As is the way of most technological paradigm shifts, the phenomenon of virtualisation emerged in advance of any standards initiatives. One solution to the challenge of making the pieces fit together neatly is, of course, to rely on a single vendor, with the attendant risk of being locked into on approach, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of market advances and inevitable consolidation.

To remove the barriers to take-up, virtualisation vendors are working towards common standards – in particular, regarding virtual appliances. These are pre-configured software packs containing an operating system and application tuned to run in a virtualised environment. They are meant to speed up deployment of new virtualised applications by being able to work with the more significant virtualisation technologies, including Citrix Systems’ XenServer, Vmware’s ESX Service and Microsoft’s new Hyper-V software. Continue Reading