VKernel Virtualization Blog

VKernel Modeler: No-Cost Alternative to VMware CapacityIQ

2009-11-10T07:46:00.000-05:00

VKernel is today making perpetual licenses of its Modeler software completely free until December 31, 2009. VKernel Modeler is a free alternative to the expensive VMware vCenter CapacityIQ and can be downloaded at http://www.vkernel.com/free.

Recognizing that VMware CapacityIQ’s capacity planning and ‘what if’ functionality is roughly equivalent to VKernel Modeler, Vkernel is offering anyone that downloads Modeler between now and December 31, 2009 free perpetual licensing for unlimited CPU sockets.

The free Modeler software provides VMware customers the ability to quickly plan, simulate, and validate hundreds of real-world “what if” VM deployment and resource allocation scenarios in an interactive sandbox before going live in the production environment. With VKernel Modeler, user can perform:

Capacity Planning
Interactive “What If” Modeling Scenarios
Proactive Problem Prevention
Predictive Capacity Impact Analysis

Compared to the $1,000+ per processor pricing of CapacityIQ, free Modeler is a great, no-cost alternative.

Vkernel Release Optimization Pack v. 1.1

2009-11-02T10:01:00.000-05:00

VKernel has released the v. 1.1 update of our Optimization Pack (Wastefinder, Rightsizer, and Inventory) software today. New features for optimizing your VMware ESX/vSphere infrastructure include:

Ability to choose between Level 2 or Level 3 vCenter stats
New JEOS based operating system streamlines the VKernel virtual appliance
Automated update feature ensures users have the most up-to-date version of the Optimization Pack

To see how you can reclaim 20-40% of your storage and server resources, download and try the new version today.

Virtualization Best Practices: 10 Tips to Improve 6 KPIs that Drive Down Costs, Drive up Utilization, and Improve Performance

2009-10-28T09:25:00.000-04:00

Check out this EMA/VKernel Webinar: Virtualization Best Practices: 10 Tips to Improve 6 KPIs that Drive Down Costs, Drive up Utilization, and Improve Performance

As you look to grow your organization’s virtual data center, you must consider cost implications and how to best optimize the current virtual infrastructure. Most organizations are now between 5-30% virtualized and a lot has been learned to get there.

During this one-hour Webinar, EMA VP of Research, Systems & Storage Management Andi Mann and VKernel Founder and CEO Alex Bakman will offer their best practices for how to:

Properly and efficiently allocate resources (CPU, memory, storage, network)
Continually monitor resource utilization to identify current and future capacity problems
Safely increase virtual machine densities without impacting performance

If you are interested in learning how to optimize your virtual data center to get the most out of your virtualization hardware, software, and storage investments and, ultimately achieve the required performance and ROI, check out this Webinar now

Is VMware CapacityIQ Really GA?

2009-10-23T10:21:00.000-04:00

First of all, with the launch of its CapacityIQ, we would like to thank VMware for recognizing that capacity management and optimization is a real issue that many IT groups are struggling with. For a long time, VMware’s response to capacity management was to just enable DRS and you will be fine. Frustrated with VMware, VKernel has built up a very healthy customer base by delivering products that simply provide IT admins with the answers they need to address capacity issues and continually optimize their VMware infrastructures.

But, what we do find curious…is CapacityIQ really a ready for primetime product? It seems to have been hurried out the door. It doesn’t support VMware’s flagship hypervisor, VI4 or vSphere. It’s also available on the VMware website as a 60 day trial. Yes, that’s right…a 60 day trial. That is not a near term revenue generating product. Sure sounds like an extended Beta to us.

What’s more, when you read the CapacityIQ press release, the language they use in terms of optimization, VM right-sizing, and waste finding seems like quite the stretch for what the product can actually do. It’s really a capacity planning and modeling tool.

