Subscribe to the RSS feed

I chatted up a group of IT pros running full tilt towards virtualization. They all seemed to have left their management hats at home... How 'bout you? We'd love to get your view on VM management.

Comment on this blog entry

What standards do you follow if you're interested in getting started in cloud computing? The short answer is, there are few clearly defined standards in what remains a loosely defined area. Nevertheless, the main outline is clear. Follow the leaders and follow the Web.

Comment on this blog entry

Cloud models are starting to provide an attractive option for large and influential regional medical centers to get lots of small, local, laggard doctor offices trading in their paper patient files for electronic medical records. Are there clouds in your forecast?

Comment on this blog entry

Over the last two years, Intel commissioned a study on how companies were delivering virtualization to end users. It's one of the few indicators of where this confused segment is headed. Several approaches are still on the table, but the fastest growing one is where the virtual machine resides on the end user's PC.

Comments(2)

The user conference is labeled "EMC," but its VMware that has the potential for world domination.

Comments(2)

The migration of a running virtual machine from one physical server to another was referred to by one VMware user as "a god-like power" that he gained by using VMware's VMotion product. At the end of this year, Microsoft will catch up by offering live migration on Hyper-V.

Comment on this blog entry

Every IT person has dreams about the technologies they really want for their business. In current economic conditions, however, you may need to downsize your expectations.

Comment on this blog entry

Is Windows 7 with XP on its back going to be your next corporate desktop? How about XP-in-a-can, delivered, somehow, to the device of your choice?

Comment on this blog entry

Greg Scherer, CTO of the I/O device maker Neterion, explains a weakness buried in virtualization's hypervisor. When it comes to virtual machine I/O, the hypervisor has to deal with it through a software switch, and lots of I/O means frequent interruption of the hypervisor's main job, processing guest application needs.

Comments(1)

It's often seemed obvious to me that clouds and Linux go hand in hand. Amazon's EC2 started out running workloads under Linux in a modified open source Xen file format. So why couldn't the operation of the whole cloud be based on open source code?

Comment on this blog entry

I dialed in recently to an online technology discussion sponsored by Wikibon.org, a community of technology professionals. Speaking was Rich Avila, director of server and network operations at California State, who said saving power wasn't a fuzzy, feel good goal for him. It was a necessity.

Comments(4)

What was interesting about Cisco's entry into blade servers Mar. 16 was the key role that it expects virtualization to play. It trumpeted its convergence of storage and networking data on the blade. But what about its assumption that the blade will be virtualized?

Comment on this blog entry

There's been a persistent rumor circulating that Virtual Iron is about to be acquired, fueled in part by a recent Jefferies & Co. research report that said Oracle was interested in the virtualization startup. Why would Oracle, with its own Oracle VM, want a third-tier player in the virtualization market?

Comments(1)

VMware last week continued its push into the cloud computing market with updates to its vCloud initiative and API, Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS), and more. So, how many of its customers does VMware expect to deploy internal "private" clouds? Answer: all of them.

Comment on this blog entry

Red Hat has moved from being a bolt-it-on virtualization vendor to a build-it-in supplier. It will include the KVM hypervisor in its next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, earlier than expected. It's doing so because it wants to get competitive in virtualization. And it realizes the time to do so is now.

Comment on this blog entry

At the Cloud Computing Forum, InformationWeek asked a distinguished panel why it was necessary for every hypervisor vendor to launch its own virtual machine runtime format. If we can see the need to move workloads from one cloud to another, a common runtime format would simplify the process. What will it take, I asked, a user revolt?

Comments(1)

It's been six months since VMware announced vCloud, the company's grand plan for public, private, and hybrid computing clouds. It's almost time for an update on VMware's progress.

Comment on this blog entry

VMware is bidding for thin client device makers and independent software developers to develop for its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, now called VMware View, with a piece of open source code, Open Client, it's first Lesser GPL open source, as best I know.

Comment on this blog entry

Could Microsoft take its cash reserves and buy an open source company? Why not? Who expected Oracle and Citrix Systems to become such big investors in open source. Citrix' purchase of XenSource sure has worked out--for Microsoft, in my opinion. And that example might seed a desire for more open source code in Microsoft's camp.

