Looking back at Synergy 2010, the numbers appear quite favorable. According to Citrix (and no conference sponsor in the history of the information age has ever been completely truthful when it comes to such matters), the company hosted 4,600 attendees and over 70 vendors at this, its third annual show.
By way of a somewhat skewed comparison, the 2009 show drew some 3,000 attendees from over 1,000 companies and 56 countries. Emboldened by its domestic success, Citrix will hold its first pan-European event--Citrix Synergy Autumn this October 6-7 in Berlin--where it can be expected that Oktoberfest attendance in the local beer gardens by show-goers will surely rival that of the Citrix event itself. At last, a trade show where you can drink beer for breakfast and blend right in with your fellow conference attendees.
On the VMware's side of the conference ledger, in a press release VMware issued last September 4 after the completion of its sixth annual VMworld conference, it was said the show attracted more than 12,500 customers, partners, press and analysts, plus 200 sponsors and exhibitors. This year's event will be held August 30-September 2 in the same location as last year's: San Francisco's Moscone Center. And VMworld Europe will also be held in October (from the 12th to the 14th), but in Copenhagen, which is a respectable distance from the oompah bands and lederhosen crowd.
All of which begs the question: Does the virtualization/cloud industry deserve its own, independent, annual event--call it VC Horizons--which can act as an emphatic proof point for these powerful technologies that are reshaping data centers and spawning energetic new marketplaces?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 06/01/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments
Vizioncore announced its vRanger Pro 4.5 Data Protection Platform. The latest version of its image-based data protection technology enables IT administrators to back up any data size within required time windows.
VRanger Pro 4.5 DPP includes Vizioncore's Active Block Mapping (ABM) and Change Block Tracking (CBT), two components from the company's vReplicator product. According to Vizioncore, "ABM queries the Windows OS to remove inactive blocks from read lists during backups, which accelerates the data collection process by an average of 49 percent compared to vRanger Pro 4.2.3. ABM works on its own to speed full backups, typically performed weekly by Vizioncore customers. ABM also works in combination with CBT to speed incremental and differential backups, typically performed nightly.
"ABM is particularly helpful in speeding the backup of virtual machines running file and print services, which create and delete many small files as a routine part of their operation. Notably, ABM also speeds recovery by an average of 90 percent as compared to vRanger Pro 4.2.3 by avoiding the need to write zero blocks."
The product also supports Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange (RME) to provide object-level recovery for Microsoft Exchange. Vizioncore says that RME enables vRanger Pro DPP to be the first image-based solution to provide agentless object level recovery from image-based backups.
VRanger Pro 4.5 DPP is available now for $499 per socket.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/27/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
Via its new Xsigo VP560 I/O Director, Xsigo has hit three hot buttons with I/O virtualization, cloud computing and VMware. Citing the new product's 2U size, affordability, interoperability and open systems architecture, the company says the VP560 I/O Director creates a modular building blocks based on standardized, rack-based computing architectures it calls "pods" that enable the efficient delivery of scalable compute resources.
According to Xsigo, "Pod architectures allow businesses to deploy compute resources in consistent, pre-configured racks that can be uniformly designed, built and managed. The result is deployment times reduced from weeks to hours and standardized management across pools of servers. The Xsigo VP560 I/O Director consolidates I/O and enables software management of I/O resources, eliminating the physical complexity and manual configuration that is found with traditional connectivity."
Jon Toor is VP of marketing at Xsigo. He says server virtualization has created excessive complexity, which the VP560 undoes because it requires only two physical connections per server (one of which is strictly for redundancy), compared to between 6 and 16 in many instances today.
"You have 70 percent fewer cards per server and a lot fewer switch ports at the other end of the wire," Toor notes. "We run connectivity to the server, and what goes out to Brocade is driven by bandwidth needs. It's more simple and efficient, and utilization goes up from 5 percent to 50 percent."
Cloudwise, this is a boon to customers who want any-to-any connectivity, as opposed to maintaining separate clouds for the Web or databases that lead to more and more wires, cards and complexity.
Evidently, VMware agrees with Xsigo's vision, because Toor says their reaction was "This really solves problems for us," which means it creates business for Xsigo. Toor says 90% of his company's 70 customers are also VMware customers.
