Monitoring from the Cloud

I have started the year 2011 out by looking at some of the different monitoring solutions available for us to have an insight into the health and welfare of the systems that we support. In your typical monitoring solution you would install the monitoring server in your environment and let the system discover all the devices in your infrastructure and or to control the licenses we would manually enter the devices that we want to monitor. Some of these monitoring servers solutions have to have a beefy box to begin with and all solutions will need a great deal of “tweaking” to control the number of false positives as well as time put in to be able to report on what exactly we care to be alerted about.

Want to Move to the Cloud? Simple Steps

You heard the buzzwords and drunk the kool-aid and now you want to move to the cloud, how do you do this? This has been the a fairly interesting question on the VMware Communities Podcast yesterday, when the vCloud team showed up to talk about the current reference architecture. Yet almost all the questions were about going to the cloud and not about the architecture. Does this mean people do not understand what is required to go to the cloud? I think so. So to take a few elements from the podcast and put them in writing is the goal of this article. The Simple Steps to move to the cloud.

The Virtual Desktop Design Maxim: Start With User Requirements

When considering a Virtual Desktop Design a good architect needs to ask “what is the best solution for this environment?” For many, once you’ve considered the needs of your users, it is a combination of desktop delivery models – some virtual, some physical. Ideally the user is unaware of which model is being delivered to them, they consume that service on an appropriate device, at an appropriate time. Ringcube perhaps first to market for this type of solution with their Workspace Virtualization Engine.

Cisco Pushing More vNetwork into Hardware

In the first Virtualization Security Podcast of 2011, we had Brad Hedlund with us once again. Not to talk about the Cisco Virtualization Security Gateway (VSG), but about the security of what I call physical-virtual devices that provide network virtualization within the hardware. Or what Brad Called Network ID Virtualization (NIV). Cisco has taken its VN-Link technology to extend the networking of a VM directly into the core switch when using vSphere.

Desktop Lifecycle Managment and what Novell has to offer

Mainstream virtual desktop solutions have focused their efforts on providing the best platform for hosting virtual desktop environments. Hypervisors, image management, and connection brokers are the top feature sets that companies have looked at during their comparisons. Moving up the stack, these vendors are now focusing on user personalization management, but do not have what is considered to be a full desktop management solution. So are our end-to-end virtual desktop solutions really complete?