Building the Personal Cloud

Step back to Citrix CEO Mark Templeton’s keynote at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco and you would have heard him talk of “The Three Cs – the Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Personal Cloud.” Hang on a moment, “Personal Cloud” what’s that? For years Citrix used to talk about “any any any” and it did a pretty good job of delivering it provided any was restricted to meaning any Windows app. Now though, Citrix is wanting us to believe that it has moved past any app and extending that to anything digital.

Looking at vCenter Past and Present

I mentioned in my last post that I have started the process of preparing for my VCP5 exam that I need to have finished by the end of February. While I was watching the Trainsignal training video about installing and configuring vCenter, I got to thinking about how much vCenter had changed and matured over the years. Let’s start with a look at where vCenter started and where it is today.

Virtualization & Cloud Security: More Process Than Tools?

I was discussing yesterday how to use virtualization and cloud performance management tools as an early warning system for security issues. I have touched on use of New Relic, VMware vFabric APM, Quest vFoglight, and other tools that can make up such a early warning system before, but without the proper process in place, the tools will not be good enough.

vSphere Upgrade Saga: Setting up a RHEL iSCSI Server

When using the RHEL scsi-target-utils, there is some special mojo needed when connecting to vSphere 5 (perhaps any version of vSphere). Unlike the iSCSI Enterprise Target (IET), the new service makes use of modern iSCSI targeting techniques, and these did not work as expected with vSphere out of the box. For a few days, I was confused as to what was happening, but not anymore, so now my iSCSI server for my vSphere Environment is back in running shape after its hardware upgrade, new operating system, and upgraded disk drives.

Cloud: More Secure Than You Think?

At the end of last year and the beginning of this year the Virtualization Security Podcast featured two very different guest panelists to discuss cloud security, policy, and compliance: Phil Cox, Director of Security and Compliance at RightScale, joined us for the last podcast in 2011 and the George Gerchow of VMware’s Policy and Compliance Group, joined us for the first podcast of 2012. We asked is the public cloud ready for mission critical applications. The answer was surprising. Have a listen and let us know your thoughts.