HP confirmed webOS will be on all new PCs

A couple of weeks ago, you could be forgiven for not ever having even heard of webOS, but now after HP CEO Leo Apotheker confirmed that starting in 2012, every HP PC will include the ability to run webOS in addition to Windows, if you profess to having any understanding of mobile platforms you have to profess to have at least some understanding of what webOS is and why it is important.

Cisco Pushing More vNetwork into Hardware

In the first Virtualization Security Podcast of 2011, we had Brad Hedlund with us once again. Not to talk about the Cisco Virtualization Security Gateway (VSG), but about the security of what I call physical-virtual devices that provide network virtualization within the hardware. Or what Brad Called Network ID Virtualization (NIV). Cisco has taken its VN-Link technology to extend the networking of a VM directly into the core switch when using vSphere.

Desktop Lifecycle Managment and what Novell has to offer

Mainstream virtual desktop solutions have focused their efforts on providing the best platform for hosting virtual desktop environments. Hypervisors, image management, and connection brokers are the top feature sets that companies have looked at during their comparisons. Moving up the stack, these vendors are now focusing on user personalization management, but do not have what is considered to be a full desktop management solution. So are our end-to-end virtual desktop solutions really complete?

GestaltIT Tech Field Day: Storage Line Up

I participated in GestaltIT’s TechFieldDay which is a sort of inverse conference, where the bloggers and independent analysts go to the vendors and then discuss the information they have received. We visited the following storage vendors:
* Data Robotics where we were introduced to the new Drobo FS
* EMC where we discussed stretched storage and other interesting futures
* HP where we were introduced to the IBRIX products

VirtualBox OSE 3.0 – Still a viable Open Source option?

In trying to re-use some old server hardware I re-vsisted VirtualBox/Ubuntu, a viable and completely free Open Source option for non-virtualization-enabled hardware. It is a neat solution, simple and well-supported, but the open source version of VirtualBox is nobbled to make it extremely awkward to use, in a different way to VMware’s nobbling of the non-Open Source (but also free) ESXi.

Now is the time, for Oracle/Sun to put all the features of VirtualBox into the Open Source version, and let it live on, perhaps not for use on Linux servers, but as free virtualization platform for other operating systems on Windows. If Apple ever loosens up the licencing on MacOS, it could turn 15 million PCs into Macs – overnight.

Going to vSphere — The Need to Upgrade

I have been preparing my virtual environment for a VMware vSphere upgrade. Specifically I have been going over my existing hardware with an eye towards running all aspects of vSphere including VMware Fault Tolerance (FT), NPIV, Cisco Nexus 1000V, and well everything.