[Interoperability Group Singapore] The Virtualisation Shootout

Posted on Apr 15 by Ruiwen

Quick. Think back to the first few lessons your parents taught you as they packed you off to your very first day at school.  If you were like most kids, chances are, those lessons were "Play nice with others! Share your things! "

Now, fast forward a decade or two. It would seem that many an operating system designer has forgotten exactly those lessons. Don't take my word for it, ask any IT administrator who's had to put together setups involving more than one type of system. Each system has its own little quirks, and getting them to work seamlessly together might take a little more effort and patience than juggling running chainsaws. Walking backwards. On a plank over a piranha-infested tank.

I jest. But unfortunately, interoperability is not where we’re at.

Well that’s all a pain isn’t it?

Apparently Mike Veltman thought so too, and that’s how Interoperability Group Singapore was born.

This group is created to be a platform with feet in many worlds. In the good old times it used to be that every hard or software platform was unique and had no or badly defined connections with the other platforms. This was ok because it was not important....

That has changed, new and old operating systems are used throughout the company infrastructures. Applications are now build or bought. Things are open source or proprietary.. and we are all caught in the middle.

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How do you manage all these different systems and are there other options.

These are the questions that we try to answer, and maybe raise some new ones and offer them to the vendors or suppliers of these platforms. We want people to come together and discuss these options or to show their solutions.

First on its agenda, the Group takes on a technology that has been slowly gaining popularity in the tech world in recent years. Touted almost as a panacea for issues ranging from cost saving , to energy efficiency , from scalability , to hackability , virtualisation has indeed come a long way. The benefits of virtualisation are obvious, sure. Effectively multiply the number of machines/servers you can run on the same physical hardware and yet be able to manage them all with simple scripts, or better yet a GUI. Where’s the wagon? I want to get on! The question then is, which bandwagon do you jump on? The virtualisation market is filled with solutions from all over, choose between: Xen /Citrix . Hyper V . VirtualBox . Parallels . VMware . OpenVZ .

Not enough? QEMU . Solaris Domains . KVM . You get my point.

Thankfully, help is on hand through the Interoperability Group’s meet ups.  In the coming months, the Group has invited speakers from a number of virtualisation solution vendors who will hopefully explain the ins-and-outs of their offerings.

Here are the details of the next Interoperability meetup , featuring Citrix’s Xenserver and Microsoft’s Hyper V :

Date: 23 April 2009 Time: 7pm Venue: Microsoft (21st Floor Auditorium. Get a guest pass at the security post in the lobby) [map ]

There are more virtualisation vendors lined up for future meet ups, so stay tuned for updates! On the map so far are: Parallels, Xen by Red Hat Enterprise Linux , Xen by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and perhaps even VMWare.

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For more information about Interoperability Group Singapore

• Facebook
• Meetup.com