Well, it’s been a quiet month. I’m still writing on my project, and I’m searching for a job. In addition, the planning for The Gathering 2009, where I’m the chief information officier, has begun.

To sum up some of the things learned from my project: There are a lot of shaky virtualization solutions out there. I am currently writing about the following solutions:

• VMware ESX(i)
• VMware Server
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Xen
• Citrix XenSource
• Sun xVM
• Sun Solaris Containers
• Virtual Iron
• Parallels Server
• Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
• KVM

The project is available at http://www.slappfisk.net/prosjekt/specialization.pdf if anyone want to see what I’m writing. The project is about terminal rooms at the department of computer and information science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The main goal is to investigate if it is possible to replace the terminals available for students with virtualized machines located in server rooms. As of now, I’m ready to say that it’s possible, I just have to find the right virtualization solution for the job.

That’s were the shaky part comes in. A lot of the solutions are poorly documented. Even more of them are missing important features like a network enabled administration client or support for FreeBSD and Sun Solaris. Parallels Server, the new kid on the block, does not, as least as I can see, support centralized storage at all.

All my results are presented in the PDF at http://www.slappfisk.net/prosjekt/specialization.pdf. Please send an email to frode@sandholtbraaten.com if you find something that’s completely wrong :-)

More updates to come!