The Virtualization Practice

Tom Howarth | February 3, 2010

There has been a rumour that VMware circulating that are going to move to a per VM Guest licensing model rather than the traditional Host based licenses.  Well it looks like the first move to this has been taken,  I was having a conversation with a friend about an issue they were having with a VDI Proof of Concept (POC) they were running.

So what exactly was this issue,  well one of his co-workers was trying to vMotion a running XP desktop from host one to host two but was receiving the following message

Error: There are not enough licenses… (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Desktop Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization | No Comments »
Tags: ESX, ESXi, Licensing, VDI, VMware, vSphere

Bernd Harzog | February 1, 2010

On January 25th 2010 VMware reported earnings for the fourth quarter of 2009 and for the full year of 2009. While we are not a financial analysis site focused upon earnings and stock prices, there is important information contained in these earnings numbers about the success of VMware. This is a critical issue, as many people expected the release of Microsoft Hyper-V R2 to significantly eat into the growth of VMware, and perhaps even start to eat into VMware’s dominant market share position. These earnings numbers provide a critical insight into how well VMware is doing, which helps us understand how impacted by Hyper-V VMware was in the fourth quarter of 2009. (more…)

Topic:  Application Virtualization,  Business Agility,  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization,  Desktop Virtualization,  Performance Management,  SMB Virtualization,  Virtualization Backup,  Virtualization Management,  Virtualization Security | No Comments »
Tags: Hyper-V, VMware, VMware earnings report

Texiwill | January 28, 2010

VMware has just announced the End of Availability but not End of Life (EOL) for some of its pre-vSphere ESX products (Announcing End of Availability), specifically all but the latest releases of ESX 3.x and vCenter 2.x however, it has dropped availability for the ESX 2.x products completely. This tells us several things:

• There are not many customers still on or using ESX 2.x products. This is a true statement. If there are still ESX 2.x systems in use, they are either unsupported by VMware or using special contracts to maintain their support. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization | No Comments »
Tags: End of Availability, ESX, ESX 3, ESX 3.5, ESXi

Texiwill | January 22, 2010

I was privileged to speak at the 3rd Annual South Florida ISACA WoW! Event with Robert Stroud, Alan Shimel, and other great speakers. What I discovered from this conference is something I have feared for quite a number of years. Compliance actions are not continuous but often only enacted when the auditor shows up at the door. Secondly, very few auditors raised their hand when I asked if they are working with Virtualization or have customers that virtualize, this was quite a surprise. Several things pop to mind when talking about Compliance after the ISACA WoW! Event: (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Virtualization Security | 1 Comment »
Tags: Auditing, Compliance, ISACA

Bernd Harzog | January 20, 2010

As VMware 3.x took the enterprise virtualization market by storm in 2008, following by the successful introduction of VMware vSphere 4.0 in 2009, many enterprises discovered the managing the utilization of the key resources on their virtualized systems had some unique challenges associated with it – especially when this problem was compared with resource management on physical servers. VMware early on took a significant step towards solving this problem by collecting a rich set of resource utilization data from its hypervisor and making this data available via the Virtual Center (now vCenter Server) API’s. Many new and established vendors in the resource management business built integration with the VMware API’s. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management | No Comments »
Tags: Akorri, CapacityIQ, Veeam, Vizioncore

Mike | January 19, 2010

It’s hard to get a handle on IBM and virtualization, not because it isn’t active but  because it is difficult to identify a single strand or theme within its portfolio of products and services .  IBM’s high-level cross-brand initiatives are often bland in the extreme – designed to offend none of the IBM product groups.  And so it is we currently have IBM’s “Dynamic Infrastructure” a term with a nod to virtualization, but broad enough to include just about anything. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization | 3 Comments »
Tags: IBM, Linux, Mainframe, Novell, Open Source, Red Hat

Bernd Harzog | January 15, 2010

Ever since the rise to prominence of the Intel/AMD based server platform there has been a simple, horizontally integrated solutions delivery model for the hardware, operating system, middleware, networking, and security industries. That model was based upon the concept that vendors of hardware and software typically specialized in one layer of the solution (server hardware, or operating systems, or routers/switches) and that services organizations (VARs and major systems integrators) assembled and integrated these layers of the cake into solutions for the customer. (more…)

Topic:  Business Agility,  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management,  Storage Networking,  Virtualization Management | 2 Comments »
Tags: Acadia, HP, Microsoft, VMware

Bernd Harzog | January 13, 2010

Prior to virtualization, “performance management” was roughly broken into two groups of products:

1. Products that focused upon how utilized the infrastructure (hardware and software – everything from the spindle on the storage array to the operating system in the servers) was, is currently and will projected to be. These products came in many forms, from any different vendors, focusing upon many different parts of the infrastructure stack – but they invariably were put to one of two purposes. The first was to manage and plan the capacity of elements of the infrastructure. The second was to infer (or in some cases, assert) that if resource utilization was within either a set of manually set or statistically derived thresholds that the performance that the infrastructure was providing to applications was “normal”. These products were largely sold to the teams within IT who supported one or more of the layers of this infrastructure. Examples abound but include IBM Tivoli, HP Business Availability Center, BMC, CA Unicenter (now renamed CA Spectrum), and products from hundreds of other companies. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management | 4 Comments »
Tags: Applications Performance Management, Hyper-V, Infrastructure Performance Management, Virtualization Performance Management, VMware, vSphere

Tom Howarth | January 8, 2010

Since October of 2008 there has been a version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V that has been free to download. This version, to the surprise of some, includes a full version of Windows core, which means that you can bring up a fully functional Hyper-V host server without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft. For example, if you intend to run Linux Guests on your free Hyper-V server, you have the privilege of doing so without paying any money to Microsoft at all. On the other hand, if you intend to run Windows Guests the picture gets considerably more muddled, there are important economic and licensing trade-offs to be made. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Desktop Virtualization | 1 Comment »
Tags: Hyper-V, Microsoft, virtualization

Bernd Harzog | January 5, 2010

VMware is acquiring Zimbra, an open source messaging and collaboration suite from Yahoo. This appears to be an extension of the same thinking that lead to the acquisition of SpringSource – specifically a desire on the part of senior VMware management to (with SpringSource) move into enabling virtualization aware custom applications, and apparently now with Zimbra providing a common horizontal application suite (messaging and collaboration) in a virtualization aware manner. (more…)

Topic:  Application Virtualization,  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management,  Virtualization Management | 3 Comments »
Tags: Hyper-V, SpringSource, VMware, vSphere, Zimbra