This blog post references my cover story 'Virtualization: Silicon And Software Salvation, Or Technological Tower Of Babel?' in EDN's October 2, 2008 edition. It's one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.

If you'd like to peruse Figures 2-4 in higher-resolution detail, or if you'd like to check out the data behind the colored bars and lines, then hit up this link to download the multi-sheet Excel spreadsheet that I used to generate the graphics. Note that in order to do so, I 'hid' some of the rows in some of the sheets; 'unhide' them to see all of the numbers and their respective categories. However, keep in mind one of the points I made in my print writeup:

SiSoftware’s utility also output scaled performance-versus-clock-rate and performance-versus-power-consumption data, but [the figures don't] show it because the utility is unreliable in a virtualized configuration. Recall that the virtualized CPU and core logic connect through a 4-GHz front-side bus and that the virtualized DRAM is of the ancient, asynchronous EDO flavor. All of these factors greatly distort the virtualized per-megahertz and per-watt-performance results.

And if you'd like to see the even more voluminous source data from SiSoftware's Sandra that I fed (in part) into Excel, hit up this link for a ZIP of the ASCII text report files.

If your foundation O/S is Windows, you don't necessarily need to shell out cash to add virtualization to your system's capability repertoire; both Microsoft and VMware offer no-cost limited-function product options (and subsequent to that writeup's publication, VMware even began offering a free entry-level variant of its bare-metal ESXi hypervisor-based product). Parallels' products aren't OS X-only; Linux- and Windows-based options are also available. And if your virtualization needs are more humble, check out open-source, multi-platform DOSBox (and its OS X-optimized Boxer variant).

Speaking of open source, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Xen, managed by XenSource (owned by Citrix Systems as of a year back). And speaking of open source projects (strictly speaking...originally proprietary) now owned by companies, I encourage you to also investigate InnoTek's VirtualBox, acquired by Sun Microsystems (and renamed xVM) in February. Version 1 reviews were quite positive, and Sun released v2 mid-last month.

My print article evaluates VMware Fusion v1.1.3, but v2 of the software predictably also went gold mid-last month (a month-plus too late for me to incorporate it in the magazine writeup). Stay tuned for more virtualizion-themed Brian's Brain blog posts to come next week where, among other things, I'll provide in-depth follow-up to my already-published Fusion v2 thoughts. Here's a tantalizing sneak peak to whet your appetite. Remember the single-core virtualization burden (focus on vmware-vmx) that Fusion v1.1.3 put on the MacBook, even with Windows XP at idle?

Well, here's what single-core Fusion v2 'gold' looks like under the same virtualized O/S circumstances:

A greater than 2x reduction in CPU load? Not bad...not bad at all! In next week's posts, I'll also share my hands-on impressions of Wine (specifically Darwine) and Microsoft's now-discontinued Virtual PC for Mac. I'll also share what I know about Parallels' plans for the upcoming Desktop For Mac v4. And, per my usual practice, I'll shell out lots of additional-reading links for you to continue your virtualization education.