Welcome, Welcome

Hello to all and a big thank you to Art for kicking of the Virtualization Immersion Center blog for me. To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges, Looks like I picked the wrong week to be off-line. Or, make that two weeks... which have seen a wealth of announcements, product releases, and shakeups in the world of virtualization. Citrix steps in and XenSource is walking tall, virtual appliances are coming out of the woodwork, announcements are roaring out of VMworld this year, hypervisors from VMware and XenSource are heading to silicon in what might end up being the first real challenge to Windows dominance in the server market... whew. Speaking of the sleeping giant in the virtualization market, have you heard any of those leaks around Viridian? Stay tuned for news from the show over the next few days, and I???ll be sharing everything I can within the limits of embargo.

Bear with us over the next few months as we move this Immersion Center from Beta to full production. It will be worth it. We???re building out our virtualization test lab for nwc.com and iWeek. When the dust settles we should have ESX, VirtualIron, XenEnterprise, and a sprinkling of ???real??? open source hosts humming on Intel and AMD boxes. I???ve got some heavy-duty iSCSI and FC storage devices on indefinite loan, and virt appliance vendors are clogging up my voice and email boxes with offers of management, storage, and security tools. We???re going to have fun, and you get to come along for the ride.