtual foundation means that a single server can run more jobs at the same time and that the jobs can more easily be moved from one computer to another.
The move is intended to show the company's software maturity and advantages and let many more potential customers try it out, Diane Greene, VMware's chief executive, said.
A basic advantage of virtualisation is the ability to run multiple jobs gracefully on a single server, a consolidation that cuts administrative expense and electricity bills.
VMware pioneered the technology for running multiple virtual machines, each with its own operating system, on a single computer.
VMware Server is similar to Microsoft's Virtual Server; open source Xen, while relatively immature and not available for Windows, reproduces the basic features of ESX server.
Among them are start-up Virtual Iron, a company whose software is designed not only to run multiple operating systems on one machine but also to let a single operating system span several machines.
The company plans to announce that Novell, the number two Linux seller, now provides that support in a version of its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server product.
Another company that already has several customers in the Web hosting business is SWsoft, which sells a product called Virtuozzo that subdivides a single copy of the operating system so different applications believe they have a whole computer to themselves.
SWsoft released version 3.0 of its Linux product, which adds a feature called Zero Downtime Migration that lets a virtual private server be moved from one computer to another without shutting it down.
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