A new partnership between IBM and VMware was announced in Las Vegas at IBM’s annual InterConnect cloud and mobile technology conference. This partnership will present the IBM cloud as the showcase platform in the VMware vCloud Air Network ecosystem. This is one specific area in the cloud space where VMware has the ability to really shine. …
Stephen Beaver is the co-author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center and Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration as well as being contributing author of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and How to Cheat at Configuring VMware ESX Server. Stephen is an IT Veteran with over 15 years experience in the industry. Stephen is a moderator on the VMware Communities Forum and was elected vExpert for 2009 and 2010. Stephen can also be seen regularly presenting on different topics at national and international virtualization conferences.
Current State of Virtualization
In my last article, my topic of conversation was the state of the cloud as it stands in the start of the year 2016. Following that discussion, I want to move a little further down the stack and discuss the state of affairs of virtualization, based on financial results and insight from conference calls.
State of the Clouds
It’s the state of the clouds! As we float further along into 2016, the overall state of affairs for cloud services remains very strong, with over fifty percent year-to-year growth being reported in the fourth quarters of 2014 and 2015. Moving right along into 2016, the absolute growth should continue, with the largest growth opportunity …
The Start of 2016 Brings the Start of Layoffs
The start of 2016, brings the start of layoffs. In my first post of the year, one of the stories from 2015 that has secured my interest to keep an eye on in 2016 is the Dell $67 billion dollar merger or acquisition of EMC and there has been some chatter that EMC, VMware and Dell have been struggling to get the merger across the goal line. I have heard of a couple different reasons for the cause of this struggle. One of the reasons I have heard was the extra funding that would be needed to cover the $10 billion or more in capital gains taxes that Dell would need to cover. These taxes were originally going to be covered by a tracking stock. This tracking stock was structured under a very fundamental provision of the U.S. tax code and was designed to represent the holdings of Dell as the parent company.
Will 2016 Be the Year When Containers Take Off?
Will 2016 be the year that containers take off? In my humble opinion we are not to a place where containers are mainstream yet, but all indications seem to indicate that interest in containers continues to rise. VMware has recently open-sourced its Photon Platform and to help channel people’s interest in the new platform, VMware has created the Photon Platform Devbox that brings the power of the Photon Platform right to your desktop or laptop via VMware Fusion and/or VMware Workstation.
Goodbye 2015, and Here We Go, 2016
Goodbye 2015 and here we go 2016. Since this is my first post of the New Year, I wanted to start the year with a post on one of my current favorite topics for discussion and that topic to start the year right is automation. For this post, let’s concentrate on the second day operations type of automation. Second day operations is really quite a different beast from the build and decommission automation in that second day operations incorporate several different approaches to the automation. It is these approaches that I discuss a little further.