The VP560 I/O Director is immediately available for $20,000, a price Toor says is "comparable" to the costs of competing technologies from HP and Cisco. Plus, he adds, his product wins out when it comes to openness, ease of use and scalability. As for ROI, he claims new customers start saving 30 percent to 70 percent on day one.
Question: Why should Microsoft sales partners add Hyper-V to their arsenals?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/26/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
Nice find by Alessandro Perilli at Virtualization.info. He came up with a "call-to-action" written by David Greschler, Microsoft director of Virtualization, that appeared on the company's partner network channel, and talked about the strong competition VMware is throwing at Hyper-V. Bottom line: Despite the heaping helpings of hype, Hyper-V is not capturing the hearts, minds, or pocketbooks of Microsoft's sales partners at the expense of VMware.
That swishing sound you hear is VMware CEO Paul Maritz rubbing his hands together with glee.
In support of Microsoft's new "Virtualization Partner Profitability Toolkit," Greschler begins, "Every partner knows about the great opportunity to sell virtualization technology and services. For a while, that meant one thing: working exclusively with VMware.
"Times have changed."
Greschler goes on to cite the relative affordability and technical prowess of Hyper-V compared to VMware, while noting that IDC says Hyper-V "continued its ascent" in Q4 09, growing 215% year over year.
But then the tenor changes dramatically when he goes on to declare: "Nearly every VMware partner we talk to recognizes that Microsoft is a major player in virtualization and tells us they would like an opportunity to build a virtualization practice that includes both VMware and Microsoft."
While this is not tantamount to raising a white flag, it is a stark, public acknowledgement of VMware's deeply embedded pre-eminence.
The Virtualization Partner Profitability Toolkit, which is available on the Microsoft Partner Network, includes a "profitability modeling tool" in the form of a interactive spreadsheet designed to depict the advantages of adding a Microsoft practice to their business.
So what will Microsoft partners find if they dutifully use this tool? According to Greschler, "As much as we'd like to tell you otherwise, if you plug the numbers in to look at your work on a project-by-project basis, the numbers could favor VMware. But if you take a practice-level view, and look at the numbers over the long term, the tool is likely to show partners making far more money with Microsoft."
The company says that claim is true because Microsoft virtualization offerings are "three-to-five times" less than VMware, a claim that VMware would hotly dispute, arguing that while Hyper-V is free, customers have to buy it along with an operating system, and they have to manage it, neither of which occurs free of charge.
At any rate, in conclusion, Greschler declares, "The takeaway from all this is pretty simple. If you're just selling VMware today, then you are in the VMware business. If you want to be in the virtualization business, look at building a virtualization practice where you're technology-agnostic and offering more choice to customers."
If you are one of those customers, you probably won't be hearing this particular call to action.
Question: Why should Microsoft sales partners add Hyper-V to their arsenals?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/24/2010 at 12:48 PM3 comments
It looks like the virtualization management market for companies in the VMware ecosystem is living up to its hype--at least for privately-held Veeam, which does not reveal its intimate financial workings, but is quite happy to put out a press release filled with good news, e.g.:
- Total booking revenue grew 165 percent in Q1 2010 over the same period in 2009.
- New license bookings revenue increased 161 percent over the same period.
- Veeam signed up over 1,400 new customers in Q1, bringing its worldwide total to nearly 10,000.
Also in March Veeam unveiled SureBackup for VMware image-level backups. This technology tests and verifies the recoverability of "every backup of every virtual machine." SureBackup will find its way into version 5.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication, which is scheduled to hit the streets during Q3.
Of course, they have a cloud initiative, and it comes in the form of a customized partner program for cloud and managed service providers that was created to align with their business models. The company says it has 3,300 ProPartner resellers and more than 20 distributors worldwide.
Veeam president and CEO Ratmir Timashev cites the work his company put into building a strong, global sales and channel organization, as a reason for the favorable Q1 results.
Question: What is your impression of Veeam?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/20/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
Midnight Ride has finally seen the light of day.
