vSphere 4 – now with free SUSE Linux

I you buy vSphere 4 (or 4.1) after June 9th, you get a free copy of SLES to run on any CPU on which you have a valid license for vSphere. This lines up SLES on vSphere alongside Windows on Hyper-v, in both cases the O/S and the hypervisor are supplied under the same license. This obviously lines up SLES on vSphere alongside Windows on Hyper-v, in both cases the O/S and the hypervisor are supplied under the same license. In the long term, Licensing SLES leaves out a tantalizing prospect that VMware can build its own semi-official version of Azure, using vSphere, SLES and Mono, without a Windows server operating system in the mix.

If the Virtualization Security Products had no Firewall?

The security companies are looking into all aspects of virtual environment introspection to label, tag, or mark all objects for compliance reasons, inspect the contents of virtual machines for asset management (CMDB), and an early form of Root Kit detection.
Virtualization Security is not just about the firewall, it is about the entire ecosystem, auditing, compliance, and object management.

Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems

PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.

VMware Spring + Google: Dramatic PaaS Progress and New SMT Concerns

Java based applications can now be moved between not only a SpringSource TC-Server Java platform on VMware vSphere, but also between the same platform on VMForce, and now Google AppEngine. This level of support from VMware, Salesforce.com, and now Google is starting to make SpringSource look like the early leading technology for PaaS Clouds. This is a significant advance in the state of PaaS clouds as there were previously no examples that offered such broad support for one platform by such a diverse set of industry leaders. However as is always the case, platform advances have outstripped security, management and performance assurance capabilities.

The End of ESX is Near – Is ESXi Ready for the Enterprise?

Well the worse kept secret in virtualisation is now finally out in the open, have a read of VMware ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center:Planning your Upgrade to the next-generation hypervisor architecture where they state that “In the future, the superior architecture of ESXi will be the exclusive focus of VMware’s development efforts. This means that not only will the ESXi hypervisor superceed the classic ESX hypervisor in a new version of vSphere; what the time scale is, is currently unknown however it is most likely to be vSphere 5 or whatever they decide to call the next major release. What is more interesting in statement is that VMware expects their customers to upgrade their existing installations of vSphere based on the ESX hypervisor to the new ESXi hypervisor.