Why would a Developer choose VMware?

It is interesting to see Edward’s comment that according to EMC/VMware, widespread production deployment of Cloud Apps is 3-5 years off. If that is the case the VMware CloudFoundry initiative should be focused on cutting-edge development rather than porting existing apps, and in much the same way that Microsoft has always courted developers, CloudFoundry should be the latest cool thing for developer productivity. It’s interesting to talk about this stuff in the abstract, and at the strategic level, but sometimes it’s worth understanding what happens when you need to make the decisions for yourself.

VMware’s CloudFoundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift – Compare and Contrast

Over the last few weeks, VMware (as we indicated in an earlier post) and Red Hat have initiated two very similar initiatives known respectively as CloudFoundry and OpenShift. These are Platform as a Service (PaaS) plays, being developed for the longer term, primarily looking to encourage the development of (and thereafter to provide infrastructure for) applications specificallysuited to the the cloud. In this article we compare and contrast the two offerings and discuss their significance for the PaaS market as a whole.

Security of Performance and Management tools within the Virtual Environment

The problem is that not everything is as black and white as security folks desire. If we implement performance and other management tools, we often need to expose part of our all important virtualization management network to others. But how do we do this safely, securely, with minimal impact to usability? Why do we need to this is also another question. You just have to take one look at the Virtualization ASsessment TOolkit (Vasto) to realize the importance of this security requirement. But the question still exists, how do you implement other necessary tools within your virtual environment without impacting usability?

Federated Clouds? Possible?

Mike DiPetrillo’s post entitled VMware is Building Clouds sparked some interesting thoughts and discussion about what it means to have federated clouds and how do you define such federation? Is federated required to make ‘cloud’ ubiquitous or are we already there? But is the discussion really about federated clouds or simplistic data object movement between the VMs or about cloud management?

VDI Printing. Is it the Nemesis it was for Terminal Services? Part II

VDI Printing. Is it the Nemesis it was with Presentation Virtualisation? We consider the core printing options for the likes of Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft RDS, Quest vWorkspace and VMware View; and how they match to our printing considerations. We take an overview of solutions from ThinPrint, triCerat and UniPrint. An effective printing strategy must provide both the facility for printing to local printers as well as remote printing and include dedicated print server support. Ideally, you are in a better position to understand the cost of printing to your organisation: but don’t be surprised with incredulous looks when you tell user’s how much printing out their team meeting agenda cost.