When it comes to virtualization platforms,
experts say focus first on the services to be
delivered.
By mache cReeGeR
cto
virtualization
Roundtable,
Part ii
last month we published Part i of a Cto roundtable
forum on virtualization. sponsored by the
aCM Professions board, the roundtable features five
experts on virtualization discussing the current state
of the technology and how companies can use it most
effectively. in this second and final installment,

the participants address key issues such as choosing the most appropriate virtual machine platform, using virtualization to streamline desktop delivery, and using virtualization as an effective disaster-recovery mechanism.

Participants:

Mache Creeger (Moderator): Creeger is a longtime technology industry veteran based in Silicon Valley. Along with being an ACM Queue columnist, he is the principal of Emergent Technology Associates, marketing and business development consultants to technology companies worldwide.

Tom Bishop is CTO of BMC Software. Prior to BMC, Bishop worked at Tivoli, both before and after its initial public offering and acquisition by IBM, and also at Tandem Computers. Ear-

lier in his career Bishop spent 12 years at Bell Labs’ Naperville, IL facility and then worked for UNIX International. He graduated from Cornell University with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science.

Simon Crosby is the CTO of the Virtualization Management Division at Citrix. He was one of the founders of XenSource and was on the faculty of Cambridge University, where he earned his Ph.D. in computer science. Crosby grew up in South Africa and has master degrees in applied probability and computer science.

Gustav. This is a pseudonym due to the policies of his employer, a large financial services company where he runs distributed systems. Early in his career, Gustav wrote assembler code for telephone switches and did CAD/