In other words--despite many a dubiously blogged word--XenServer 5.6 has been officially introduced. The new and revamped version, which Citrix sees at the heart of its virtualization efforts, continues to be available gratis in the free (fully open source) XenServer edition, but there are also more advanced--and decidedly not free--Enterprise and Platinum editions from which to choose. In addition, Citrix unveiled a "low-priced" XenServer Advanced Edition, which reportedly makes it easier for users running free XenServer to cost-effectively add high availability and management features. In the wake of all this change, you can forget about Essentials for XenServer, which no longer exists; its management functionality has been spread across the new editions.
Citrix lists four primary highlights of XenServer 5.6:
The XenServer 5.6 Free edition enhances the existing enterprise features to extend the limits of host memory, CPU, network and OS support. According to Citrix, "While the free edition already provides a rich feature set for enterprises to deploy and centrally manage full enterprise-class virtualization on any number of servers with no up-front costs, the enhancements in XenServer 5.6 enable virtualization users to achieve greater server consolidation ratios, flexibility and best-in-class VM density for server, cloud and desktop workloads."
The XenServer 5.6 Advanced edition includes everything in the free edition, plus the long-awaited dynamic memory control. It also includes high availability and a host of advanced reporting and alerting capabilities. "The Advanced edition has been designed to provide a simple and cost-effective solution for enterprise customers and cloud providers to deliver highly available application services from their virtual infrastructures," Citrix notes.
New and advanced capabilities added to XenServer 5.6 Enterprise include automated workload balancing, host power management, advanced storage integration with StorageLink, live memory snapshots and role-based administration. "The Enterprise edition has been the primary choice for a majority of XenServer customers because it builds on the enterprise-ready, cloud-proven free edition to enable customers to integrate directly with a wide range of enterprise storage environments. The new XenServer 5.6 enterprise edition not only expands StorageLink support, but also adds new features to existing storage management capabilities, enabling customers to optimize application performance, reduce power consumption and define detailed access rules for managing virtualization infrastructures," Citrix says.
XenServer 5.6 Platinum extends the free, Advanced and Enterprise editions to deliver a suite of IT capabilities that help administrators accelerate the delivery of IT services that drive the business. "Specifically," the company notes, "XenServer 5.6 adds StorageLink SiteRecovery and a self-service portal extension to Lab Manager. The new SiteRecovery provides an automated way to recover from a data center outage through a single console that leverages the native capabilities of a customer’s existing storage array. The self-service portal enables employees to quickly access needed resources, allowing them to create new environments or use an existing virtual environment, along with on-demand documentation."
XenServer 5.6 will be available May 28. XenServer Advanced Edition is $1,000 per server, or $30 per month for cloud service providers. The Enterprise and Platinum Editions are $2,500 and $5,000 per server, respectively.
According to a quote from Al Gillen, Program VP, System Software, IDC, the new free version is an "entryway" for new virtualization customers, while "We are increasingly seeing vendors use a free plus premium offering strategy to build market share for a variety of infrastructure software products. XenServer Enterprise and Platinum editions provide the additional features that virtualization customers will look to as their virtualization deployments expand and mature."
Question: What do you think of the XenServer 5.6 pricing structure?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/19/2010 at 12:48 PM3 comments
Positioning itself as a virtualization management provider that relies on its strength and experience in the enterprise software market to provide not only management products but business strategies as well, CA announced three new products for assurance, automation and configuration of heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments.
Citing a very popular statistic, Andi Mann, VP of Virtualization Product Marketing at CA notes that most analysts say that between 15 percent and 30 percent of servers are virtualized. "That's still very low. That tells me they're having difficulty getting past file servers," Mann declares, adding, "Jumping from step to step, for example from consolidation to infrastructure optimization is very hard."
He also notes that unlike some of its smaller competitors in the virtualization management space, CA is not beholden to any one vendor (read VMware), which allows it to take advantage of a much broader market, including Citrix, Microsoft and IBM. "That's a key differentiator for us," he states.
Another key differentiator is CA's ability to go beyond past "speeds and feeds" to a complete, end-to-end look at virtualization implementations, and offer a range of products and services, including P2V, networking, database management, configuration and provisioning. "We show them what resources they can have and what it will cost them," Mann says. "There's no one who addresses the market as broadly as we do."
The three new CA products include:
CA Virtual Assurance, which was created to "optimize uptime and performance of virtual and private cloud environments by providing comprehensive monitoring, event correlation, and fault and performance management." This product is focused on model-based root-cause analytics, real-time and historical performance metrics, along with the ability to monitor virtual networking and app traffic response across virtual layers.
