Have you already bought all your Christmas gifts?
If you still need to buy some of them and you are evaluating the possibility of giving technology, we advise you to follow the recommendations of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and choose those products, software or subscriptions which do not have restrictions, give freedom to the user to share them and don’t force him to pay any license.
Our analysis about KVM hypervisor management tools and the cost savings by migrating from a desktop virtualization platform with vSphere to another with oVirt have been the most read articles in our blog during the first half of December.
Below you can find the links to these 3 posts so you don’t lose track of the most outstanding information according to our followers:
VDI cost saving: vSphere to oVirt migration
Very shortly after Citrix announced its Linux technologies for vApp and virtual desktops in XenDesktop and XenApp, VMware reported that Horizon View will support Linux in 2015. And why these firms have decided to take this step? It is very simple. Companies using Linux and Windows would find a VMware and Citrix unified virtualization tool very useful.
In this way, they would no longer maintain two virtualization platforms, two support teams, two protocols, two clients and two different environments. They could manage everything centrally.
The Top500 list, which sets the ranking of supercomputers worldwide, has been published this week. Tianhe-2, developed by the University of Defense Technology of China, still holds the first place. And what is its operating system? Linux, the one chosen by experts for years to handle the fastest and most powerful computers in the planet.
In the list released in November 2014, the 97% of supercomputers, in particular 485 of 500, run on Linux. The next most used operating system is Unix and only one computer from the entire list runs Windows.
If you want to know more details about this ranking, have a look at this article.
There are Linux-based (either Debian, SUSE or, of course, Red Hat) desktop virtualization solutions which are fully Open Source. Any modern version of a Linux distribution incorporates support for KVM, so if your hardware allows it, it turns the operating system into a hypervisor platform. On this basis we install oVirt, which will be responsible for transforming the Linux into a node of our virtualization system.
Finally, we will need a virtual desktop management platform as UDS Enterprise, which has a fully Open Source version and, in the same way as Red Hat, there is the possibility of hiring support, updates, patches and maintenance.
openSUSE is a GNU/Linux distro very easy to install and highly recommended for those who are thinking about changing from a proprietary operating system to Open Source.
13.2 version started to be available for download a few weeks ago, but have you seen how does it look in KDE or Gnome desktops? In case you didn’t have the chance to see it yet, here you are a couple of videos:
If you want to try openSUSE you can download the new version here
