Migrating to the Cloud: OpenStack or vCloud?

We, here at The Virtualization Practice, are getting ready to have a cloud presence. Since we ‘eat our own dogfood’ with a 100% Virtual Environment, we are gearing up to move some of those workloads into a hybrid cloud. We already use some cloud resources, but now is the time to look at other workloads. Why we are moving to the cloud is three fold: how can we write about various aspects of being a tenant in the cloud, if we are not one; a recent power outage at the grid level; and a upcoming data center move. Two of these reasons are all about business continuity with the first being what we do. While we already have a cloud running within our own environment, it is time to branch out.

VMware Licensing Past and Present Compared to Hyper-V

When we look for patterns from the past, sometimes we can really get a good idea of what the future might entail.

If you take a look at the way VMware has rolled out licensing changes during each of the major releases you can see a pattern and get an idea of what the future may bestow on us. When Virtual Center was first released, vMotion and vSMP were licensed separately from Virtual Center as an add-on for Virtual Center.

Once VMware ESX3 was released, vMotion and vSMP pretty much became a standard feature included in ESX3. Virtual Center was still sold separately and then VMware presented three licensing models for VMware ESX3.

Citrix Acquires Podio – Forget Desktops, Users – Build Your Own Apps

Citrix acquire Podio – Podio’s focus is to provide a platform for small/medium sized organisations to get up and running with standard business function applications offered from Podio’s own App Store. Does this mark the a Citrix foray to better accomodate mobility and consumerisation while stepping outside the microsoft windows desktop delivery environment.

OnLive Desktop Inching Towards Viability

OnLive, the desktop pundits favorite DaaS provider, is one step closer to being able to offer a viable and fully compliant virtual “desktop” service following the stealth update of its platform from a Windows 7 based VDI service to a Windows Server 8 R2 Remote Desktop Services offering. While this move eliminates the threat to the service that attempting to run a set based on a licensing model that was not compliant with Microsoft’s licensing policies, OnLive is still not out of the woods.

Centrix Software Simplify Windows 7 Migration

In supporting increasing needs for agility in a world driven by the increasing consumerization of IT (CoIT), desktop transformation can no longer be seen as an infrequent process. To quickly deliver change, you need to best understand what the impact of that change is. Auditing should be continuous as seasonal or limited use applications that may be missed through manual processes will be identified and flagged as they occur. Centrix look to assist with the latest release of Workspace IQ which includes Management Reporting, Business Group Reporting, Integration with License Dashboard and Windows 7 hardware compatibility assessment.

Improving Virtualization and Cloud Management Security with Symantec CSP

The 3/22 Virtualization Security Podcast brought to light the capabilities of Symantec Critical System Protection (CSP) software. This software successfully implements a manageable version of mandatory access control policies based on role-based and multi-level security functionality within the virtual environment. More specifically on those systems that are critical to the well being and health of your virtual and cloud environments such as all your management and control-plane tools (VMware vCenter, Microsoft SCVVM, XenConsole, etc.). In addition, Symantec CSP will monitor your virtualization hosts for common security issues. This in itself is great news but why are we just hearing about this now? Is this a replacement for other security tools?