TVP Tag Archives

Ecosystems for Both VMware and Microsoft Hypervisors

Since the start of the Windows 8 Public Beta, there has been a great deal of discussions and comparisons galore. There have been points made that Microsoft Hyper-V will be good enough to draw good consideration in companies looking to the future. For me personally, feature comparison was not my first consideration. One measurement that I consider is the eco-structure of the technology or in other words, how large is the 3rd party partners and products supporting both the technologies?

Migrating to the Cloud: OpenStack or vCloud?

We, here at The Virtualization Practice, are getting ready to have a cloud presence. Since we ‘eat our own dogfood’ with a 100% Virtual Environment, we are gearing up to move some of those workloads into a hybrid cloud. We already use some cloud resources, but now is the time to look at other workloads. Why we are moving to the cloud is three fold: how can we write about various aspects of being a tenant in the cloud, if we are not one; a recent power outage at the grid level; and a upcoming data center move. Two of these reasons are all about business continuity with the first being what we do. While we already have a cloud running within our own environment, it is time to branch out.

OpenStack: What it is not….

The OpenStack conference 2012 is full of OpenStack fans, aficionados, developers, and companies making a business using the ecosystem. However, I kept hearing that openstack was a replacement for VMware. So why is this even a possibility, and why did Rackspace and now HP build public clouds using this technology? The easy answer is to save money. But is that the only answer? What is OpenStack and why is it becoming important?

ActiveState Stackato – A Diverse Private PaaS

ActiveState has created a Private PaaS that supports Perl and Python as well as Java, and is based on the Open Source CloudFoundry distribution, packaged and distributed in a VM image, or installed to a wide range of IaaS platforms (public or private).

ActiveState is well known in Open Source communities as packaging/distribution vendor for dynamic languages – Perl, Python and Tcl. A sort of Red Hat for dynamic development languages. It also has a Komodo IDE for these languages, and a strong pedigree in contributing back into the Open Source projects which it packages. Stackato is also essentially a packaging of these and other Open Source technologies. It’s an interesting take on the PaaS space – PaaS becomes a packaging problem – just like the Linux Distro. For the customer, the choice of PaaS/Distro is partly about the breadth in the package and partly the mix of pricing, support and warranty offered by the PaaS/Distro.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice To Have … Appliances for All?

I was involved with the design and deployment of a small proof of concept that would introduce virtualization to a local SMB in my area. The idea was to build them something small that they would grow into and at the same time demonstrate all the really cool things that virtualization can bring to the table. I built a couple of hosts and deployed virtual center virtually, as well as added the VMware Management Appliance and the VMware Mobile appliance. It is really fun to get a chance to introduce virtualization to people, it is almost as fun as bringing a child to a candy store. Showing the client what they can do with virtualization as well as what they can do on their iPad is just priceless.