Controlling the Virtual Infrastruture

There is a great deal of marketing hype about which hypervisor is better but I have spent some thinking about this and really have to wonder if the hypervisor is what we should really be focusing or concentrating on. A lot of third party vendors are starting to port their products to be able to work with both hypervisors but what about the management server itself? When third party application vendors design their applications to work with VMware or Microsoft hypervisors they have been writing plug-ins for their product to work inside the management server systems and or its client.

vSphere 4 – now with free SUSE Linux

I you buy vSphere 4 (or 4.1) after June 9th, you get a free copy of SLES to run on any CPU on which you have a valid license for vSphere. This lines up SLES on vSphere alongside Windows on Hyper-v, in both cases the O/S and the hypervisor are supplied under the same license. This obviously lines up SLES on vSphere alongside Windows on Hyper-v, in both cases the O/S and the hypervisor are supplied under the same license. In the long term, Licensing SLES leaves out a tantalizing prospect that VMware can build its own semi-official version of Azure, using vSphere, SLES and Mono, without a Windows server operating system in the mix.

Can You Give Power to Users Responsibly?

Appsense’s development of User Rights Management and User Installed Applications offer products that you can deploy to give additional rights to users so that they can work effectively without being a drain on IT, or IT being a millstone to them. How will such functions impact your business?

To Cloud or not to Cloud, Better Yet, What is a Cloud?

While doing a quick Google search to find what a Cloud is, I have found several different definitions which depend on which vendor site you pull up. One thing is for sure despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people and or companies. For my reference point I am going to use the National Institute of Standards and Technology definition referenced by Texiwill’s NIST Cloud Computing Definitions Final article.

KVM in SUSE, what is going on at Novell?

As of Service Pack 1, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES) supports KVM for SUSE guests. This post follows on from our previous post regarding the demise of Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and perhaps suggests the beginning of the end for Xen-based virtualization in Linux, but the story is far from clear. A complex set of agreements with Microsoft mean that Novell is bound to preferentially support Windows guests, and it may be a while before KVM support is adequate, although Novell has a project called Alacrity to help get it there. In the meanwhile Novell may get split up into pieces by a private equity house and SLES find itself a new owner.

Can you Transform your desktop with Turnkey VDI?

Can you transform your desktop estate by migrating to VDI solution and expect that “savings will be made”? You should ask not what you can do for VDI, but what VDI can do for you. The process of transforming your desktop needs to begin with understanding what each user has in their workspace. Being able to minimize your desktop device spend should not come with increased costs due to complexity and lost productivity. Be sure you fully assess what it is that you have now before considering transforming your environment.