The best news come when most people think that there's nothing new. The VPS Host Dir's editor's team wants to wish you Merry Christmas and to target your attention to a few very interesting articles about virtualization. On of them is a quiz.

"Server virtualization quiz: How much do you know?", this is the name of the quiz, published by Computerworld.

The first question of the quiz is "On a particular server, within each virtual machine:
- You can run any version of Windows without regard of the version, running on the virtual machines

- The versions of Windows must be no more than one release level apart

- The versions of Windows must be exactly the same"

To choose the correct answer, to see other questions and to lear more about virtualization, visit Computerworld's virtualization quiz

The end of the year is always a good time for analysis. 2008 is a very important year for the development of web hosting industry. This year web hosting changed a lot because of the new emerging hosting markets. One of the fastest developing markets in hosting industry is VPS Hosting. We can definitely say that 2008 is the year of virtualization. See what journalists and bloggers say:

"With a little more than a week to go in 2008, I found my mind drifting to the events of this year -- at least those relevant to IT. It may seem obvious, but I think that we'll look at 2008 as the year that virtualization finally landed. After more than a decade of x86 virtualization, it's to the point now where it's not only a viable technology, but it's being adopted in every IT sector, from production to development, from small to large business", wrote Palu Venezia in an article in InfoWorld's welog titled "2008: Virtualization's big year".

According to Paul Venezia virtualization will provide the framework for the next generation of IT infrastructures. He says that 2008 was the year that became a firm conclusion, not a potential.

"Virtualization is reorganizing the IT industry. It underpins cloud computing by making it possible to separate the software from the hardware", this is the conclusion of made by the Virtualization Conference. According to conference website Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now the world's largest cloud-based virtualization system and is "literally changing the world of IT as we knew it".

According to IDC the virtualization market has been approximately $560 million in 2005. It is expected to grow to $2.7 billion in 2009. According to Gartner, virtualization will be the highest-impact trend which will change the IT infrastructure and operations through 2012.

The analysts expect data center virtualization to stay as the most important market segment, but they also say that application virtualization, storage virtualization, and virtualization for end users are growing very fast.

Virtualization and Cloud computing top the list of almost any survey made this year.

One of the events that is expected to summarize the trends in the virtualization market and to set goals for 2009 is the International Virtualization Conference & Expo.

The popular web media SYS-CON is holding it's 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo in London on January 26- 27, 2009. "The conference will be looking at every flavor of virtualization" as it is written on tits website.

The leaders in the industry are expected to hold keynote on server virtualization, virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure, para-virtualization, security and compliance issues, Green IT, cloud and data center file systems, distributed I/O resource management, database management in virtualized environments, secure mobile device virtualization, and resource management and load balancing issues for very large clusters of up to 100,000 nodes.

HP has begun shipping the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP). This is a network-based storage virtualization system that can migrate and manage data between midrange arrays in different SAN environments.

The SVSP pools capacity across heterogeneous storage hardware from HP and other hardware vendors. It provides users with storage services, such as online data migration, thin provisioning, and replication—including clones, snapshots, synchronous local mirroring, and asynchronous remote mirroring for disaster recovery.

"This is a storage virtualization platform for customers experiencing a proliferation of midrange storage arrays", explained HP officials.

The virtualization technology is based on a partnership with LSI. LSI's virtualization platform is the Storage Virtualization Manager, that provides virtual volume management in different environments.