A conversation over a few pints of beer was the stimulus for Dunedin’s casino to virtualise its desktops. The exercise was successful and is being closely looked at by casinos in other parts of the world.
The NSW Rural Lands Protection Board (RLPB) has splurged A$300,000 (NZ$385,700) on sweeping communication and datacentre upgrades, including a state-wide IP network and a fleet of servers with virtualisation software.
According to its proponents, virtualisation has taken the world by storm, but for end-users requiring application support, migrating services from physical to virtual machines is not so easy.
VMware has unwrapped the latest version of its Virtual Infrastructure — re-christened as vSphere 4.0 — and detailed a new pricing structure that might make IT shops consider more ways to reap virtualisation's bounty.
It's hard, in an economy that finds bottom and then wallows there, to say that a particular set of IT skills is in extremely high demand. Recruiters acknowledge that amid layoffs and slashed IT budgets skill areas designated "hot" may only be "less cold than others."
Users are paying little attention to some of the downsides of virtualisation in their haste to reap the benefits that the technology can bring.
Tasty Baking Co produces more than 4.8 million cakes, doughnuts, cookies and pies each day. The Philadelphia-based snack food giant also manages to generate another crucial commodity — computer data — in equally impressive amounts. "It's something to be concerned about," says Brendan O'Malley, Tasty Baking's vice president and CIO.
Glenavon primary school in Blockhouse Bay in Auckland has rolled out virtualisation technology from desktop virtualisation company NComputing.
Citrix is introducing new technology to improve the delivery of voice, video and 3D graphics to virtual desktops and to make decisions about traffic prioritization in order to boost end-user experience.
Virtual growth
Microsoft has unveiled the first public beta release of its BizTalk Server 2009 enterprise connectivity software, which can take advantage of virtualisation and enhanced failover clustering featured in Windows Server 2008.
After targeting the market for virtualising servers and clients, VMware has now set its sights on mobile phones, announcing its Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) last week.
Gartner has ranked virtualisation as the number one strategic technology for next year, not for its "tremendously obvious" ability to virtualise servers, but for its increasing capability to virtualise just about everything else in a datacentre.
Dell has made a number of announcements designed around virtualisation.
Virtualising a datacentre can make it more flexible, but it also introduces new points of failure and it doesn't remove the need for critical servers to be duplicated for fail-over, disaster recovery (DR) specialist Neverfail has warned.