TVP Category Archives

VMware Licensing Past and Present Compared to Hyper-V

When we look for patterns from the past, sometimes we can really get a good idea of what the future might entail.

If you take a look at the way VMware has rolled out licensing changes during each of the major releases you can see a pattern and get an idea of what the future may bestow on us. When Virtual Center was first released, vMotion and vSMP were licensed separately from Virtual Center as an add-on for Virtual Center.

Once VMware ESX3 was released, vMotion and vSMP pretty much became a standard feature included in ESX3. Virtual Center was still sold separately and then VMware presented three licensing models for VMware ESX3.

Citrix Acquires Podio – Forget Desktops, Users – Build Your Own Apps

Citrix acquire Podio – Podio’s focus is to provide a platform for small/medium sized organisations to get up and running with standard business function applications offered from Podio’s own App Store. Does this mark the a Citrix foray to better accomodate mobility and consumerisation while stepping outside the microsoft windows desktop delivery environment.

Tenant and Multi-Tenant Security: It's All About Scope

While at InfoSec World 2012’s summit on Cloud and Virtualization Security, the first talk was on Securing your data. The second was on penetration testing to ensure that data was secure. In essence it has always been about the data but there is a huge difference between what a tenant can do and what the cloud or virtual environment provider can do with respect to data protection and security. This gap is apparently becoming wider instead of smaller as we try to understand tenant vs cloud provider security scopes. There is a lack of transparency with respect to security, but at the same time there are movements to gain that transparency. But secret sauces, scopes, legislation, and lack of knowledge seem to be getting in the way.

RackSpace calls Citrix’s Bluff over CloudStack. Citrix Folds.

Citrix has given up Project Olympus which was based on the Open Source OpenStack platform in favor of its own Open Source CloudStack initiative (formerly known as Cloud.com), which it is contributing to the Apache foundation and has re-licensed under the partner-friendly Apache Open Source license (rather than the GPL).

Dell to expand cloud and thin client business through Wyse acquisition

Dell continues its expansion into the cloud and virtual desktop market with the announcement on Monday that it has reached agreement with Wyse Technologies to acquire the company.

Dell has had a long partnership with Devon IT,the Dell OptiPlex FX 130 and FX 170 thin clients and the Dell FX100 Zero Client are OEM editions of the Devon IT TC2, TC5, and TC10. Dell also OEMs Devon IT’s VDI Blaster software thin-client and its Echo Management Console software. All of which are considered to be high quality products. So if Dell already has access to its own thin client products and management software why did it need a thin client vendor of its own, and why didn’t it pick Devon IT instead of Wyse.

Application Security using Secure Cloud Storage

VMware’s Project Octopus and others like ownCloud and Oxygen Cloud have stirred some interesting ideas about Application Security. Those applications that make use of SSL, nearly every web application, can make use of secure data storage for certificate verification means. What makes SSL MiTM attacks possible, is mostly related to poor certificate management. If there was a way to alleviate the need for the user to be involved in this security decision, then SSL MiTM attacks would be significantly reduced.