Documentation…
As I’m currently in the process of writing an academic report on virtualization solutions currently on the market, I have been surfing the web for documentation of quite a few of the products on the market. I have noticed that a number of these solutions are poorly documented. As a general notice, a lot of the solutions lack basic information about limits. For example, I really want to know how many guests I can have on a single server before the hypervisor says “enough” and refuses to power on another guest.
Simply said, there are a number of solutions I wouldn’t have bought today on the basis of their online documentation. This applies to Sun xVM and Parallels. As both Xen and KVM are freely available software, the demand for documentation decreeses, but I think they too should get someone to document their code.
On the other side, VMware have documented their solutions extremely good – and, they have done one thing that I think is critical: all the documentation are available from a single page linked to from the product page. No more browsing of support pages, pages you have to create an user to access and so on. It’s there, available for everyone. And, it is maintained on a regular basis. Kudos!
Just as a side note; Microsoft: Please try to do something similar, your web pages with both microsoft.com, TechNet, MSDN and so are a big mess. Collect all the necessary documentation on one page, please.
Posted: October 14th, 2008 under Random thoughts, Readings by Frode.
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