Mike D’s Blog

I’ve always held respect for Ian Pratt of the open source Xen project. While Xen as a hypervisor is a competitor to the company I work for I always find Ian’s discussion around virtualization enlightening. He has a mater of fact way of saying things. I recently ran across an interview of Ian conducted by Gartner Fellow Brian Gammage. It’s long but definitely worth the read.

Gartner’s Interview with Ian Pratt: “Cloud computing will be critically dependent on virtualization technology. Ian Pratt, one of the best known and most-respected technology leaders in the field of virtualization, explains how the compute platform will change and the impact on the IT industry. “

(Via Gartner.)

It looks like the great KVM vs Xen debate has taken an interesting twist. For a while now others have speculated that KVM will replace Xen as the defacto choice of a virtualization solution in Linux distributions. It makes sense for the Linux OSVs to make Linux the hypervisor instead of adding an abstraction layer underneath Linux as happens with Xen. Now Fedora seems to be skipping a release with Xen in it due to some shipping deadlines for Fedora 10 and the transition in the Xen camp to the standards based paravirt-ops. It should be interesting to see how this one works out.