I was recently on an island and it got me thinking about whether a set of close islands can support a highly mobile cloud? If not what would be needed to make the Islands Cloud safer from the vagaries of Mother Nature, such as hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Can a cloud provider be based on an island? or would it need to be on every island? Only the mainland?
TVP Tag Archives
Upgrades to VMware vSphere will Impact Availability and Security!
I was upgrading my nodes from VMware VI3 to VMware vSphere and used the VMware Update Manager to perform the update. Given that my existing filesystems were implemented to meet the requirements of the DISA STIG for ESX, as well as availability. I was surprised to find that when the upgrade of the first node of my cluster completed, that the install did NOT take into account my existing file system structure, but instead imposed the default file system used by the standard VMware vSphere ESX 4 installation.
Virtualizing from an Island?
I was recently on an island and it got me thinking of how would I move my company to the island. The company services people around the world, but would also service local to the island. Does virtualization really help me here? Why do I ask this, because an island is often prone to the vagaries of mother nature: Lava, Flooding, Typhoon, Hurricane, Earthquakes, humidity, desert, power fluctuations, etc. The list is pretty endless. So how would you move a business to or from an Island? Is this where the Cloud becomes a mature component? If so how much cloud do you need?
VMsafe – Vendor Implementations at VMworld
With the advent of existing VMsafe products from Altor Networks, Reflex Systems, and ones on the horizon from Trend Micro and others in the security space, all administrators should have a clear understanding of how they work under the covers. Where does VMsafe appear within the stack? Is VMsafe on the incoming physical NICs, within the vSwitch, portgroups, or before or after the vNIC? Can we expect the other aspects of VMsafe to be the same? While I was discussing VMsafe with the vendors, VMware was also going around and talking to all the VMsafe vendors for VMware TV shots.
Is VMware trying to remake itself? To Compete with Microsoft?
With all the rebranding going on with VMware, I find it interesting that the new logo for VMware is similar to Microsoft’s logo. A single name instead of the cool boxes they used to have. Did VMware’s brand loose its focus while we were not watching? Is this why VMware is rebranding everthing? Is VMware really trying to remake itself to be more like Microsoft?
Disaster Recovery Maturity shown at VMworld 2009
Veeam, Vizioncore, and PhD Virtual all showed there latest released products as well as the future products that integrate with VMware vSphere at much deeper levels that previously available, ala the VMware vStorage API. Talk was also about expanding their products into Microsoft Hyper-V as well as Citrix XenServer. This space has become so important that even the traditional backup vendors such as Symantec (BackupExec) as well as HP (DataProtector) are getting into the act. This shows ecosystem as well as market maturity not seen at last years VMworld.