Will the SDDC Be the Norm in Two Years?

Come on, let’s get real here. The software-defined data center may become the norm in two years in the gilded cages of Silicon Valley, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and the other “centers of excellence” out there. But in the real world—you know, the one where companies are still using NT4 servers to deliver real and …

Privileged Accounts within SDDC

As your software-defined data center (SDDC) grows, so does the quantity of privileged accounts. This was the discussion on the Virtualization Security Podcast of February 13, 2014, where we were joined by Thycotic Software. Privileged accounts are used by administrators and others to fix issues, set up new users, add new workloads, move workloads around …

Network Virtualization: Not Just for the Service Provider

Many network virtualization products appear to be aimed at the top 10,000 customers worldwide, accounting for their price as well as their published product direction. While this is a limited and myopic view, many claim it is for the best, their reason being that network virtualization is only really needed by the very large networks. The more I think about this approach, the more I believe it is incorrect. Let us be frank here. Most networking today, within many different organizational sizes, is a hodgepodge of technologies designed to solve the same problem(s) over and over: how to get data quickly from point A to point B with minimum disruption to service.

The Software Defined Data Center

The Software Defined Data Center: That was pretty much the biggest takeaway from this year’s VMworld in San Francisco. VMware made announcements about the new vSan that will be coming out soon and will enhance the software defined storage aspect and also the announcement about the NSX platform that addresses one of the final hurdles, network virtualization, to pave the path to finally have a completely software defined datacenter.

Testing within the Virtual Environment

There has long been a debate about testing products within a virtual environment. Not just on how, but the why as well as the what to test. There are limits in some EULA’s as well on the reporting of such testing. This was the subject of the 7/25 Virtualization Security Podcast (#112 – Virtualization Security Roundtable) held Live from NSS Labs in Austin, TX. Where we delved into the issues of testing within a virtual environment. While the discussion was about security products, it is fairly straight forward to apply the concepts to other products within the virtual environment.

Public Cloud Use Cases

There are different public cloud use cases. Here at The Virtualization Practice we moved our datacenter from the north to the south part of the country and utilized the cloud to host the workloads during the transition. Edward Haletky, yesterday posted about Evaluating the Cloud: Keeping your Cloud Presence and presented the question and his thoughts of is it worth staying in the cloud or bringing the data home.