Comments(1)

No, VMware isn't going open source with their core products any time soon -- at least, I don't think so. But there's little question they understand how important it is to have at least one toe in that water. To wit: the VMware View Open Client, an open source app that lets you connect from Linux desktops to remote Windows machines managed by VMware View.

Comment on this blog entry

Desktop virtualization is not like what it sounds. It does not start with a one-by-one conversion of each user's desktop from a straightforward piece of hardware to one that runs only a virtual machine.

Comment on this blog entry

How is Citrix's upcoming desktop hypervisor different from its XenDesktop already on the table? Mainly, end users gain the ability to leave the network that connects their client to a host server and still operate their personal virtualized desktop. XenDesktop, on the other hand, is tethered, not free roaming.

Comment on this blog entry

The savings that flow from server virtualization are well known and accepted. The potential savings on the client side, I believe, are even greater. But that premise is much less widely accepted, and even less frequently implemented. Perhaps virtualizing end users one application at a time is the way to go.

Comments(1)

It's getting more common to see a proprietary company partner with an open source one, but even so, the alliance of SpringSource and VMware is notable. Each is a leader in its field, and their ability to work together is a boost for both.

Comment on this blog entry

I spend 80% of my work life in a 100% Mac shop. While I’ve used VM solutions from Sun, VMware, and Parallels on Apple hardware for InformationWeek, we've been a Parallels shop at my day job 'cause, frankly, the company was first top market with Mac desktop and server offerings. We’re much happier with this latest rev of Desktop.

Comment on this blog entry

Long-time readers know that a Dell iSCSI array currently lies at the heart of our virt lab. Our December wishes came true when Dell offered us not one, but two updated arrays just in time for the holidays.

Comment on this blog entry

bMighty.com's latest virtual event -- a "deep dive on IT infrastructure for growing companies" -- is a wrap, but now you can check out the whole thing any time you want.

Comment on this blog entry

Is your IT organization hiring? If so, you'll likely be getting a flood of resumés soon. A new report says that there's been a pretty recent sharp decline in hiring plans by IT organizations for the next six months.

Comments(6)

Novell's Richard Whitehead is a pretty sharp guy. I tend to tout shiny new startups in the world of VMs; I'm a big fan of up-and-comers. I'm also an open source fan. Well. It is easy to forget that Novell is an open source shop and that PlateSpin offers pretty snazzy Swiss-army knife functionality for physical and virtual server management. Richard, bless his heart, won't let me forget.

Comment on this blog entry

Intel has its own definition of cloud computing and it makes no reference to virtualization. But virtualization, like it or not, lies at the heart of how things will get done in the cloud. I noticed this disparity in a review of an Intel presentation posted by the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum.

Comments(1)

I've noted that the DMTF.org standards body is not working on a spec for a standard virtual machine runtime, one that could be shared by all vendors. Why not? Because among DMTF members, there's no political will to do so. There is, however, a desire to create a standard VM management interface.

Comment on this blog entry

I had just finished moderating a Webinar, my first, on how enterprises architect their virtual environments. One of the takeaways was, beware of the impulse to migrate virtual machines. They have to go from like to like, when it comes to server chipsets. And the first headline I saw afterward declared that information obsolete.

Comments(2)

We're in the middle of a project where we'd proposed to measure the difference in perception of virtualization between business decision makers and technology decision makers. At the same time, we're looking at the same perceptions for advanced Web technology -- stuff like Ajax, the trend of adding collaboration and BI capabilities into apps. I've been surprised by the results.

Comment on this blog entry

Green Hills Software Integrity 178B operating system is the first, and only, certified Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+ operating system on the market. Green Hills Software uses Integrity as the basis for a secure PC operating system called Integrity PC and includes Padded Cell Virtualization, a secure hypervisor running within Integrity PC. Integrity Global Security LLC has been formed as a subsidiary of Green Hills Software to market Integrity PC. Integrity PC is provably secure.

