It never fails to make me smile when new “innovative” technology is introduced on the PC server scene. Remember when Citrix desktop revolutionized a whole industry by delivering applications and desktops on remote workstations? UNIX was doing that for a decade before Citrix using X11 and still to this date X is more flexible and easier to use… VMware was cool (and still is!) but mostly because it enables LPAR like functionality on the PC platform. Still it wasn’t really new and still not as integrated as ye old LPAR… or is it?
New VMware software (is it called 3i?) runs from a USB stick or even integrated on the system itself and delivers LPAR functionality for PC servers. Very cool. So converged hardware to me is a PC platform with a build-in hypervisor. I love it!
Converged hardware also include the blade systems with build-in storage. HP has some of those systems out and they seem ideal for closed VMware environments. Perhaps a storage vendor (Hello EMC) will bring a storage box with build-in VMware?
