Cool free software - Proxmox

We're living in a virtual IT world where everything is not as it seems. This has always been the case - Windows its drivers hide the hardware from applications and RAID has been with us for years, making several disks/volumes look one big one - but the last few years has seen an explosion in different virtualisation technologies.

At the forefront is VMware. Their main enterprise offering doesn't run on an OS such as windows, it *is* the OS. In ESX v2 this was a highly modified version of redhat, but in v3 it can be considered native (this isn't strictly true but it's a good enough description for now).

Microsoft soon woke up and released virtual pc and virtual server, and more recently hyper-v, all of which of course require a windows installation to run, although the big selling point of hyper-v is that it will run on the new Windows 2008 Core Server and Microsoft are going to be selling it very cheaply with clustering out of the box.

VMware responded to Virtual PC going free and introduced first the VMplayer, and then the free VMware server (effectively their GSX server product) available for both Windows and Linux Host operating systems. The ESX server and the management tools are where VMware make their money but this market is coming under more and more pressure.

Step in Proxmox Server Solutions! They are in beta with a product that looks suspiciously like VMware ESX v2, and installs onto bare metal and unlike other solutions is available on a GPL licence. I'll be watching this one closely...

Dell Small Business 360 - 10 Essential Blogging Tools

First post of my new work blog is an article on what else? Blogging. Useful tools and tips for getting your blog out there.

Dell Small Business 360 - 10 Essential Blogging Tools