CA Virtual Automation provides automated, self-service virtualization machine lifecycle management that enables users to "rapidly deploy, expand, and control virtual and private cloud environments." Its capabilities include resource pool management, template-based virtual machine provisioning, provisioning support for Amazon ECS and Amazon VPC, integrated self-service with chargeback, and capacity and utilization tracking and reporting.
CA Virtual Configuration allows users to maintain operational efficiency and compliance in virtual and private cloud environments by automating the discovery of virtual environments to inventory and baseline virtual machines, infrastructure, applications, and dependencies. The product then "enables customers to manage sprawl, track and compare configuration changes as well as help meet regulatory compliance and audit needs."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/18/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
By officially unveiling Citrix XenClient, rolling out a series of HDX "Nitro" technologies, and collaborating with Wyse and McAfee on zero client and integrated security management, respectively, Citrix took full advantage of its Synergy 2010 bully pulpit to promote desktop virtualization as a mainstream technology and proclaim its position as market leader.
XenClient--which Citrix quickly notes is based on XenServer--was clearly the star of day one at Synergy, as Citrix bragged on the ability of its Intel vPro-powered bare-metal architecture to provide client-side virtualization that enables centrally managed virtual desktops to "run directly on corporate desktops and PCs, even when they are disconnected from the network."
The concept of companies running multiple virtual desktops on the same corporate owned laptop is "near and dear" to the heart of CEO Mark Templeton, who embraces the notion of employee-owned PCs that can separately and securely support personal and professional computing environments.
Speaking of Templeton, he seemed to be enjoying himself as he strutted triumphantly across the stage proclaiming the success of huge Citrix desktop virtualization environments in large enterprise settings.
In addition to XenClient's bare metal hypervisor, which enables each VM to run side by side directly on hardware, as opposed to being hosted within the installed operating system, the new product features two primary components: Citrix Receiver, a "lightweight client that lets users create and manage their own local virtual desktops, or access centrally managed corporate virtual desktops," and Synchronizer, which connects with XenClient laptops to download centrally managed virtual desktops. "Synchronizer enables user data to be backed up automatically through a secure connection over the Internet, and allows IT to define security policies for managed laptops, disable lost or stolen XenClient laptops and restore a user's virtual desktop on any XenClient-based laptop," Citrix said.
Via XenClient Express, the XenClient package is available for public download. It is intended for organizations to trial small deployments. Citrix said XenClient will be generally available with the next release of XenDesktop later this year.
HDX "Nitro" Technologies
Anxious to retain what many experts call a competitive advantage over VMware View 4 (which remains the standard bearer until VMware shakes the bugs out of v4.5) Citrix introduced its series of HDX "Nitro" technologies that are planned for upcoming releases of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp. No dates for their debut were announced.
The company said Nitro technologies, which are on display at Synergy this week, will include enhancements from several development projects designed to promote faster across-the-board performance, enable instant app launch, provide faster printing at a fraction of the bandwidth, support accelerated WAN speed and efficiency, and produce dynamic sense-and-respond rendering.
HDX Happening Now with Wyse Xenith
Wyse leveraged its position with Citrix to take the wraps off Wyse Xenith, which it calls "the industry's first zero client with Citrix HDX technology." (Just in case you're wondering, Pano Logic has thrown its lot in with View.) Quick value prop: Xenith improves on traditional client devices by eliminating management and security hassles while providing the much ballyhooed high-def HDX user experience. In this zero client environment, there is zero local configuration to worry about, zero delays because there is no operating system to boot, and zero malware because Xenith has no "attack surface." In addition, it reduces energy expenses, auto-discovers XenDesktop straight out of the box, and "launches a full Windows desktop in seconds."
Because it is Citrix Ready, Xenith will also accept new HDX features as they are released by Citrix and Wyse. The product will be available in June.
Wyse also introduced Wyse PC Extender virtualization software that enables users to extend the life of existing PCs as they implement virtual desktop strategies. According to Wyse, "Wyse PC Extender enables organizations to buy thin clients they can afford, and turn the remaining PCs into thin clients, extending their usefulness for another year or two." Which puts Wyse in a great position to service legacy customers and then upsell to them when they enter their refresh cycles.
