I was recently on an island and it got me thinking about whether a set of close islands can support a highly mobile cloud? If not what would be needed to make the Islands Cloud safer from the vagaries of Mother Nature, such as hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Can a cloud provider be based on an island? or would it need to be on every island? Only the mainland?
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
Upgrades to VMware vSphere will Impact Availability and Security!
I was upgrading my nodes from VMware VI3 to VMware vSphere and used the VMware Update Manager to perform the update. Given that my existing filesystems were implemented to meet the requirements of the DISA STIG for ESX, as well as availability. I was surprised to find that when the upgrade of the first node of my cluster completed, that the install did NOT take into account my existing file system structure, but instead imposed the default file system used by the standard VMware vSphere ESX 4 installation.
Virtualizing from an Island?
I was recently on an island and it got me thinking of how would I move my company to the island. The company services people around the world, but would also service local to the island. Does virtualization really help me here? Why do I ask this, because an island is often prone to the vagaries of mother nature: Lava, Flooding, Typhoon, Hurricane, Earthquakes, humidity, desert, power fluctuations, etc. The list is pretty endless. So how would you move a business to or from an Island? Is this where the Cloud becomes a mature component? If so how much cloud do you need?
Should the SMB Adopt Cloud Computing?
With the advent of VMware Go, vCloud Express, and the vCloud API, VMware’s marketing message is that all SMBs should use the cloud to either deploy their free hypervisor (VMware Go), or use the Cloud to run their servers (vCloud Express). VMware claimed at VMworld that we are no longer looking for ROI with Virtualization from a pure power and equipment costs, no we are now looking at virtualizing to save funds within the operational space of your company. Where best to do this than for SMBs to instead of owning their own equipment move their servers into the waiting vCloud Express providers such as Savvis, Terremark, Hosting.com, etc.
Making sense of the Virtualization Security Players (Updated)
The known virtualization security vendors Reflex Systems, Catbird Security, Altor Networks, HyTrust, Symantec, Trend Microsystems, Tripwire, and VMware all showed their wares at VMworld. Even Checkpoint was showing off their firewall integration within the virtualized environment. Are these really competing products or products that have unique uses within the virtual environment with just a bit of overlap?
Regulatory Compliance, Slowly Catching up with Virtualization
As of this writing just a few of the regulatory compliance groups are working to encompass Virtualization. However, they are not close to anything publishable yet. What does this mean for companies that must enforce regulatory compliance? What does this mean to an auditor? The big question many are asking, is if the Compliance documents to which they must adhere do not mention virtualization, are they compliant when they virtualize? Currently whether you get down checked or not during an audit depends entirely on the auditor’s interpretation of the current non-specific guidelines. In most case its negative as there is no guidance from the compliance groups with regards to virtualization. There are also virtualization security products out there that try to enforce and report upon current compliance guides with respect to virtualization.