Working with VMware License Files

There is a cardinal rule that we should all know about, especially for those of us who have spent a lot of time developing kickstart scripts for automated builds of the VMware hosts in your environment, that you do not use windows word editors like Notepad or WordPad when working with Linux files. If you use notepad to edit Linux files it will add unwanted line feeds (LF) to the file which may cause the file to be misinterpreted. If you must use Microsoft Windows as your client OS use Microsoft WordPad which does not modify the file in this way.

Private Cloud Security Nice to Have!?

In a recent document written by virtualization.info and Secure Network of Italy entitled Securing the Private Cloud several issues come to mind. While this is a good document on the availability front of virtualization security, I did not read anything that affected integrity or confidentiality. You cannot be secure if you ignore 2 of the 3 tenants of security.

vNetwork Security: Looking at VLANs

There is nothing like fully understanding the protections inherent within your vNetwork and the Roles and Permissions you can set within the virtualization management tool suites to ensure your vNetwork is secured, audited, and monitored for issues. Just like you do now within the pNetwork. Unlike the pNetwork, the vNetwork provides a certain amount of introspection and capability that is missing from a pNetwork, and this will also help with security.

Eucalyptus 2.0, and the stalled debate on Cloud API Standards

We’ve been following Eucalyptus over a series of posts, and recently seen the company strengthen its management team with the appointment of new CEO Marten Mickos the (only) ex-CEO of MySQL. This week they have released a new version of the Eucalyptus product, Version 2.0. which carries some of his strategy, particularly in putting clear water between the Open Source and the Enterprise version of the product.

Controlling the Virtual Infrastruture

There is a great deal of marketing hype about which hypervisor is better but I have spent some thinking about this and really have to wonder if the hypervisor is what we should really be focusing or concentrating on. A lot of third party vendors are starting to port their products to be able to work with both hypervisors but what about the management server itself? When third party application vendors design their applications to work with VMware or Microsoft hypervisors they have been writing plug-ins for their product to work inside the management server systems and or its client.