Wyse PC Extender includes full support for XenDesktop with HDX and other protocols, including Microsoft RDP and PCoIP for View. It is available immediately.
Two Security Thrusts
Citrix and McAfee are combining forces toward the goal of enabling XenDesktop customers to extend their virtualization security by deploying the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. As part of this effort, the two vendors are developing security solutions for VDI-based virtual desktops that "centralize all virus scanning and virus signature file updates, offloading the processing intensive actions from individual VMs." Citrix and McAfee also announced that they are developing hypervisor-native detection capabilities for XenClient and XenServer that are designed for the hypervisor to play a prominent role in "protecting and detecting security policy violations for VMs."
Finally, Citrix introduced "Safe Zone" technology that lays out a path that makes it easier for companies to employ virtual computing by targeting not only internal users but external contractors and users who work at home or have employee-owned laptops. Citrix said, "This new technology automatically encrypts all data created by corporate applications delivered to users via XenApp or Microsoft App-V, storing them transparently in dedicated safe zone directories. This ensures sensitive corporate data stored on non-corporate devices is not only protected, but that it can be wiped remotely at the end of a contract, or in the event that a user's laptop is lost or stolen."
Safe zone technology is available immediately.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/13/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
VMware continues putting the cloud puzzle pieces in place by announcing through its SpringSource division (a Java application infrastructure and management acquisition) that it has acquired Gemstone Systems, a Beaverton, Oregon-based firm offering enterprise data management solutions. The terms of the transaction were not announced.
VM is spinning the deal by saying the privately held Gemstone will enhance SpringSource and VMware's vision of providing the infrastructure required for cloud-centric apps via its built-in availability, scalability, security and performance guarantees.
According to SpringSource, "These modern applications require new approaches to data management, given they will be deployed across elastic, highly scalable, geographically distributed architectures. With the addition of GemStone's data management solutions, customers will be able to make the right data available to the right applications at the right time within a distributed cloud environment."
This most recent acquisition comes after VMware also recently acquired two messaging vendors, Rabbit Technologies, which provides an enterprise messaging system based on the emerging Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and Zimbra, Yahoo's open source mail collaboration unit.
Heck, VMware is even publicizing the fact that they acquired a human, namely Salvatore Sanfilippo, who was lead programmer on the open source Redis project, described by Derek Collison of VMware's Cloud Service Division as a "high performance and scalable advanced key-value store where values can be data structures such as lists, sets, and hashmaps, as well as strings and blobs."
The company tells me that they won't be bashful about grabbing other companies as the need arises.
Question: What do you think of VMware's cloud technologies?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/13/2010 at 12:48 PM5 comments
It's looking like a good week for Citrix. First, of course, Synergy is happening, and along with it a raft of new product announcements (see this space tomorrow). In addition, Citrix HDX is getting repeated boosts from companies such as UniDesk and Kaviza, who have announced the incorporation of HDX in their products.
Kaviza also gave a nod to XenServer--which is looking more and more rehabilitated--by announcing its support for that Citrix product as well. In fact, Kaviza went so far as to say XenServer is "making it easy for Kaviza customers to host their VDI environments on a world-class platform at a far lower cost."--a far lower cost being zippo in the case of XenServer.
Almost as an afterthought to its praising of Citrix, Kaviza took the wraps off the beta version of its Kaviza VDI-in-a-box 3.0, which it says delivers turnkey virtual desktops for an "unprecedented" total cost per desktop of less than $500--including servers, software and support. Kaviza says 3.0 is the antidote to the high costs, intimidating complexity and under-performing user experience that have plagued some desktop virtualization solutions.
The company also says VDI-in-a-box "is designed specifically to fit departmental budgets and desktop IT expertise using a plug-and-play architecture that runs on commodity servers without requiring shared storage. Kaviza enables the desktop IT staff to deploy VDI or hosted virtual desktops without any specialized IT expertise. This innovative approach makes VDI less expensive than traditionally managed personal computers and generates immediate ROI."
Kaviza VDI Accelerator with Citrix HDX is an add-on designed to provide a high-definition user experience, and is available on all hypervisors supported by Kaviza. Kaviza VDI-in-a-box for XenServer enables users to leverage the company's hypervisor-agnostic design to select the most appropriate virtualization platform.
