The Virtualization Practice

sbeaver | May 28, 2010

When working with VMware ESX there are some tips that I can share that can help you manage your environment. This tips are not anything really new or exciting but rather a reinforcement of some best practices to live by in order to improve auditing for compliance and troubleshooting.  Use of the following in conjunction with remote logging functionality will improve your compliance stance and improve your ability to troubleshoot over a period of time.

How you may ask? By using a tool that logs all local administrator actions to a remote logging host. There are two ways to do this today for ESX (SUDO and the HyTrust Appliance) and only one mechanism for ESXi and vCenter (the HyTrust Appliance).

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Topic:  Personalization Virtualization,  Virtualization Management,  Virtualization Security | No Comments »
Tags: Compliance, ESX, HyTrust, Root, sudo, Tips and Tricks

Texiwill | May 27, 2010

PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.

There are now many more products on the market that not only cater to VMware but Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, Xen, and with that KVM. Some of these tools are well known in the virtualization community while others are not. This is a list of tools that have specific code and integrations for each of the listed hypervisors, not ones that naturally work with all hypervisors such as many APM and other Performance Management solutions, that is a different type of list. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization,  Virtualization Backup,  Virtualization Management,  Virtualization Security | 1 Comment »
Tags: Citrix, Cross-platform Tools, Hyper-V, KVM, Microsoft, Virtualization Ecosystem, VMware, vSphere, XenServer

Andrew Wood | May 26, 2010

Citrix have finally made their much touted bare metal hypervisor for desktop devices – XenClient – available for download. This release closely follows that of Virtual Computer, the market leader in distributed desktop virtualization announcing the availability of NxTop Connect. And indeed, only recently Neocleus, makers of NeoSphere signed a technology licensing agreement with BigFix a leading solutions provider.

Both Virtual Computer and Neocleus are small organizations in comparison to Citrix: why would Citrix extend their wide virtualization portfolio to include a bare metal hypervisor for desktop devices? What features would be necessary to make this such a service viable?  Where is Citrix’s normal sparring partner VMware? Could such a solution help organizations deliver their IT services more effectively?

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Topic:  Business Agility,  Desktop Virtualization | 2 Comments »
Tags: bare metal hypervisor for desktops devices, BYOC, Citrix XenClient, Neocleus, NeoSphere, NxTop Connect, VirtualComputer NxTop, VMware

Bernd Harzog | May 25, 2010

Virtualization (the underlying foundation of a cloud) introduces a set of challenges to how one should monitor the performance of the infrastructure and the applications. These challenges are:

1. Unlike physical systems that are mostly dedicated to specific applications, virtual systems are both shared and dynamic. This makes inferring the performance of the infrastructure by looking at resource utilization statistics ineffective. Leading edge Infrastructure Performance Management vendors like AppFirst, Akorri, CA|NetQos, Virtual Instruments and Xangati are taking an Infrastructure Response Time approach to this problem that avoids the issues of relying upon resource metrics, and provides a true picture of how the infrastructure is actually performing. (more…)

Topic:  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management | No Comments »
Tags: Akorri, AppDynamics, Cloud Performance Management, Nagios, New Relic, Nimsoft, SolarWinds, Xangati, Zenoss

Tom Howarth | May 24, 2010

Before you all go screaming to your local vendor let me elaborate, the product has just had it’s name changed to reflect a new corporate direction. esXpress is now called PHD Virtual Backup for ESX. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  Virtualization Backup | No Comments »
Tags: Backup, Citrix, PhD Virtual, Tom Howarth, XenDesktop