Virtualized Replication: vSphere APIs Expand

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to SRM Replication as well as ZeRTO a third party replication tool. They seem to be as different as night and day but are they? Both work within the vSphere environment to replicate virtual disks regardless of storage type, and apparently hook into the same location within VMware’s API stack. This shows a maturity of VMware’s API stack that until now has been unknown and secret. In this one area, Microsoft Hyper-V is beating VMware vSphere: The availability of well known APIs that are easy for Third Parties to use. I now see a change in VMware’s behavior, can they continue this growth?

Centralized RBAC Missing from Virtualization Management Tools

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to several virtualization and performance management tools from vKernel, NetApp, Solarwinds, Embotics, and a company still in stealth mode. With all these tools and products I noticed that each were not integrated into the roles and permissions of the underlying hypervisor management servers such as VMware vCenter, Citrix XenConsole, or Microsoft System Center. This lack of integration implies that a user with one set of authorizations just needs to switch tools to gain a greater or even lesser set of authorizations. This is not a good security posture and in fact could devolve any security to non-existent.