The Apple server situation is in a very sad state right now. With the announcement of Xserve end of life in January 2011 and poor server replacement products, the Apple server line appears to be EOL too. However, if Apple were to allow for virtualization of the OS X Server environment on x86-based servers, the server line may be resurrected and allow Apple to penetrate the enterprise market.

Much has been said about virtualization platform interoperability. VMware is constantly pushing forward with trying to achieve ANSI standards for common virtualization components and functions. One of which is the most useful… the virtual hard disk format. In theory, I should be able to take a virtual disk from my Hyper-V environment and import into my vSphere environment. I have seen this work on my workstation when I imported my Windows XP Mode drive into my Workstation setup!

With vSphere 4.0, VMware has introduced vNetwork Distributed Switches (vDS). Implementation of a vDS in your environment is fairly straightforward and can be performed on a live environment! Read on for an example procedure to introduce vDS into your environment.

One of the up and coming topics in the virtualization industry is how to properly virtualize phones. Mobile phones are quickly becoming one of the most convenient and powerful computing devices in our everyday lives. Roughly 20% of the phones in the US are smart phones… with anticipated intersection with “feature” phones coming somewhere around the end of 2011.

As more technologies enter the market, the paradigm surrounding end user computing is changing. Due to the level of abstraction that Virtualization provides, the ability to provide a viable workspace outside of the desktop workstation is plausible.