KVM

It's not uncommon to own multiple PCs. For example, you might use both a desktop and a laptop, frequently hopping back and forth between their keyboards. That's kind of a hassle.

Wouldn't it be great if you could control both those machines from a single spot? That's the idea behind ShareMouse (Win/Mac), an invaluable utility that lets you share your mouse and keyboard with multiple networked PCs.

The software normally runs $30 per license, and you need a license for each system you want to control -- in other words, a minimum of two. Today … Read more

The Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, today announced total membership of more than 200, up from 65 in just over three months. New members include CA Technologies, DataStax and Jaspersoft.

I spoke with Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of Cloud for Red Hat, who told CNET that infrastructure as important as virtualization needs an open alternative. And Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has emerged as a strategic initiative at many large companies, including Intel and HP. KVM is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware that provides for multiple virtual … Read more

From the depths of the Microsoft's experimental Garage group comes a free, useful application this morning. Replicating the core functionality of a KVM switch using only software, Mouse without Borders makes it impressively simple to control multiple Windows PCs over a network using a single set of input devices.

Simply download the program to up to four machines, and use one system to generate a security code to plug into the others. Click apply, and you can then use the mouse and keyboard on any of the four systems to seamlessly control the other computers.… Read more

VMware has come to define the virtualization market with more than 190,000 customers and dominant market share. But does that success translate to the cloud world?

To better understand how VMware thinks about virtualization and cloud, I talked with Chris Knowles, VMware's enterprise cloud architect, about how the company approaches cloud and what IT feedback the company is getting from customers.

Q: While some organizations have gone all-in on adopting cloud technologies, many organizations are still planning the best approach. How are the companies you are working with looking at implementing public, private, hybrid cloud environments? Knowles: The … Read more

Few would question the impact that mergers and acquisitions have had on the IT landscape over the past year, and most people believe the acquisition trend will continue to heat up in 2011. Market consolidation is already happening with big companies getting bigger, and a host of start-ups are looking to carve out a niche.

One of the biggest consolidators via acquisition is IBM. Big Blue has acquired no less than 65 companies since 2003 and in an exclusive interview with CNET, IBM Senior VP and Group Executive Steve Mills told me the company will continue to look for acquisitions … Read more

Red Hat has released the first beta edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, with updates to virtualization, scalability, and power efficiency, among others.

The operating system was made available for download on Wednesday. It is the first to drop the Xen hypervisor in favor of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) developed by Qumranet, which was purchased by Red Hat in 2008.

Red Hat added the KVM hypervisor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) alongside Xen with version 5.4, which was introduced in September. It has been testing virtualization products based on KVM since last June.

Read more of &… Read more

If there is one underlying theme of this year's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, it's that the cloud, in all of its forms, represents a very different way of consuming software than we've embraced in the past.

In fact, the cloud has largely displaced open source as the "next big thing" in the enterprise computing landscape, but it's important to recognize that open source provides much of the underlying software infrastructure for the majority of commercial public clouds.

In a press meeting Wednesday, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and vice president of corporate development Mike Evans discussed how open source is at the basis of cloud computing and how an open architecture and layered approach to infrastructure is the best path forward.

According to Evans, if you choose open-source components to base your infrastructure on, you are way ahead of the game. Red Hat believes this to be true for a number of reasons, with an emphasis on the fact that in order for cloud computing to become mainstream software vendors will have to start certifying their products to work on-premise and in a cloud environment, typically running in virtual machines.

Red Hat's virtualization engine, based on the open-source KVM project, received a big endorsement earlier this week when IBM announced that it had based its latest cloud offerings for test and development on the Red Hat commercial product.

Virtualization is a critical component, and Red Hat considers it to be a component of the operating system similar to how TCP/IP. What was once a separate component is now part of the core.

Whitehurst told me that this is an important step in the evolution of KVM; as to date many users felt that the software wasn't quite ready for prime time. But with the vote of confidence from IBM and with NTT already on board, it looks like there is finally an alternative to VMware's dominance. … Read more

IBM is expected to announce Tuesday its plans to go online with its commercial cloud service for software development and testing, allowing enterprise and government clients to access to IBM cloud services.

Testing services are an excellent use-case for cloud services, and a number of start-ups including Sauce Labs and SOASTA have offerings that allow customers to test their applications without having to build a massive test infrastructure.

According to IBM Research, the average enterprise IT department devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test, with up to 90 percent of the available test … Read more

Could VMware be the next Novell? That's the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.

I'll let you read Cappuccio's excellent post for his full argument, but the crux of it is that in the face of dominant but pricey technology, many buyers will turn to "good enough" to fill their needs. For Novell, that competition to its 90 percent market … Read more