Last, and seemingly least, Kaviza points out that VDI-in-a-box "is also available for VMware ESX and vSphere."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/11/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
Reader Kirk Foutts is an IT manager who likes to poke around and come up with fixes that aren't exactly standard-issue. In the course of his explorations, he sometimes comes across some pretty interesting stuff -- in this case, what he calls "components in System Center that duplicate and conflict with components built into Small Business Server."
According to Kirk, these duplications and conflicts come as a result of Microsoft stating that System Center Virtual Machine Manager is the "supported solution to managing virtual machines and systems."
He states that Systems Center "wants to take control" of some functions that are managed from a single SBS Microsoft Management Console. These functions include Windows updates, monitoring and reporting, firewall control and e-mail notifications.
Here's how Kirk puts it: "Looking at the System Center page, SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 are both listed as supported operating systems. This just doesn't work! This is even more confusing to me when I see that SBS 2008 has a virtual license. It's like laying the cheese out there for the mouse, but when the mouse gets there, it's really yogurt or something, not cheese."
"Adding System Center would bring in multiple software pieces for configuration and add complexity that I believe would simply be too much," he continues, adding "Don't get me wrong here, System Center and its little brother System Center Essentials are awesome tools. They just duplicate SBS and in that duplication there will be more expense and less efficient."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/10/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
In many ways, virtualization has grown up. A lot of servers have become virtualized, and a lot of virtualized environments have become relatively sophisticated. Yet, as a recent report notes, virtualization security remains a critical issue that is not widely understood, implemented or budgeted.
These are some of the issues at the heart of "2010 State of Virtualization Security," which was conducted by Prism Microsystems and directed toward a large universe of IT pros drawn from a audience that include Prism customers and over 50,000 subscribers to the EventSource newsletter. The survey was also put out to the general public via Twitter and Linkedin.
Protection of the virtualization layer -- the hypervisor and VM management apps -- is a major concern to survey respondents. To wit, 56.6 percent said "The introduction of a new layer that can be attacked" was a concern, while 58.1 percent cited "The potential for the hypervisor to create a single point of entry into multiple machines instances" as another concern.
There were a few interesting points that divided respondents. For example, in response to the statement "Virtual environments are inherently less secure than physical environments," just over 25 percent either strongly agreed or agreed, while 52 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed," with 21.8 percent saying they were unsure.
There was also significant disagreement over responses to the statement "Traditional security solutions are sufficient to provide security insight into all layers of the virtual environment (hardware, hypervisor, Guest OS)," with 24.2 percent strongly agreeing or agreeing, and 51.3 percent disagreeing or strongly disagreeing. Another 24.5 percent reported that they were unsure.
When asked to respond to "Threats exposed by virtualization can be mitigated by using existing processes and technology," 46.1 percent either strongly agreed or agreed, while 24.3 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed, and another 29.5 percent were unsure.
In response to the preceding question about the use of existing processes and technology, the study states, "What's most interesting is that the majority of respondents seem to be aware that traditional solutions are insufficient to provide insight into all layers of the virtual environment, yet they still continue to use these solutions, which brings us to ask, why?"
In response to that query, 51 percent of respondents cited a "lack of budget for virtual environment-specific solutions," 48.1 percent listed "lack of staff expertise," and 40.2 percent mentioned "licensing, deployment and support models of security vendors not optimized for virtual environments."
Turning to another topic, 65 percent-plus of respondents reported that they have not created a separation of duty between IT staff responsible for the provisioning of virtual machines/virtual infrastructure and other admin groups. The problem with this, 34.9 percent of respondents claim, is that it gives too much "privilege and capability to administrators," which may lead to abuse resulting from "an extended span of control."
QUESTION: What bugs you about virtualization security in your company?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/07/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
Demonstrating that its appetite for acquisitions remains healthy, IBM announced it had acquired privately held Cast Iron Systems--the 56th company the IBM Software Group has absorbed since 2003--which offers cloud integration software, appliances and services.
According to IBM, Cast Iron has completed "thousands" of cloud integrations globally for financial institutions, media and entertainment companies and retail organizations. With Cast Iron in its business process and integration portfolio, IBM is able to help businesses integrate their cloud-based apps and on-premise systems.
