TVP Category Archives

Ecosystems for Both VMware and Microsoft Hypervisors

Since the start of the Windows 8 Public Beta, there has been a great deal of discussions and comparisons galore. There have been points made that Microsoft Hyper-V will be good enough to draw good consideration in companies looking to the future. For me personally, feature comparison was not my first consideration. One measurement that I consider is the eco-structure of the technology or in other words, how large is the 3rd party partners and products supporting both the technologies?

What is Considered Too Big for Virtualization?

A customer recently asked me, can we virtualize our Tier 1 App that receives 7Billion requests per day? My initial response was, on how many servers? Their answer was 15. This is quite a shocking set of numbers to consider. Add into this numbers such as 150K sessions per second, the need for a firewall, and sub-second response time and you end up with a few more shocking numbers. So could such workloads be virtualized? or is it too big for Virtualization?

Migrating to the Cloud: OpenStack or vCloud?

We, here at The Virtualization Practice, are getting ready to have a cloud presence. Since we ‘eat our own dogfood’ with a 100% Virtual Environment, we are gearing up to move some of those workloads into a hybrid cloud. We already use some cloud resources, but now is the time to look at other workloads. Why we are moving to the cloud is three fold: how can we write about various aspects of being a tenant in the cloud, if we are not one; a recent power outage at the grid level; and a upcoming data center move. Two of these reasons are all about business continuity with the first being what we do. While we already have a cloud running within our own environment, it is time to branch out.

AppSense StrataApps – to self install apps, or not to self install apps, that is the question

AppSenseLabs have released StrataApps, their long anticipated User Managed Applications Solution. We’ve discussed before that User Installed Applications, as a function, are often unloved and unwanted.And yet, almost every organization has a group of applications that fall outside the standard set that are administered and supported by IT. Unlike existing Application Virtualisation solutions, StrataApps doesn’t require that applications be installed in a clean environment or sequenced by IT staff.

OpenStack: What it is not….

The OpenStack conference 2012 is full of OpenStack fans, aficionados, developers, and companies making a business using the ecosystem. However, I kept hearing that openstack was a replacement for VMware. So why is this even a possibility, and why did Rackspace and now HP build public clouds using this technology? The easy answer is to save money. But is that the only answer? What is OpenStack and why is it becoming important?