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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
On the desktop. I have it here. But VMWare wants the corporate market, with all the data centers containing tens or hundreds of rack mounted servers. In that market, the competition is probably Xen, and since Intel is producing CPUs with virtualization support, an offering from them would not surprise me.
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VirtualBox actually runs as a service; there is (or at least was) commercial licensing available for enterprise use in terms of server virtualization. If Oracle gave up pursuing that, I think it would be rather short-sighted on their part. It's still not bare-metal but pretty efficient. Ellison might be too high up in his ivory tower to realize this but there's probably more money to be made in SMBs these days considering large businesses are loathe to upgrade servers unless they absolutely have to, and rightly so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I'm not sure what resources are required for Netware support. Netware hasn't changed significantly in terms of the underlying IPX/SPX protocol. The Windows networking support for Netware probably hasn't been touched in years. I suppose Microsoft gets the odd support call about it. (An old friend who does telecom and networking use IPX/SPX as a simple "It just works" way to connect printers at customer sites.)
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That's what I thought too, but looking around there still seems to be a not-insignificant amount of work to do in keeping up with versions, fixes, and service-packs (or at least MS' support site likes to make a big production out of it). As your friend observed, NetWare's not a shambling corpse just yet, and it indeed "just works"; I wonder if MS wouldn't like to take IPX/SPX protocol bits and use them in a proprietary replacement for CIFS (itself a replacement for the deprecated-but-won't-go-away SMB a.k.a. Samba). After all, CTO's might be more amenable to keep their MS stuff around if it plays nice with future *nix implementations.
I'm just theorizing on MS' take on the whole thing; it's a moot point anyway. On the other hand, nobody's signed anything yet, so there could be a surprise around the corner; after all, MS is flush with cash right now and Novell could pretty much be had for a song...the name alone might be worth the investment in Ballmer's view.