The company says the acquisition "also advances IBM's capabilities for a hybrid cloud model, which is attractive to enterprises because it allows them to blend data from on-premises applications with public and private cloud systems."
Cast Iron joins a cloud effort at IBM that also includes another appliance entry called Cloudburst, a private cloud solution based on the System x BladeCenter platform, that comes pre-installed with the cloud framework. Cloudburst does not utilize existing technology--a cardinal sin in the eyes of many cloud vendors--but rather creates a new infrastructure for deploying images and patterns.
Cloudburst includes an entire rack loaded up with everything necessary to get the cloud concept up and running. With its built-in ability to provision those apps on an as-needed basis, it integrates very well with WebSphere applications.
IBM predicts the worldwide cloud computing market will grow at a compounded annual rate of 28% from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012.
Question: Who would you choose for your private cloud vendor, Amazon or IBM?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/04/2010 at 12:48 PM7 comments
Yellow Bricks reports that VMware released v1.1 of the VMware Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC)--for VMware partners only. Sorry, users.
As posted by Yellow Bricks: "With RAWC 1.1, Solution Providers can better anticipate and plan for infrastructure requirements to support successful VMware deployments for Windows 7 migration.
"RAWC 1.1 now simulates user workloads in Windows 7 environments and can be used to validate VMware View designs to support Windows 7 migrations. RAWC 1.1 supports the following desktop applications in Windows 7 and Windows XP environments: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Java code compilation simulator, Adobe Acrobat, McAfee Virus Scan, and 7-Zip.
"RAWC 1.1 also includes bug fixes and several enhancements in test run configurations, usability and user interface. Please see RAWC 1.1 product documents for more details.
"VMware partners can download RAWC 1.1 software and the product documents from VMware Partner Central:Sales Tools > Services IP"
Feeling left out about not having access to RAWC, one disgruntled reader posted: "I understand why they did it--I just don't agree with it, I spent a metric ton worth of cash for licensing, hardware, and the like...testing tools would be a nice perk."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/03/2010 at 12:48 PM4 comments
Zero-Client desktop virtualization provider Pano Logic released Pano System 3.0, which includes support for Windows 7, puts more control over virtual desktops in the hands of admins and end users, and enables closer integration with VMware View.
On the Windows 7 side, Pano Logic is facilitating the move from Windows XP to Windows 7 by allowing users to choose at logon whichever environment they want to work in. The company now supports Windows 7 Enterprise, Professional and Ultimate editions with no price change. In support of its Windows 7 product, Pano quotes a happy user saying he realized "dramatic savings" out of the box with Pano, and he "looks forward to the day when I've finished swapping out all our company-wide PCs for Pano Logic virtual desktops."
Pano further announced a failover capability that allows customers to deploy more than one Pano Manager virtual appliance and provide active-passive failover clusters across them. According to VP of engineering, Parmeet Chaddha, "This capability starts to become more critical as customers deploy Pano broadly and they start looking for some semblance of high availability on the backend."
When it comes to giving admins and end users more control over their virtual desktops, Pano System 3.0 delivers workflow-like control via an intuitive interface that enables users, for example, to perform such actions as trashing and recreating their Windows VMs, which allows them to keep working and save the problem VMs for subsequent analysis. V 3.0 also makes it possible for users to maintain and click their way among multiple VMs.
"A lot of these actions have been put in the hands of users pretty much from the logon screen," Chaddha notes, adding that Pano System 3.0 also allows admins to allocate control of these actions. He also cites responding to "a very big request" from admins regarding production VMs, saying Pano Logic not only provides the state of any given VM--e.g. whether it's powered on or not--but also gives some visibility into the state of support tools, such as those offered by VMware, that may need to be updated, and allows admins to update them from the Pano Management interface.
Pano says 3.0's enhanced View integration with VMware View Manager bolsters the value of their zero client approach by easing the management of heterogeneous desktop environments. According to Pano, "IT administrators can now use a single, seamless and comprehensive console through VMware View for managing small to large-scale virtual desktop deployments of infrastructures comprising a mix of both Pano Logic virtual desktops and PCs or thin clients."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/28/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments