Virtualization: An Advanced Education Reading List

This blog post references my cover story ‘Virtualization: Silicon And Software Salvation Or Technological Tower Of Babel?‘ in EDN’s October 3, 2008 edition. It’s one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.

As usual, in preparing this article for publication, I supplemented my interviews and hands-on experiments with a lot of online-only and print-also-online research. And as usual, I’m passing those research links on to you, so that you can also expand your knowledge on the topic of virtualization if you so choose.

The chronologically ordered list below predominantly (but not completely!) comes from Ars Technica and Slashdot. Happy reading, y’all…

• Virtualization Goes Mainstream
• Hardware Virtualization Slower Than Software?
• The Virtualization Reality (from ACM Queue)
• An Overview of Virtualization
• Virtualization Is Not All Roses
• Virtualizing Cuts Web App Performance 43%
• Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ
• VM Enables ‘Write-Once, Run Anywhere’ Linux Apps
• Desperately Seeking Xen
• Cache and memory in the many-core era
• Virtual Containerization
• Apple’s Leopard Server EULA moves closer to Microsoft’s virtual abilities (and Virtualize Mac OS X Client on VMware Fusion)
• Uncovered: Evidence that Mac OS X could run Windows apps soon (and Native Windows PE File Loading on OS X?)
• Hardware Virtualization: the Nuts and Bolts (from AnandTech)
• VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today
• Review of Sun’s Free Open Source Virtual Machine
• Ars Technica Guide to Virtualization: Part I
• Virtualization and multicore x86 CPUs (from EDN)
• Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3
• Mac virtualization software sales skyrocket
• Parallels Desktop 4 preparing to battle VMware Fusion 2.0

To that last point, by the way, I also had a conversation with Parallels back in the Intel Developer Forum timeframe. According to senior product manager Raymond Chew, Parallels plans to add support for more than one core (specifically, up to four…VMware’s Fusion already supports up to two) in its next major software update, along with virtualization support for the FireWire interface. In my recent conversation with VMware’s Peter Kazanjy, I didn’t get the same solid assurance regarding future FireWire support…then again, FireWire ports are steadily disappearing from Mac systems, anyway. And Kazanjy rightly points out that you can alternatively access a FireWire-tethered hard drive by mounting it in OS X, then accessing it in a virtual machine via Fusion’s Shared Folders feature. Granted, this doesn’t help you with respect to IEEE 1394-supportive digital video cameras, for example, but again you can always copy the video data off the camera in OS X and then access it off the HFS+ partition via a Shared Folders definition.