Month: February 2006

VMWare is rumored to be planning on releasing one of their Virtualization products for free. The company is best known for VMWare Workstation, which allows you to install and concurrently run multiple Operating Systems on the same host machine. Woekstation is primarily aimed at endusers for thier desktop machines. The company has two other server based products GSX Server and ESX Server. GSX Server allows a datacenter to dynamically provision and run muliple server installations on one box, but still requires a host operating system to run on. THis is the product that VMWare are expected to give away. ESX Server is their high end product which operates at a lower level and does not require a host OS.

The biggest threat to VMWare is most likely the Open Source offering from XenSource, whose software is soon to be bundled with Linux Enterprise Server packages from RedHat and Suse Linux.

Java.net have a very brief overview of OSWorkflow from the Open Symphony group, an open source Workflow engine.

What is Workflow? Workflow is the ability to define ordered processing steps and tasks that need to occur as part of a business process. A Workflow engine should allow you to easily define these steps and tasks and then integrate the use of this engine into your system.

The article illustrates building the steps by hand as an XML file, but the project also has a graphical workflow editor, although this isn’t demonstrated in this article.