Cloud SLAs Are Worthless But Does this Matter?

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an excellent expectations-managing mechanism, but it’s important to manage your own expectations of what an SLA can realistically accomplish. Just those three words “Service” “Level” and “Agreement” is often an attention turn-off I know: SLAs are to infrastructure bods what documentation is to developers. Yet, when considering taking up cloud and utility services many consider that the SLAs offered aren’t reliable, if they exist at all. So the SLA becomes the blocker – ‘If I move services out of my data centre, how will I guarantee availability and performance’.

The Progress of the Cisco UCS Platform

It has been just over two years that the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) was announced and released to the world. I wanted to give my feedback on the progress of the platform and how it is fitting into the Cloud Computing space.

When Cisco announced their Unified Computing Platform a couple of years ago, the thinking was not to just design and get into the server business, Cisco’s goal was to and become the heart of the datacenter itself. This was a big move by Cisco considering, that they had a very good working relationship and partnership with HP well, at least until the announcement that Cisco was getting into the server business.

ITaaS: Managing Software Costs within Hybrid Clouds

Managing licensing and utilization costs is a mess today in the physical world. Introducing elastic scaling of workloads into a hybrid private/public cloud introduces new uncertainties and new software licensing metering and compliance issues. This is particularly true in the case of enterprise applications which are licensed by the enterprise from the software vendor and then deployed on an as needed basis on Iaas or PaaS clouds.

Multiple Hybrid Clouds Kludged Together? — Cloud Architecture

With the diversity of cloud’s available today, data being sent from one to another could appear to be a hodge-podge of security. As one colleague put it recently when I asked what he was expecting to maintain integrity of data in motion between clouds:
“… what kind of kludge can things end up being when you have multiple connections to multiple hybrid clouds all doing different things” — Steve Beaver
So how does data transfer between the clouds? Is it a kludge? or can it be done using a uniform security policy, procedures, and protocols while maintaining Integrity and Confidentiality and auditability?

vCenter Operations: Integrated and Secure?

VMware released 3 versions of vCenter Operations, standard, advanced, Enterprise. We have already discussed the abilities of vCenter Operations vCenter Operations – vSphere Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management with Self Learning Analytics but is this an integrated and secure implementation of monitoring or do we need more security than what is provided?
At the time the first article was written there was a bit of vital information we did not have available to us. That is how to access vCenter Operations Standard or Advanced in a multi-tenant manner, that has now been provided. vCenter Operations Alive functionality can be accessed directly from a web browser using your VMware vCenter Credentials, which allows you to see the Alive status of any VM you have the permissions to view. This capability is a huge capability, as it now allows me to provide a non-vSphere Client mechanism to view the status of the virtual environment.

vSphere Client for the iPad

The VMware Community Roundtable, which is recorded every Wednesday, has been available for download from iTunes for the last couple of years or about as long has the podcast has been presented on TalkShoe.com. Other than the community podcast and The Virtualization Security Podcast there have not really been too many other things available on iTunes for VMware technologies or products. You could find a VCP study guide, VCP Exam Cram from Pearson Education and some other third party tools to control VMware vCenter from your iPhone and/or iPad. Within the last couple of years there have been hundreds if not thousands of iPads that have been given away at the different technology conferences and the sneak peak from VMware at these conferences, on the iPad application that they are working on, it was just a matter of time and that time has come with VMware releasing the VMware View for iPad and the VMware vSphere Client for the iPad.