Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Hypervisor virtualization basics a visual representation

For all of you that want a place to point folks to describe the basics of virtualization, I have put together a few videos to describe the hypervisor, CPU, and network concepts in a visual way.

The intent is to give a quick amount of conceptual information to those folks that suddenly are dealing with VMs, but might not have the experience to fully understand what they are looking at.

Hypervisor Basics:

The basics of what a full (type 1) hypervisor is.

 

The hypervisor pool of resources – the CPU:

The basics of CPU scheduling. It is far more complex than this and there are many methods.  It gets really messy when hyper-threading is introduced.

More CPU scheduling details are over at the Xen.org site (the Xen folks are more open in discussing the gritty details of all this):  http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/CreditScheduler

The hypervisor pool of resource – the network:

This is about virtual networks / virtual switches / bridging.  The concepts, as each vendor implementation offers different features.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Datamation puts their angle on the big three virtualization vendors

Datamation has put their spin and opinion into the world of virtualization and the virtualization engines and offerings in this comparison of Citrix (XenServer), Microsoft (Hyper-V, SCVMM), and VMware (ESX, vCenter).

Mind you, this is a judgment article – But it mentions Kensho – a project very near to my personal efforts, and DocFinder – another product I was involved in the infancy of.

You can find the article here:

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/12297_3853716_1/Virtual-Server-Comparison-Xen-vs-Microsoft-vs-VMware-2010.htm