NYLUG.org: The New York Linux Users Group
General Meeting
Wednesday, June 18th, 2003, - 6:30pm-8pm
IBM Building, 9th Floor, 590 Madison Ave @ 57th Street
Frank Nydam (VMware, Inc.)
-on-
Virtualization on the x86 Platform
Imagine you could run Red Hat and Mandrake Linux on one machine at the same time, without rebooting -- tabbing between the two environments. Now imagine you could drag and drop files between them. Then imagine you could snapshot the state of the system at any point, continue running applications, and if your system crashed resume at exactly the state you recorded. Further, you could copy both systems to a new, entirely different piece of hardware -- and keep running, without reinstallation. Useful. Wonderful, even. Whether a swiss army knife, a roving Martian lander, or virtual machine software for the x86 platform a great tool idea is self evident. VMware executes this idea very well.
The scenario, and more, is possible through hardware-independent machine virtualization, with VMware server and desktop software.
VMware software allows you to run multiple copies of multiple operating systems (OSes) -- Microsoft Windows, Linux, Novell NetWare -- simultaneously on a single computer in ``secure'' virtual machines. A virtual machine abstracting to a penned off area where the host OS corrals the guest OS(es) and perfectly channels its activities, work. Sublime.
VMware virtualization benefits include a reduction in the total number of servers within your organization, ``higher system reliability,'' and easier development and deployment of new applications.
Private companies, like Merrill Lynch, General Electric, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, Delta Airlines, American Express, and government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Army, National Security Agency, the Federal Reserve Board are using VMware software in their I.T. workday to abstract multiple, full system environments (BIOS, operating system and applications) from hardware. They are saving money and ``increasing security'' as a result.
Incidentally, FreeBSD, as well as Novell Netware can be run as guest OSes. Good to know.
Join us Wednesday June 18th for an evening of virtual machines, with Systems Engineer Frank Nydam of VMware, as he discusses the magic of encapsulation, isolation, server consolidation and hardware-independent high-availability through virtualization.
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About Frank Nydam:
Frank Nydam has spent the last decade in high-performance data center and development environments, including Fleet / Summit Bank. Having mastered Microsoft certification and become an acknowledged Citrix expert at an early age, he subsequently moved on to greater operating system environment challenges and is currently a Senior Systems Engineer at VMware, where he now also faces cross-hardware simultaneous use of multiple versions of Linux and Novell on a daily basis.
Copyright 2003