Comments(4)

I asked, how's progress coming on a neutral VM runtime format that could be recognized by all the hypervisor vendors? Winston Bumpus, president of the DMTF, said: "Nothing is under way at the moment. Nobody's proposed that we undertake that work."

Comment on this blog entry

The bane of the cell phone industry is that its software needs to be rewritten for every new model. And since new cell phones come along about as often as, ah, cell phone commercials on TV, that's a problem. The answer is virtualization -- break the dependence on hardware of a piece of software written for a particular device.

Comments(1)

A quick announcement out of Palo Alto this morning... VMware plans to bring the metaphor of virtualization to mobile handsets.

Comment on this blog entry

With balloons floating as tethered "clouds" in front of the Moscone Center and clouds projected onto the beams of the keynote hall, attendees at Dreamforce in San Francisco probably got the picture that CEO Marc Benioff wanted to talk about cloud computing. Which he did yesterday for two-and-a-quarter hours straight.

Comment on this blog entry

The world was a different place the last time we ran a full review of XenServer. In July 2007, we called XenSource's XenEnterprise 3.04 a virtual bargain and suggested that it was rough around the edges but a viable ESX alternative for smaller shops. It's not so rough anymore. You might even say it has smooth edges.

Comments(7)

Both companies exceeded the Street's expectations last quarter. Now... how to close '08 with a bang?

Comment on this blog entry

With four tech titans -- Amazon, EMC, Microsoft, and Sun -- hitting their 52-week lows on Thursday, Oct. 23, and a bunch of others coming awfully close, I wondered in my last post if we should have called it Tech Black Thursday. In fairness, I didn't bother to do the same scan on some of Wall Street's other recent and horrific days. So, Thursday may not have been unique. But, at least in the case of Amazon, one has to wonder if Wall Street has it right.

Comments(3)

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is now ready to run Windows and the Microsoft SQL Server database. Both Windows and SQL Server operation will be in beta mode, according to Jeff Barr, senior Web services evangelist.

Comment on this blog entry

Does cloud computing sound like fun, something your department or business unit could do while waiting for IT to come up with that new system you requested two years ago? Why not make use of somebody else's computing infrastructure, especially if they're smart enough to figure out how to give you access to it?

Comments(2)

In the wee hours of the morning recently, I posted a blog addressed to the virtualization vendors: "It's Time To Walk The Walk, Not Just Talk," advocating greater use of the recently emerged OVF standard. Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Systems' XenSource unit, was four time zones away in Cambridge, England, but it only took him about four hours to track me down.

Comments(1)

Deployed as a virtual appliance, the firewall enforces individual security policies for VMs and controls inter-VM communication.

Comments(1)

Last month I suggested future computing models would let employees pick their own machine with company funds, fetching a corporate desktop via some mix of VM tech. At Citrix, the future is now.

Comments(3)

Virtualization offers many potential savings through server consolidation and reduced server administration labor. But it also poses the age-old hazard of vendor lock-in. The field is young enough that the market leader, VMware, and the bigger companies that are following in its footsteps have not yet been called to account for their proprietary moves. But that's increasingly hard to bear when there's a solution so close at hand.

Comments(5)

One side of my production shop is all-Mac. Or soon to be all-Mac hardware. Say what you will, we have our reasons. I’ve tooled around with Parallels server in the Virt Test Lab for IW; now I’m trying it with real end users in the mix.

Comment on this blog entry

It's hard to know whether there's more than meets the eye with Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet. Yes, it gets expertise in the open source KVM hypervisor, and KVM is the alternative preferred by open source developers. But what can Red Hat actually do with a desktop virtualization product? How's it going to make headway against Citrix XenServer and VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure? There's potential in KVM, but is there traction in desktop virtualization for Red Hat?

Comment on this blog entry

Not everybody remembers a little outfit called Wily Technology. It was a Silicon Valley startup that caught my eye because it did something that made eminent common sense: it watched a running Java application the way an end user would experience it on the Internet. In January 2006, CA acquired the eight-year-old company for $390 million.

Comment on this blog entry