Transvirtualization is a new term. This term refers to using virtualization in the ‘transition’ phase of an upgrade. If you are currently running (x) system, but you require the new (y) system, but can’t give up (x). This is the solution for you.

Right now, who ever runs the host nod writes all the rules. The host node is the actual operating system installed on the computer and constantly running in the background. This host is able to start, stop, create, modify and delete “virtual machines” at any time.

Currently there are 3 choices for your host operating system, they are as follows: Linux, Windows, and OSX. Many may argue that OSX doesn’t count because it is mostly for desktop virtualization and not server virtualization, but that is quickly changing.

Microsoft is working on releasing their Virtual Server 2005 (maybe they might update the name before they ship it in 2008) and VMWare has a full line of products ranging from VM workstation up to VM data center level software, which can run on windows or linux hosts, and possibly some products on OSX.

So now as virtualization picks up, and soon people will be able to swap between virtual machines as easily as switching between applications on their desktop what will the future bring?

Will Apple win, able to look pretty and run virtualized linux and windows applications using Parallels or a future product no yet on the market, or even better yet built into Leopard?

Will Windows win, having a strong foundation in the server market and home user base, and the ability to not allow licensing for their os onto other host virtual machines?

Will Linux take off due to the low entry cost, and open source easy to modify options, where a company can modify the host node to exactly their specs and not have to deal with licensing and EULA issues?

Xen and OpenVZ are both very popular products which having a growing support behind them to take their respective place in the virtualization marketplace.

What will the future bring? As the lines are getting blurred between Apple, Linux, and Windows who will win?

I have started to do research for personal interest into the history of virtualization. and What I have discovered would shock most anyone using virtualization technology today. The who idea of virtualization is older then I’m. Real world applications have just become available in recent years. But the foundation for server virtualization dates back to the early 1970’s. There is an article from 1974 which states:

Virtual machine systems have been implemented on a
limited number of third generation computer systems, e.g.
CP-67 on the IBM 360/67. From previous empirical
studies, it is known that certain third generation computer
systems, e.g. the DEC PDP-10, cannot support a virtual
machine system. In this paper, model of a thirdgeneration-
like computer system is developed. Formal
techniques are used to derive precise sufficient conditions
to test whether such an architecture can support virtual
machines.

That is introduction to “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures”
Gerald J. Popek
University of California, Los Angeles
and
Robert P. Goldberg
Honeywell Information Systems and
Harvard University

Much of article very dated referring to PDP-10 hardware which many of us have hardly heard of let alone used. But what I find most interesting is that many of the issues stated in this 30 year old article have yet to be resolved. It wasn’t until Intel’s newest chipset which have a built in hypervisor to support more native virtualization. Within a few years as multicore servers become the norm much of the portion of hardware nodes software may drift into the actual server cpu core.
Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualization_requirements

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=361011.361073

Here is a complete run down on how I got this blog listed, using all clean, legal, white hat methods in under 72 hours on Google.

I purchased this domain on 12/1, and by mid day on 12/3 I already had content and traffic directly from Google.com. What is the trick?

1. let Google know you exist. visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and sign up your site.
1. upload the confirmation file into the web directory, get verified
2. Install Wordpress, current version 2.0.5 directly from http://www.wordpress.org/
3. Start downloading needed plugings:
1. AddMySite (AMS)
2. Google Sitemaps
3. Google Analyticator
4. DiggClick
5. Jerome’s Keywords
6. Jerome’s Keywords: Related Posts
7. Meta Tag Generator 1.1
8. Sociable
4. Install and activate All plugins
1. Add My Site is a nice collection of links to social websites (requires template modification)
2. Google sitemaps requires write permission to a local directory to store sitemap files
3. Google Analyticator requires a free analytics account.
4. DiggClick is quick and painless, makes people want to digg your articles
5. Possible the key to this whole process is choosing good keywords
6. Once you have these keywords you can create really simple keyword swarms
7. Meta Tag is a nice feature to randomize the meta headers a little for each article
8. More links to those fun social sites
5. Now that you have the blog ready, use it.
1. Write a simple article with instructions on how to do something which has a wide fan base, such as setting up wordpress for seo optimization
2. Add a few more articles and pages to give your blog some body
3. Add even more, don’t forget to use a nice template
6. Digg away, Always digg your articles.
1. By digging your articles it gets them out there very quickly and easy.
2. Try digging in the early AM, there is less articles and more chance for your to get seen, since digg is flushed on a daily basis
7. Don’t forget, to make this worthwhile you need to do two things, either have content people will return back to, or have ads people will click on while at your site. So just drop on some simple ads, banners to other sites of yours or adsense what ever you want to do.

I haven’t listed all of the tricks, there is more customization I did to wordpress to make it more SEO friendly, but this is enough for now to get even a blog novice started.

Enjoy and let me know how things work out for you.

The nation is waiting now as the deadline draws near and the copies of Microsoft Vista hit the shelves in late January. But many of us, who have been waiting for this since 2003 when it was originally supposed to be launched have to sit back and wonder, what is in store next for Microsoft.

Now looking ahead what is vista lacking? Native Virtualization.

I think the next version of Windows you see on store shelves after vista will have native virtualization support. As the variety of programs people use on a day to day basis increases, and not every program is going to be 100% percent forward compatible with newer operating systems you will see a need for virtual machines running older operating systems.

The next version of windows will have a live virtualization migration tool, which will take your current hard drive, copy it into a virtual machine and allow you to boot your “classic” computer on your new system. So you can go back and open Windows 98 with Aol 7 and get your mail from 6 months ago without a problem.
The multi user options will allow each user to have a virtual machine. When they choose logout, instead of keeping those processes running in the background it will halt the virtual machine, move that data to permanent storage and load up the next users virtual machine. This also means if the power flashes there is no loss of data for that user who is logged out, because their virtual machine is shutdown and stored to the hard drive.

