Vyatta: Building Block for Brocade SDN Plans

Brocade has stated they will buy Vyatta for an all cash deal. This is good news for Vyatta and perhaps a way for Brocade to partake of software that could rival VMware’s purchase of Nicira when Vyatta’s own SDN features are married with Brocade Ether Fabric technology. Brocade has been in the software business for a while now, but only with respect to their own hardware. With Vyatta, they will shortly own a building block to allow Ether Fabric to extend into the virtual and cloud environments. It would be short sighted to say this is just an SDN play, this purchase shows there is quite a bit of benefit to Brocade.

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.

Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity v5.2: does it out sense AppSense or haze Mirage?

ProfileUnity FlexApp is capable of presenting organisations with a comprehensive user environment management solution encompassing both user virtualization and a virtualized software distribution system. v5.2 adds user rights elevation, machine settings support and profile migration reporting. How does ProfileUnity stand against key competitors in the market with this new release?

Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

One topic that gets discussed quite often is Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere and a quick Google search will return at least several hundred thousand hits. There seems to be a large number of posts and articles trying to make a case for which version is better by listing and comparing features one by one of the hypervisor itself. The purpose of this post is not to campaign which platform is better than the other. Is that the best way to really compare the different virtualization technologies as a whole or should we take a step up to a higher point of view and really look at difference in approach for the virtual infrastructure and/or virtual ecosystems?

Cisco Nexus 1000v: Free unless you want Security

While not particularly new news, the next version of the Cisco Nexus 1000v will be free, unless you want the security features. This is an interesting shift from Cisco with respect to VMware vCloud Director, the Nicira purchase, furthering UCS, and Cisco within non-UCS data centers. However, given other announcements, with respect to OpenStack, perhaps this is more a play to level the playing field between cloud architectures? But what I find most interesting, is that the changes to the Nexus 1000v also align with the changes we see in the vCloud Suites from VMware.