The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on the United States General Services Administration has approved the acquisition of some cloud services for use by the Federal Government including many of the Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Since these services are for sale as well as freely available this sounds more like an admission that they can be used. Will other governments follow suit? But should they be used? That is really the question.
There are two sides to any government, the classified and the unclassified. These are general terms that quantify how the government can use services. While all services require quite a bit of security, classified utilization requires even more, in many cases what most would consider to be “uber-security” requirements. The types of requirements that impact usability in some way. Can these tools provide adequate security?
Search results for: vmware
vSphere 4.1 Improvements in Availability
With the release of vSphere 4.1 there have been some great enhancements that have been added with this release. In one of my earlier post I took a look at the vSphere 4.1 release of ESXi. This post I am going to take a look at vSphere 4.1 availability options and enhancements. So what has changed with this release? A maximum of 320 virtual machines per cluster has been firmly set. In vSphere 4.0 there were different VM/Host limitations for DRS as well as different rules for VMware HA. VMware has also raised the number of virtual machines that can be run in a single cluster from 1280 in 4.0 to 3000 in the vSphere 4.1 release. How do these improvements affect your upgrade planning?
OpenStack, an IaaS Platform from Rackspace, NASA and Citrix
Whilst I have been away on vacation, something fairly interesting has happened in the area of Open Source initiatives for Infrastructure as a Service in the form of a new initiative from NASA and Rackspace called OpenStack. You may remember in our last post in this area, we noted that there was a proliferation of offerings in the IaaS space, and it was in the customer’s best interest for there to be effective migrateability (or even mix and match) amongst public and/or private clouds. However, the API standards to support interoperability are proving elusive.
A Quest for Citrix's Crown?
Is Citrix king of deploying applications and workspaces to desktops? Citrix’s portfolio of solutions is extensive – but extensive is difficult to introduce change to. Are there serious challengers and if so, is changing to those vendors an easy task?
vSphere Upgrade: Going to 4.1 (Updated)
Well I had some serious issues going to vSphere 4.1 from v4.0U2. The steps for the upgrade seemed straightforward:
1. Upgrade vCenter Server
2. Upgrade ESX
Well, it was not all that easy.
This Week in Virtualization Security News
The Virtualization Security Podcast on 7/22 was all about the news of the week with our panelists discussing how this news affects everyone and anyone with respect to Virtualization Security. The news discussed:
* NIST Released their Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies (Draft)
* There is a Security issue with VMware vSphere 4.1
* VMware discussed the new vShield Zones Edge and vShield App products
* HyTrust and Catbird announced a cooperative effort