Cloud Monitoring

When we talk about monitoring for performance, security, and business rules, we often refer to monitoring of infrastructure or Platform as a Service mechanisms. But how do you monitor Software as a Service? Do you just tally the dollars spent for the service, or can you look at application performance, security issues, or even your …

Flip Side of the Coin: Automation Tools of the Trade

In my last post I started the discussion on the tools of the trade for automation and orchestration. The post mainly focused on Microsoft PowerShell as one of the primary tools of the trade when working within Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtualization and orchestration solutions. One of the main reasons that I focused on Microsoft PowerShell. So why PowerShell? Quite simply it is a very powerful platform that has a very strong community to help support it and companies outside of Microsoft have invested a great deal of time and development to use this technology as one of the main administration and management platforms for working with VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen. For the sake of this discussion, I am going to refer to PowerShell as one side of the automation coin and now concentrate on the flip side of the automation coin.

Getting to OpenStack

In the industry, OpenStack is seen as very hard to implement. Considering this, I began to think that most people who deploy OpenStack try to bite off too a large chunk of OpenStack at one go, to implement it all instead of just what they need. OpenStack is a cloud management platform, not the hypervisor, so …

Oracle Expands Its Cloud into Indian Subcontinent

As we have stated before on The Virtualization Practice, Oracle has woken up to the cloud in a very large way. Acquisitions such as Ravello Systems, StackEngine, and Datalogix have the potential to turn this leviathan into a dominant cloud player. Oracle has started to move from a position of catch-up, though acquisitions, into an active development phase. …

How Much Private Cloud Do You Need?

How much private cloud do you really need? A private cloud is all about the IT department getting out of the way of its internal customers, enabling business units and individual developers to provision their own VMs and get on with doing their jobs. But building and operating a private cloud is a complex, and therefore …