Chrome OS: From Education to the Enterprise

In less than four years, Google has completely overturned the educational computing market. In 2012, Chromebook sales were less than 1% of all devices shipped within the K–12 education market. By the end of 2013, shipments had increased to 25%. In May of this year, Chrome OS device sales (Chromebook and Chromebox) passed 50% of …

VMworld 2014 — The Essential Desktop Sessions

It’s that time again. VMworld 2014 opens in San Francisco on Monday, August 25. With seventy-four sessions covering end user computing this year, it’s clear that VMware is as serious about the desktop as it is about the data center. I’ve been looking through the session catalog to find what promise to be the most …

When SaaS Goes Awry

Recently, I have had a spate of calendar issues from various sources and of various types. Some calendar entries are given the wrong time zone, others show up on one device but not another, and some have no email capability embedded. All of these issues occur when various calendar services are used by those sending …

PCI DSS 2.0 discussed on The Virtualization Security Podcast

In the last Virtualization Security podcast on 12/2 we had with us members of the PCI DSS Virtualization Special Interest Group (SIG). Kurt Roemer of Citrix and Hemma Prafullchandra of HyTrust joined us to discuss the differences to the PCI DSS 2.0 with respect to virtualization. In essence, PCI DSS explicitly calls out the need to bring virtualization, people, and processes in scope.
As we discussed in a previous article, the PCI DSS 2.0 does not state exactly what needs to be assessed within the virtual environment, or even what part of the virtual environment is a concern of each aspect of the PCI DSS. What the PCI DSS 2.0 does do is change the language, however subtle, that technologies employing shared resources are now acceptable.

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.