Computerworld - As I listened to the webcast from a sister state agency describing what cool new things it was doing, I couldn't help talking back. "Why do technical people always try to make it sound like they are doing something much bigger and better than anyone else? Why are they bragging about implementing videoconferencing? Most of us have already done that. And what was that about Web services? Do they even know what the term means?"
It didn't seem so, since the alleged Web service was a Web-based security gateway for authenticating other agencies' personnel before letting them access the agency's databases. That's a service you access via the Web, but it's no Web service. The fellow talking was rubbing me the wrong way. I have an aversion to people who spout undefined acronyms and make things sound more complicated than they are, and he was doing both of those things.
Then he said that his agency had "virtualized" its environment and suggested that other agencies look into EMC 's VMware. This was too much for me. If I'd been in the meeting, I would have spoken up. I like to work in a collaborative environment, where you ask people to help you understand a problem, not tell them that you've solved it and they should listen up. Chances are, you've probably solved only a small piece of it and you could learn a lot by hearing other people's ideas.
Afterward, I called a couple of colleagues and asked them if they were using virtualization other than disk management and if they had any security concerns around it. None of them was doing much with it. Maybe I don't hang out in the right crowd. What's all the hype about? I wondered.
Virtualization is nothing new, of course. The concept goes back to the '50s and '60s, when IBM led the way with the development of the virtual machine and the virtual machine manager. VMM is software that lets you run several instances of an operating system on a single piece of hardware, with each instance of the operating system located within its own virtual machine along with its companion applications. The VMM controls all interaction between each virtual machine and the hardware (resources, drivers, etc.). You can run a variety of applications on the same server without worrying about incompatibilities or resource conflicts.
Virtualization has been improved upon countless times in the past 50 years. My own experience with it includes managing disk arrays under HP-UX in a "virtual" way,
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