I wonder how many of us remember when VMware bought BlueLane and their technology, good things were promised, we saw the first part with the release of vSphere when they introduced vShield Zones. This was a “Free” product for those of you that had any version above Advanced vSphere and to be fair for a 1.0 release was a nice weapon to have in your armoury when dealing with the Security during a design and implementation phase.
At VMworld 2010 San Francisco VMware announced and released the expanded and improved vShield family of products. it however now a costed product, now the good news is that vShield Zones been not been removed from the vSphere suite, and are still “Free” the the correctly licensed level of vSphere.
Looking in from 5000 miles (no I didn’t make it to VMworld this year), the two most significant announcements involved the consolidation of VMware’s bulging product lines into clearly-defined vFabric and vCloud strategies, which are respectively PaaS and IaaS plays that compete feature-wise with the established market leaders.
The week that all of us virtualization junkies have been waiting for has finally arrived. In case you are not sure what I am talking about, it is VMworld 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco California. The weather for me is a little cool with the wind but then again I am from Florida so it does not take much for me to think it is cool. The sun is shining and the place is packed. All and all a great start for this event.
In case you missed it, Intel has bought McAfee, a security company best known for virus scanning and other malware detection software, for $7.68Bn (on revenues of about $2Bn). This is a tidy multiple in any marketplace, particularly as McAfee is not the dominant player. It is the largest deal Intel has ever done, and the largest pure-play security deal ever. Plus the deal was in cash.
Add to this the Intel plan to purchase the Wireless Solution unit of Infineon (for $1.4Bn) and you now have the direction in which Intel plans to go. More Security in the hardware.
When I first started with virtualization, the only option you had at the time was single core processors in the hosts. Scale up or scale out was the hot debatable topic when designing your infrastructure. On one side of the coin the idea was to scale up in that it was best to get a few of the biggest servers you could find and load them up with as much memory and processors that you could fit in the box. The end result were some very expensive servers able to run a lot of virtual machines for its time. The other side of the coin presented the idea that it was better to scale out with more, smaller servers to make up the cluster. I have worked in both type of environments and attitudes over the years and as for me, personally, I aligned myself with the scale out philosophy. The simple reason for aligning with the scale out group was host failure.
We recently annoyed Peder Ulander of Cloud.com by suggesting when Cloud.com joined OpenStack it was a Turkey waiting for Thanksgiving. We spoke, here’s what we said about Cloud computing, OpenStack, Licensing, Eclipse, innovation, billing and a stack of other things.
