The Virtualization Practice

Bernd Harzog | April 30, 2010

Ever since the availability of enterprise class Ethernet switches it has been possible to easily define one of the ports on those switches as a “mirror port”. A mirror port is a tremendously useful thing as it gets a read only copy of all of the traffic which goes through the switch sent to it. This enables a wide variety of management tools from low level network tools, to packet analyzers to applications performance management tools to collect their data without being directly in the data path. This approach has taken on even more prominence in the virtualized world since VMware discourages agents in guests, which makes collecting performance data via a virtual appliance on the virtual mirror port on the vSwitch (or the Cisco Nexus 1000V) the preferred method. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management,  Storage Networking | 1 Comment »
Tags: SAN Performance, VirtualWisdom

Tom Howarth and Texiwill | April 29, 2010

We all know that ESXi is the future for VMware are regards their Hypervisor strategy, however most of you are more that aware pf the issues with the current iteration (see my eariler post) .   Vladan, a French based (well Reunion Island based to be exact) blogger of whom I have great respect, wrote about how ESXi does not support Serial and Parallel ports.

How is this an issue? Vladan correctly states the vast majority of SMB’s still use Parallel and Serial based devices in their environments.  ESX Classic fully supports Serial and Parallel ports but ESXi does not,  surprising considering that they are supposed to use the same code base.  Now according to this KB article there is a workaround, but the fact remains that it is a workaround and not a true solution as the use of named pipes will require communication from a VM to the management appliance where you have to create the pipes. There are several reasons why this is an issue: (more…)

Topic:  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization | No Comments »
Tags: data center, ESXi, Parallel Devices, Serial Devices, VMware

Bernd Harzog | April 28, 2010

Today, VMware and SalesForce.com announced VMforce, “the first enterprise cloud for Java Developers”. VMforce is therefore the latest Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. For those of you not steeped in cloud acronyms, a PaaS cloud includes the hardware, the necessary OS bits, the virtualization layer, and an application runtime environment (think Google AppEngine). The other types of clouds are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is just the hardware, the virtualization layer and the OS bits (think Amazon EC2), and Application or Software as a Service (SaaS) which is the full application (think SalesForce.com). (more…)

Topic:  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization | 2 Comments »
Tags: Cloud, Java, SalesForce.com. PaaS, VMForce, VMware

Texiwill | April 27, 2010

I recently spoke at the InfoSec World 2010 Summit on Virtualization and Cloud Security and also attended the main conference sitting in on many Virtualization discussions. Perhaps it was the crowd, which was roughly 30-40% auditors. Perhaps it was the timing as SourceBoston was also going on, as well as CloudExpo in NY. But I was surprised to find that people are still ‘just starting’ to think about Virtualization Security.  Since I think about this subject nearly every day, this was disappointing to me at best. I found ideas around virtualization security ranging from:

• Virtualization Security is not part of an architecture/design, what do I bolt on?
• My Physical Security will work
• Virtual Environments NEED More security than physical environments
• There are no new threats, so why have something more
• Security is a hindrance (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization,  Virtualization Security | No Comments »
Tags: ESX, ESXi, InfoSec World 2010, SchmooCon, vNetwork

Bernd Harzog | April 26, 2010

John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States once said that “A rising tide lifts all boats”. This was in reference to a strong economic growth, which benefits most if not all participants in that economy. While the entire economy has not be exceptionally strong of late, companies related to the virtualization technology sector have been chalking up increasingly strong results.  For Q1/2010 here are some recent revenue and earnings reports: (more…)

Topic:  Application Virtualization,  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization,  Desktop Virtualization,  Virtualization Management | No Comments »
Tags: Citrix, EMC, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, VMware