Daily Links: Vista, Virtulization dangers, Virtual Blades, and Virtual BSODs

• Network Performance Daily: A quick note on the Windows Vista Release
• ComputerWorld: The death of competition in the ‘big bundle’ era
• Techworld.com: OS and Servers How-Tos – Virtualisation dangers and how to avoid them
• Data Center Central: The Rise of Virtual Blades – by Arthur Cole
• The Inquirer: AOL has the power to crash Win2K virtual machines

More below the fold…

Network Performance Daily: A quick note on the Windows Vista Release
“From a networking perspective, there have been several changes in the networking stack in the move from Windows XP to Windows Vista. We’re doing a fair amount of work, because we understand what Microsoft says they did, and we’re doing a fair amount of work to find out if that’s the way things actually work in reality.”
ComputerWorld: The death of competition in the ‘big bundle’ era
“Individual users and enterprise’s will be able to get all the services they currently buy from multiple vendors from a single vendor. They’ll pay for all the services with a single bill, which is convenient, as is the fact that, at some point in the future, you’ll have a single log-on no matter where you are and what access technology you’re using. ”
Techworld.com: OS and Servers How-Tos – Virtualisation dangers and how to avoid them
“The potential benefits of virtualisation are driving the rush to consolidate entire data centres. Our work with customers, however, suggests there are risks to consider.”
Data Center Central: The Rise of Virtual Blades – by Arthur Cole
“We can only hope that the actual management capabilities being bandied about by all these systems are up to snuff, because the enterprise is about to get a whole lot more complicated.”
The Inquirer: AOL has the power to crash Win2K virtual machines
Now, I hear the chorus typing their hate e-mails… “Why would anyone run the AOL client inside linux”? Simple: for me it’s just another tool to avoid network congestion. When you connect to AOL over broadband you setup a VPN to the “AOL cloud” and your AOL client allows navigating from an AOL IP address, thus often helping bypass local backbone bottlenecks and other nuisances.