As you know we have a cloud presence; we have had one for several months. Now we are evaluating the cloud to determine whether to maintain that cloud presence or move back to our local data center. We also documented some early teething problems within this cloud presence. What should be our evaluation the cloud criteria? Now that our data center is moved and fully functional, should we keep our cloud presence?
TVP Tag Archives
Automation Weaknesses
Over the last few weeks I have been struggling with automating deployment and testing of virtual desktops for my own edification. This struggle has pointed out automation weaknesses which need to be addressed for automation and the software defined data center to succeed and not only be deployed from software but also self-healing and all the great things we associate with SDDC, SDN, etc. But current automation has some serious flaws and weaknesses. In essence, in order to automate something you must have a well known exact image from which to work.
Host Deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Host deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do you deploy the hypervisors in your company? There are several different choices from installing from a CD, network install and/or PXE, to name a few methods currently available. When there are not a lot of physical hypervisors to worry about the CD installation works just fine and the need for automated installation gets stronger in direct correlation to the number of hosts.
Virtual Desktop Patching and Data Protection
Data Protection and patch management of virtual desktops, while not a sexy topic, is one that should happen on a regular basis within any organization implementing or working to implement virtual desktops. Recently, we have been testing virtual desktop software and there is a huge difference between patching and protecting data in a small number of instances and 1000s of instances. There are scale considerations as well as ease of use for file level and system recovery as well as issues with patching virtual desktops (not to mention other security issues).
OpenStack and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)
The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of “Grizzly” they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companies and technologies like that of Nicira and Virsto, both acquired by VMware, are not to be ignored.
SDDC and the Ever Expanding Control Plane
The software defined data center has the potential to expand the control plane well outside of anyone’s control by the simple fact that we do not yet have a unified control mechanism for disparate hardware (networking, storage, and compute), for disparate hypervisors (vSphere, KVM, Xen, Hyper-V), new types of hypervisors (storage and networking), and new ideas at managing SDDC at scale.