News: Windows 2012 Licensing – Mircrosoft learns from VMware's mistakes?

Perhaps with the release of 2012, Microsoft have a rare moment of being a vendor that made a change to product licensing without upsetting someone. There are now only four Windows 2012 Licensing versions, and licensing is processor and client access license based. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be hard.

VMware Sponsors the Open Networking Research Center

In my humble opinion, 2011 was the year for storage inside the virtualization space with a lot of new storage related technologies presented at VMworld 2011. There were different technologies ranging from Tier 1 SSD storage in a box that can plug right into VMware vSphere as its own datastore, to all the software storage venders that are now virtualizing their Storage Processers. Yes, for me, 2011 was the year for storage in virtualization.

News: VMware Welcomes Wanova – Is it a Mirage – does VMware finally get desktops?

VMware have announced the upcoming acquisition of Wanova. The combination of VMware View and Wanova Mirage will be an an industry first pairing that could well dramatically redefine the VDI market. It is increasingly common to find vendors acknowledging that a VDI-only solution is not enough. Citrix know it. Quest know it. Desktone know it. We’ve critiqued before that by having a VDI only view, VMware doesn’t “get” desktops. With their Wanova acquisition VMware gets desktops.

vSphere Upgrade Saga: VMware vCops 5 Enterprise

I have been using vCops Advanced since v1.0, but wanted to get more of an experience with vCops Enterprise. Specifically, the most recent GA version 5. Installing all the different components of vCops Enterprise is not a task for the faint of heart and there are so many pre-requisites, that it becomes increasing more difficult to keep everything going. The easiest component to install and configure was vCops 5, itself. With vCenter Infrastructure Navigator a close second, but VMware Configuration Manager, has even more dependencies and due to these, it is not so simple to install. Perhaps, this is why there is no trial available on VMware’s website. Even so, with good planning all these tools can be installed and made available.

VMware Advances End User Computing Vision with View, Horizon and Personal Cloud Updates

Kind to come just one week before the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco, VMware announced the next step towards its vision for end user computing today by unveiling the latest updates to VMware View and Horizon Application manager, as well as sharing more news about its Project Octopus beta.

Will access to VMware's source code change the hypervisor threat landscape?

Many of the virtualization security people I have talked to are waiting patiently for the next drop of leaked VMware hypervisor code. But the real question in many a mind is whether or not this changes the the threat landscape and raises the risk unacceptably. So let’s look at the current hypervisor threat landscape within the virtual environment to determine if this is the case, and where such source code will impact. Are there any steps one can take now before the code drop is complete to better secure your environment?