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Today marks my first “what am I working on” post, a feature that will appear every Thursday.
I’m currently working on a “first look” review of Citrix XenServer 6 beta 2, known as ‘Project Boston.’ I’ve had the code up and running for a week at the San Francisco lab. The code is available here so you can test along with me. I’m focusing on the “net new” Self-Service Manager. I’m also looking at the ways the Citrix team has simplified (i.e. integrated) so that the Open vSwitch is now the default network stack. Citrix is also doing interesting things with OpenFlow software defined networks that I may analyze in this review or in a separate technical feature.
Also starting this week and continuing next week, I’ll be looking at Oracle VirtualBox 4.1. I’m likely going to continue the compare/contrast of VirtualBox with VMware’s Workstation. Feel free to suggest other products for this review.
The Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 beta has been listed on my whiteboard long enough that I may need to get the toxic cleaner to erase the name. That’s also my hint to get to work on a first look of this management tool.
Moving on to the hardware front, I have a gaggle of “thick and heavy” notebooks and a bevy of thin clients that need to get benchmarked, photographed, configured and sent back, so look for those to appear as full reviews and/or slideshows at eWEEK.com.
Next week, I’ll be visiting Cisco’s building 2 to get another peek at the Nexus 7000 chassis. Look for a review shortly thereafter. I’m thinking there are interesting things afoot at Brocade, Force10, HP and Juniper, so feel free to let me know which products you’d like to see reviewed from these vendors.
In the very near future I’ll be reviewing VMware vSphere 5 and related VMware products. More on this when I’m out from under the non-disclosure and/or when I have the actually code installed in the lab.
In the meantime, I’m also preparing to head to Las Vegas for VMworld.
Now you know!