hyper

Microsoft updates Hyper-V, server products

There wasn't a ton of news out of day 2 of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, but the company did announce a few product milestones.

Its small and midsize business server products have both hit the near-final "release candidate" stage. Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (formerly code-named Centro) and Small Business Server 2008 (nee Cougar) are scheduled to launch and be fully available on November 12.

Microsoft also said its recently completed Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor is now available via Windows Update, as expected. The product had been available since late last month, but only as a manual … Read more

Hyper-V is not hype

Microsoft did something that it rarely does last week when it announced availability of its Hyper-V server virtualization technology months ahead of schedule. Unlike Microsoft Virtual Server, which ran as an application, Hyper-V is a true hypervisor capable of hosting multiple instances of Windows and even Suse Linux.

OK, so Microsoft is in the game, but can it compete with server virtualization king VMware? Yup. According to ESG Research, 69 percent of organizations planning to adopt server virtualization are considering Microsoft technology, 59 percent are considering VMware, 10 percent are contemplating XenSource, and 4 percent are kicking the server virtualization … Read more

Microsoft tries to hit VMware where they ain't

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is wary of building a baseball diamond on his farm, which is already near foreclosure. But a voice tells him, "If you build it, they will come."

Microsoft has the same vision for its virtualization technology. Several years in the making, Microsoft's Hyper-V officially entered on Thursday a field dominated by VMware and other competitors, including the open-source Xen product.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Bill Laing told me that he understands his company faces an uphill battle in trying to win over customers that have been using VMware and Xen, in … Read more

Microsoft plans to release hypervisor

Microsoft is expected this week to announce that it has completed work on Hyper-V, a virtualization technology that allows a single server to act as many separate servers.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported Tuesday that Microsoft is expected tomorrow to say it has released the product.

The move will allow Microsoft to fulfill its pledge of releasing Hyper-V within 180 days of the release of Windows Server 2008, which launched in February. The company issued a near-final "release candidate" version in March.

To make its target, however, Microsoft was forced last year to strip out several features from the product, … Read more

Mike Olson joins Hyperic...sort of

Mike Olson sold his open-source database startup, Sleepycat, to Oracle and earlier this year left Oracle to spend time with family. The family, however, had other plans and has booted him out of the house. "Get a real job, Honey!" were the words his wife used to chase him from the house, eyewitness reports reveal.

Well, Mike hasn't managed to get a real job just yet, but he will be spending some time with Hyperic, a leading open-source IT management company. According to Javier Soltero, Hyperic's CEO, Mike will be "helping us develop the next generation of killer products."

I pressed Javier for more detail over IM, and he offered up this lame response:… Read more

TileStack: HyperCard comes back from the dead and onto the Web

Back in days of yore I took a two-week course in HyperCard, the long lost Mac-only application creator that is now looked back on as one of the precursors to the modern Web. While our use of the application was mainly to create small animations with sounds and interactive buttons, it was fun, and if I really knew what I was doing, it likely would have led me down a different path.

So when I heard about a project called TileStack my ears perked up. The idea behind it is to bring old HyperCard stacks back to life by putting them on the Web, meaning you can take some of those long lost creations from the late '80s and early '90s and make them working Web apps. You simply upload them to TileStack's servers and they'll be converted and hosted for just you or the entire world to use once again--sans the software that is.

What makes the app especially cool is that you can make edits to public stacks, or just the ones you've uploaded from the past. You can also make entirely new ones with a Web-based editor that's a step up from the one in the old days.

So far, the mix of stacks goes from rehashes of modernday Widget files to honest-to-goodness early 1990s HyperCard test programs. There are also some newer creations that blend in special effects like fades, wipes, and transitions--some of the polishes that come with a decade of technological advancement. Co-founder and CEO Joshua Gertzen tells me future plans entail an iPhone-centric interface and more focus on widgetized content. Since the service runs without Flash, Gertzen says, TileStack is perfect for the iPhone and other devices that run on the Web without all of the latest technologies that are found on the desktop.

TileStack is in private beta with plans to launch at the end of summer. It originally demoed at the MacWorld Expo back in January. You can sign up on this page in the meantime. I've also embedded a demo of it in action after the break.

Kind of related: AniBOOM's ShapeShifter: easy user-generated animation creation

… Read more

Executive moves: Barry Klawans joins Hyperic

Well, that didn't take long. Barry Klawans, former CTO at JasperSoft, resigned from Jasper a month or so ago citing the need to unwind and spend time with his family.

Apparently, six weeks of that was all his family could stand, as he has joined Hyperic (on a part-time basis) to help with its JasperSoft integration. His kids are crying...

...with relief!

Welcome back, Barry. If your kids are like mine, you'll never leave us for long. :-)

Flash! Hyperic acquires OpenNMS to get vigintillions of customers

It's not just the big kids anymore. In JBoss-esque fashion, Hyperic just announced the acquisition of OpenNMS, a leading network management platform. Not content to compete anymore, the two decided to throw in the towel and make love, not war.

Erm...yeah.When pressed for comment, John Mark Walker, community lead at Hyperic, offered the following:

We look forward to the first release of the HyperNMS product, codenamed Tofu Bar-B-Que, which is just the sort of interoperability only possible between two open-source projects.

I can feel the synergies raging!

(And yes, it's a joke. I was taken in … Read more

Microsoft releases 'near final' hypervisor for Windows Server

Microsoft said Wednesday that the first release candidate of its Hyper-V hypervisor will be available for download.

This release will be the near-final code of the virtualization utility that Microsoft is building into Windows Server 2008. The final version will be available in August, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft released the beta of Hyper-V late last year, and it was also included with Windows Server 2008 when that software was launched last month.

The company has had to strip out some of the virtualization features it had originally planned in order to get a product to market this year and take … Read more