Links List 1.25.08

After some controversy over Microsoft’s role in the virtualization market, it appears that Microsoft is ready to step up their game to compete with VMWare and other vendors.

Speaking of, VMWare Stage Manager Beta launched this week. Tejus found some problems with the server, and Virtual Lab confessed some confusion with the product. Stage Manager seeks to become the more robust virtualization solution, and Yellow Bricks thinks it has the potential to do so.

Joel Oleson provides a great post on testing in pre-production environments. He says that more and more he “expects to see (testing) environments move to virtual” and that it still amazes him to “find environments that are missing this idea of pre production [which is] a very critical step in deployments.”

2008 may see many trends in software as a service platforms, at least according to Alex Barnett. He combines a few lists to give us eight trends including one point that all is being virtualized and the trend feeds into SaaS.

Mike Kavis at Enterprise Initiatives provides thoughts on different approaches to SOA and BPM, depending on your company’s needs. Some variables to consider when defining the value of each approach include what is the business driver, the level of executive support, company culture, time, money and talent.

The network becomes the datacenter, at least according to Nicholas Carr. He shares some news from Sun Microsystems that shows a decrease in datacenters by 2015, resulting in reduced IT costs and a goal of increasing server virtualization. This news anticipates that the software-as-a-service model, and related virtualization technologies, will advance to the point where all corporate software, including custom programs, will be able to run on large grids operated by utility suppliers.

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Filed Under: IT Operations, Testing, Virtualization