VMware Sponsors the Open Networking Research Center

In my humble opinion, 2011 was the year for storage inside the virtualization space with a lot of new storage related technologies presented at VMworld 2011. There were different technologies ranging from Tier 1 SSD storage in a box that can plug right into VMware vSphere as its own datastore, to all the software storage venders that are now virtualizing their Storage Processers. Yes, for me, 2011 was the year for storage in virtualization.

News: VMware Welcomes Wanova – Is it a Mirage – does VMware finally get desktops?

VMware have announced the upcoming acquisition of Wanova. The combination of VMware View and Wanova Mirage will be an an industry first pairing that could well dramatically redefine the VDI market. It is increasingly common to find vendors acknowledging that a VDI-only solution is not enough. Citrix know it. Quest know it. Desktone know it. We’ve critiqued before that by having a VDI only view, VMware doesn’t “get” desktops. With their Wanova acquisition VMware gets desktops.

VMware Advances End User Computing Vision with View, Horizon and Personal Cloud Updates

Kind to come just one week before the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco, VMware announced the next step towards its vision for end user computing today by unveiling the latest updates to VMware View and Horizon Application manager, as well as sharing more news about its Project Octopus beta.

Will access to VMware's source code change the hypervisor threat landscape?

Many of the virtualization security people I have talked to are waiting patiently for the next drop of leaked VMware hypervisor code. But the real question in many a mind is whether or not this changes the the threat landscape and raises the risk unacceptably. So let’s look at the current hypervisor threat landscape within the virtual environment to determine if this is the case, and where such source code will impact. Are there any steps one can take now before the code drop is complete to better secure your environment?

Ecosystems for Both VMware and Microsoft Hypervisors

Since the start of the Windows 8 Public Beta, there has been a great deal of discussions and comparisons galore. There have been points made that Microsoft Hyper-V will be good enough to draw good consideration in companies looking to the future. For me personally, feature comparison was not my first consideration. One measurement that I consider is the eco-structure of the technology or in other words, how large is the 3rd party partners and products supporting both the technologies?

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.