Moving to the cloud! Let me be a little more precise and say moving to the public cloud. This concept has really been embraced and thrives in the consumer area but will this concept really take off in the corporate world and really should it? One of the main concepts of virtualization, in the beginning, was the ability to consolidate physical systems into a virtual environment to shrink the overall foot print size as well as being able to take advantage and use all available compute resources available in a physical server and having centralized control of the compute, storage and networking resources.
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Licensing your Private Cloud
Both Microsoft and VMware have revamped their product suites and therefore their licensing once more and how you buy will dictate how you license (as always). It has taken a bit of time for all the information to percolate through to each corporate site and all the issues to be addressed. As we did before, let us look at licensing. We will look at first the old model of Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere vs Citrix Xen vs RedHat KVM. Then in a follow-on article we will look at the new cloud suite models.
New Breed of Replication Receiver Clouds
There is an ever increasing number of data protection providers creating replication receiver clouds as they team up with cloud service providers. This could herald the end of on premise tape use for some enterprises, leaving tape to be used primarily by cloud providers. There are major benefits for Quantum, Zerto, Veeam, and others to form replication receiver clouds, but these clouds are not just or storage anymore. They could be purely for storage, but this is not a big win for the cloud service providers. So why would cloud service providers be interested in being a storage endpoint for data protection? Why are they concerned with backup and offering it as a service?
Microsoft and VMware: Two Different Paths to the Future
Now that VMword 2012 San Francisco is over and I have some time to reflect on my virtualization thoughts in general before getting ready for VMworld Barcelona. One thing I took noticed with the recent announcements about vSphere 5.1 and Hyper-V 2012. Microsoft and VMware both released a specific new feature to each platform respectfully at basically the same time. Is this a sign that Microsoft is really closing the gap on VMware? I think we are getting there but I have also made some other personal observations on how I think both see virtualization in the future and I foresee a completely different method and mindset for the future between these two companies.
Type 0 Hypervisor – Fact or Fiction
While looking around the web for anything new with virtualization, I kept seeing more and more posts and articles about the new type of virtual hypervisor. Type 0, now this sounds interesting and I found these definitions for each type of hypervisor.
Defense in Depth: Encryption within the Virtual Environment
The 5/31 Virtualization Security Podcast we spoke to High Cloud Security about encryption as a defense in depth, and where to place encryption within the virtual environment. This lead to an intriguing discussion about what is actually missing from current virtual environments when it comes to encryption. We can encrypt within each VM and we can encrypt within the networking fabric, as well as within the drives themselves, but currently that leaves several vulnerabilities and unencrypted locations that can be used as attack points. While we concentrated on vSphere, what we are discussing applies equally to all hypervisors.