Roaming virtual machines are going to become a possiblity soon. Now imagine in a school setting, a student logs into a machine, but what he is really doing is loading his virtual machine from a central server over a gigabyte Ethernet. Unlike current methods where his list of documents and bookmarks might move with him, now the whole machine moves with him. He can install software, delete software, modify the registry, update programs, all because the virtual machine is his own. At the end of the school year he could burn the virtual machine onto a dvd and bring it home with him and load it up on his home computer.

Thumb drive virtual machines, sure why not? If the computer has a standardize bootloader with usb support just enough files to get to the point of reading the os off a thumb drive and dropping it all onto local memory, where it will be much faster then a standard hard drive. With constantly dropping memory prices you may see a situation where IDE Flash drives become popular. If you need 2 to 4 gig of very high speed storage this is an option. Solid state ram drives will come back into popularity as the prices drop.

Those are my predictions in regards to Virtualization Technology and Microsoft Windows, please feel free to comment on these, contradict them or just let me know what you think.

Technical decisions are as far reaching as business decisions.
This 1-Day Summit specifically for Technical Decision makers is designed to provide you the necessary knowledge and technical details of Microsoft Virtual Server R2 and related technologies to support you in determining and planning your Virtualization roadmap.

Topics of discussion will include:

• Microsoft Virtualization Roadmap
• Impact of Microsoft Virtualization technologies for your business.
• New Licensing models with Virtual Server 2005 R2 and implications
• Microsoft Virtualization Products
• Virtualization Platform demo
• VHD Re-Distribution Program
• Virtual Server 2005 R2 Redistribution program
• Go To Market Business opportunities enabled by Microsoft 2006 initiatives.
• Collaborative Discussions + Networking

http://virtualizationsummit.com/

The biggest problem with consolidation and virtualization is backups. If you move all of your data onto 1/2 as many machines now your problems with hardware become twice as big. If you have a hard drive failure instead of just taking out a database server, it could take down your whole system. So backups become even more important.

What I’m suggesting is the worlds most remote and secure off site backup. Using the new technology from Sun Microsystems it is possible to deploy a black box data center in the middle of no where. Using a small to medium sized diesel generator or solar panels and a small satellite internet connection this could provide extremely secure off site backup. The plan is to only run the system for 2 to 4 hours per week to allow data backups to be received, stored, backed up onto tape and shutdown.

Then with a simple phone call to a satellite phone, the data center could be powered back online and your data could be transmitted back to your location for recovery purposes.

The location of this system would be unknown and would be secured due to a combination of location and natural ground coverage. Hiding a 20′ cargo container is much easier then it sounds, with a few days of dirt and earth moving it would completely cover the unit to infrared and heat seeking monitors, and only running approx 2 to 4 hours per week would leave the system at ambient temperature most of the week.

Possibly being located outside of the United States would aid in the security of the box. Having it located in Canada in a remote region would all but eliminate the chance of someone stumbling upon it walking their dog.

Currently I’m taking donations for the purchase of the land to store the box. Once the land has been secured it will readied for the arrival of the box. The possibility of testing with a lesser system the the Sun Black Box are being considered. Having a collection of terabyte storage servers located remotely could make backing up last years financial records, tax records, personal data, or anything you don’t want to have people know about, but need to have access to at a later date.

If you have been in a cave for the past year you will have missed the merging of two super powers of the information technology marketplace. Apple has joined forces with Intel to take over the world. Ask anyone who is a long time user of any Mac hardware, even if it is just the ipod or an old school mac classic and they will tell you it was designed well, built well and holds up very well. Now adding industry standard central processor to the mix allows for the booting into Microsoft Windows Operating system.

Apple release software which allows you to partition the hard drive into two pieces and have a choice at boot time to either go into Windows XP or Mac OSX. But ok so you boot up into Mac OSX, and you want to just do a quick check of a website on IE 6 or maybe pay a bill with quicken. So you would think you would have to reboot, go into XP do your work and reboot again. WRONG. Parallels has the perfect solution. Using virtualization technology they are able to boot a virtual machine with your Windows partition right inside of OSX. So now you can be running Quicken and iChat at the same time.

This may be a turning point for a lot of computer users who didn’t like the idea of rebooting to change operating systems, partially why Linux has been slow growth in the home sector. If in a matter of seconds I can load up the Windows system faster then I can even boot a second computer, have drag and drop capabilities then why would I ever buy another windows only system?

I have been reading alot recently on SEO and wordpress optimization. Everyone is basically saying 1 thing. Drop the www, we don’t want no w in our url or in our whitehouse. Using a very simple .htaccess file allows for this.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is nice because now all link, bookmarks, and search engine results will goto the www free site. In combination with the rest of the rewrite code from wordpress here is the complete file in my directory.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.x86Virtualization\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://x86Virtualization.com/$1 [R=301,L]

#Note, above portion will redirect the browser to the www free site, and then this will be process again for permalinks below.

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

This is the start of a blog about the new IT word of the week, Virtualization.
As virtualization grows and becomes more popular it will be just like a GUI, everyone will want one, and sometimes even 1 isn’t enough. The computer industry is going green. They are aiming to cut down on bills for new equipment, bills for utilities such as power and cooling, and the cost to the environment for all the old technology. By using virtualization companies are able to take all there operations and put them onto less hardware, run them with less overhead and end up with more uptime overall.

This blog is going to bring you information on a regular basis, regarding information for the x86 virtualization. This will cover virtualization on all Intel and AMD based systems and Apples newer Intel line up.