VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

On Tuesday VMware announced their answer to the public cloud: the vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). One of the biggest hurdles for the roughly 500,000 VMware customers has been that their on-premise, private infrastructure isn’t directly interoperable with any sizable public clouds, like Amazon AWS or RackSpace. If you want to move towards a public or hybrid cloud model you need to add additional software, like Enstratius’ offerings or VMware’s own vCloud Automation Center.

Hotlink’s Cross-Platform Management Technology

One of the companies and technology to watch is Hotlink with its Cross Platform Management Technology (winner of Best of Show, VMworld 2012). If you have not heard of this before I think you will in the near future. This technology allows you to use VMware’s vCenter Server to manage and control all major hypervisors and public clouds to include VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM), CloudStack, and Amazon EC2 all from within VMware vCenter.

Looking at vCenter Past and Present

I mentioned in my last post that I have started the process of preparing for my VCP5 exam that I need to have finished by the end of February. While I was watching the Trainsignal training video about installing and configuring vCenter, I got to thinking about how much vCenter had changed and matured over the years. Let’s start with a look at where vCenter started and where it is today.

Security of Performance and Management tools within the Virtual Environment

The problem is that not everything is as black and white as security folks desire. If we implement performance and other management tools, we often need to expose part of our all important virtualization management network to others. But how do we do this safely, securely, with minimal impact to usability? Why do we need to this is also another question. You just have to take one look at the Virtualization ASsessment TOolkit (Vasto) to realize the importance of this security requirement. But the question still exists, how do you implement other necessary tools within your virtual environment without impacting usability?