Upgrades to VMware vSphere will Impact Availability and Security!

I was upgrading my nodes from VMware VI3 to VMware vSphere and used the VMware Update Manager to perform the update. Given that my existing filesystems were implemented to meet the requirements of the DISA STIG for ESX, as well as availability. I was surprised to find that when the upgrade of the first node of my cluster completed, that the install did NOT take into account my existing file system structure, but instead imposed the default file system used by the standard VMware vSphere ESX 4 installation.

News: Cisco and EMC, Together With VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures

Unprecedented Collaboration Heralds Business-Ready IT Infrastructure Packages and Single Point of Contact for Design, Service and Support; Cisco-EMC Solutions Joint Venture Also Established to Help Enable Customer Adoption Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, today introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. The coalition has been …

News: Windows 7 Migration for Enterprise Desktops Made Easy with Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity

Today, Liquidware Labs has announced a specific focus upon assisting with the migration from either Windows XP or Windows Vista to Windows 7. This focus applies to all of the possible resulting deployment scenarios for Windows 7 (physical desktop, client side hypervisor, centralized VDI, or layered).

Virtualizing from an Island?

I was recently on an island and it got me thinking of how would I move my company to the island. The company services people around the world, but would also service local to the island. Does virtualization really help me here? Why do I ask this, because an island is often prone to the vagaries of mother nature: Lava, Flooding, Typhoon, Hurricane, Earthquakes, humidity, desert, power fluctuations, etc. The list is pretty endless. So how would you move a business to or from an Island? Is this where the Cloud becomes a mature component? If so how much cloud do you need?