There’s nothing quite as scary as a new operating system roll out for businesses especially when they’ve invested quite a bit of time and money in acquiring licenses for Windows XP applications. Fortunately for them, and us, Windows 7’s XP Mode will smooth things over.

The Windows Blog brings word that XP Mode has hit RTM status and will be available to download for Windows 7 Professional, an higher, users meaning your XP applications will run in a nice virtualized environment that should make things go smoothly.

You’ll be able to grab your own copy of the software when Windows 7 launches October 22nd.

Source: Windows 7 Team Blog

The clock speed race has been over for a few years now as both AMD and Intel are focusing their efforts on making multi-core chips and specialized instruction sets to further improve performance and, in some instances, lower power consumption.

InfoWorld writes of AMD’s upcoming "Magny-Cours" 12-core server chip and how it might manage to fit into the same power envelope as their current 6-core "Istanbul" chips. It’s all very simple really:

Responding to an audience question about how Magny-Cours, with two chips, will use the same power as one Istanbul chip, Conway said that AMD is reducing the clock speeds of the Magny-Cours and added that power management features are being added.

Given the extra cores I’m sure customers will forgive them for scaling back on the clock rates especially if they fit the same old power and thermal envelopes, the extra virtualization horsepower should be welcomed with open arms.

Ulterior motives? Perish the thought!

Microsoft has released GPL v2 drivers for the Linux operating system they hope will be integrated into the OS. Normally that’d frighten folks away but it’s a purely business focused gesture as the drivers are designed to improve how Linux performs on the company’s Hyper-V virtualization platform.

A sensible move by the company given how much of the current and future server market will be based on virtualization of services which means they can’t choose to ignore Linux, or any other OS for that matter, if they want their customers to continue to use their server products.

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft’s operating system popularity can be traced to a few things namely backwards compatibility. The downside to this is that they have to provide some form of support in order to keep a customer’s old applications compatible with their new operating system. All of that added compatibility means a much heavier OS to contend with.

It looks like Microsoft has finally gotten wise and is going the virtualization route in order to support Windows XP based applications under Windows 7, huge news and a route they’ll likely take well into the future. SuperSite for Windows has tons of details:

XPM works much like today’s Virtual PC products, but with one important exception: As with the enterprise-based MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization) product, XPM does not require you to run the virtual environment as a separate Windows desktop. Instead, as you install applications inside the virtual XP environment, they are published to the host (Windows 7) OS as well. (With shortcuts placed in the Start Menu.) That way, users can run Windows XP-based applications (like IE 6) alongside Windows 7 applications under a single desktop.

They’ve also got some screenshots of the install process. An exciting turn of events which will surely allow the company to get rid of a good chunk of legacy cruft.

Intel’s Core i7 CPU is a beast when it comes to number crunching, far outpacing every other desktop chip known to man. Of course there are those odd circumstances where you’ll want to use it in something outside of its comfort zone.

Phoronix has a look at how the chip performs under Linux while running virtualization software. Some not so pretty results:

Ending out our testing, the KVM hypervisor had the worst performance when it came to the Intel IOMeter File Server Access Pattern option through the Flexible IO Tester. Sun xVM VirtualBox was twice as slow as the host, but KVM was five times slower than the host.

Linux’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine performed quite well in a number of tests when compared to the host OS speed and VirtualBox, but particularly when it came to the disk-related tests KVM did not fair well at all. As you can see from the graphs though, VirtualBox though also had a few areas where its performance was lackluster.

If you’re expecting performance that’s as close to a host OS install as possible you may have to wait a while.

Did you know there are Federal standards mandating the procurement of energy efficient IT equipment? There are, and according to the rules, agencies must spend no less 95 percent of their computer and monitor budgets on EPEAT rated hardware.

The taxpayer, in a reversal from recent economic woes–and the environment, let’s not forget–appears to be benefiting from the practice.

According to a 2007 Environmental Protection Agency report, EPEAT products purchased that year will save government $4 billion in energy costs over their lifetimes. Green computers also reduced energy consumption by 42 billion kilowatt hours and reduced carbon emissions by 3.3 million metric tons, according to the report.

And in a lesson that hopefully spills over into businesses at large, the House of Representatives adopted virtualization in a big way, which impacted more than just power consumption.

The 440-plus servers that resided in individual member officers were replaced by centrally located and managed virtual servers. Not only has this saved power, but it also has improved security by taking management out of the hands of individual offices. Security patches, backup and intrusion monitoring are now centrally deployed, strengthening the network, Nichols said.

The consolidation has resulted in a 35 percent cost savings. The savings generated not only include reduced power consumption and storage costs, but also reduced costs to member offices, which no longer have to budget for hardware, software or maintenance, he said.

With all the bad news surrounding Washington DC, it appears that some things are going right.

Source: FederalTimes.com