While doing a quick Google search to find what a Cloud is, I have found several different definitions which depend on which vendor site you pull up. One thing is for sure despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people and or companies. For my reference point I am going to use the National Institute of Standards and Technology definition referenced by Texiwill’s NIST Cloud Computing Definitions Final article.
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KVM in SUSE, what is going on at Novell?
As of Service Pack 1, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES) supports KVM for SUSE guests. This post follows on from our previous post regarding the demise of Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and perhaps suggests the beginning of the end for Xen-based virtualization in Linux, but the story is far from clear. A complex set of agreements with Microsoft mean that Novell is bound to preferentially support Windows guests, and it may be a while before KVM support is adequate, although Novell has a project called Alacrity to help get it there. In the meanwhile Novell may get split up into pieces by a private equity house and SLES find itself a new owner.
Can you Transform your desktop with Turnkey VDI?
Can you transform your desktop estate by migrating to VDI solution and expect that “savings will be made”? You should ask not what you can do for VDI, but what VDI can do for you. The process of transforming your desktop needs to begin with understanding what each user has in their workspace. Being able to minimize your desktop device spend should not come with increased costs due to complexity and lost productivity. Be sure you fully assess what it is that you have now before considering transforming your environment.
VMware Advanced Certifications
VMware has now announced two new advanced certifications that will be available for registration in the very near future. VMware Certified Advanced Professional 4 – Datacenter Administrator (VCAP4-DCA) and VMware Certified Advanced Professional 4 – Datacenter Design (VCAO4-DCD). Both these certification and exams are a stepping stone for the VMware Certified Design Expert on vSphere 4. These new exams are in all intensive purposes an updated version of the exams needed for the VCDX certification for ESX 3 but with the added bonus of advanced certifications during the journey to achieving the coveted VCDX certification. Let’s take a quick overview of the new certifications.
Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems
PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.
Virtualize Java without an Operating System
When we put a .NET application on Windows on Hyper-V (or a Java application on Linux on ESXi) we are actually virtualizing twice. Can we virtualize only once, by putting the CLR or the JVM directly on the VM Host? In this action of course we remove the operating system. Oracle is taking the lead in this area with JRockit VE JVM. There is no VMware support, the only hypervisor it supports is Xen, or more precisely Oracle VM. it only comes bundled only with an Application Server, namely Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option. The entire stack inside the virtual machine is in “User Mode” in other words the JVM and the drivers are all in the same memory address space and you don’t need to switch contexts into Kernel Mode in order to perform I/O or network access. Does VMware have a strategic initiative (or even a skunkworks) to engineer a similar bundle for its SpringSource runtimes? Or are they just concentrating on scaling out with as per the Google announcement?