SpiceWorld: All Things Spicy

I was recently invited to attend SpiceWorld Austin (paid for by SpiceWorks), a gathering of administrators, companies, and IT managers involved with SpiceWorks. SpiceWorks provides help desk, inventory, and now system monitoring for the small and medium business/enterprise (SMB/E). The SMB/E space until now seemed underserved by major vendors in the virtualization space. SpiceWorks provides …

What Do You Know about Asigra?

What do you know about Asigra? What if I told you there is a good chance that you have used its products but never knew it? During VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to sit in on a briefing from Asigra at the Tech Field Day Extra event. I had heard of …

RHEV Upgrade Saga: RHEL 7 Licensing and RHEV Support

While continuing on my way toward getting a fully running RHEV set up on RHEL 7, I find myself facing two new problems. Neither has a simple solution. The first is the lack of support in RHEV for RHEL 7 as a hypervisor. The second concerns a change in Red Hat’s handling of virtualization licenses. …

One OpenStack to Rule Them All: Bare Metal to Clouds

At VMworld 2014, VMware announced its easy-to-install OpenStack distribution, VMware Integrated OpenStack. This got me thinking, as normally OpenStack refers not just to the OpenStack distribution but to a specific underlying hypervisor as well, usually KVM. However, we know that OpenStack works equally well on KVM, vSphere, Hyper-V, and Xen, as it is more of …