We would love to find out how IT admins are using CapacityIQ for:

Proper VM placement
Right-sizing VM based on actual allocations and utilizations
Reclaiming wasted or unused server and storage resources
Identifying and reclaiming current and future capacity bottlenecks

We can’t seem to figure it out. Let us know if CapacityIQ is helping you do this…

The fact, quite simply, is IT admins do not have a lot of time to search for ways to do solve these types of issues. Vendor tools are supposed to help them by quickly solving issues and saving time and costs. If you have been waiting for CapacityIQ, we encourage you to evaluate other 3rd party Vendor tools, such as our Capacity Analyzer and Optimization Pack. VKernel has been developing its tools for more than 2 years now, they are proven, and much more affordable.

It is about Deleting VMs not just Deduping VMs

2009-10-19T14:06:00.002-04:00

We are often asked, "You say that Vkernel Optimization Pack reclaims storage, but how is it different than deduping VMs that my SAN is doing in hardware?". It is very simple. Deduping works by identyfying same code and data in multiple VMs and stroing it only once. It is a great way to significantly reduce storage needed for Vmware. What deduping algorithms don't do is that they don't examnine which VMs, templates and snapshots are actually being used. For example you may have 20% of your storage consumed by VMs and snapshots that have not been powered on for the last 300 days. Do you still need them? Maybe you can just delete them.
That's what Vkernel WasteFinder does.

You may also have a very common situation where storage and memory was overallocated for each VM hoping to over compensate for the "virtual overhead". Vmware Admins are busy people and don't have the time to go back and comprare allocated to actual resource usage for every VM. Vkernel RightSizer automates this process . Rightsize has been shown to consistely find resource overallocation in 98% of VMs!! Imagine how much resource you can reclaim by just "shrinking" allocated storage and memory. You can do it safely without impacting performance!

So by "shrinking" VMs and deleting unused VMs, snapshots and templated, you can achieve about a 30% resource savings in a typical environment. This is 30% before the deduping kicks in. Deleting, Right sizing and deduping go hand in hand to use less VMware storage and save money that can be used to grow Vmware environment

VMware Resource Allocation: Like Chasing Your Tail

2009-10-16T11:41:00.000-04:00

Resource (memory, CPU, and storage) sharing is essential to realize the inherent benefits of VMware and virtualization. To many, resource sharing is a new concept that was non-existent in the traditional client/server computing environment. As a result, there are many new management challenges that must be solved.

In this ComputerWeekly.com article, “VMware: five biggest challenges of server virtualization,” Adrian Polley, chief executive at IT service provider Plan-net, summed it perfectly.

"All of this sharing means that if you give to one thing, you take away from something else, so it becomes a balancing act to understand how resources should be properly allocated," Polley says. "There are always bottlenecks and you can end up just moving them around. Because things are so interconnected, you can end up chasing your tail."

What we’re finding is that a majority of our customers are way over allocating their resource capacity to lower the risk of performance problems. However, this drives up the cost per VM and makes a VMware ROI unattainable. And, now, as organizations look to the next phase of their virtualization projects, the pressure is on to use the extra “over” allocated resources to drive higher VM densities and lower costs. This is when you need to keep an eye on performance impacting bottlenecks as shared capacity shrinks. Does this sound like you’re chasing your tail?

Constant visibility into your allocated resources and actual usage is absolutely necessary to control costs and maximize performance. If you try doing this without automated management and optimization tools, you will be chasing your tail, your end users and management will not be happy, and the success of your project will be in jeopardy.

Top 5 Virtualization Challenges

2009-10-13T09:31:00.002-04:00

In his recent article on SearchServerVirtualization.com, Rick Vanover discussed the “Top 5 challenges of virtualization” as he sees them. Rick is an IT infrastructure manager with responsibility for large virtualization projects. Each challenge that he describes can be solved with virtualization management and optimization planning and processes. Here are Rick’s Top 5 challenges and our comments on what you need to be aware of:

Be an evangelist – In order to convince people within your company that virtualization is the way to go and will save money, you must be able to prove your success.
Show me the money – Can you show an ROI? Do you have the necessary visibility to determine your costs? This is absolutely necessary to continue the next phase of virtualizing the data center.
Next step VDI? – VDI introduces many more management challenges than server virtualization. Are you ready from a management standpoint (people, process, products) to address these challenges?
Introduce shared storage – Probably the most expensive and under managed components of the virtual data center. Managing and optimizing shared storage can lead to a greater ROI and the ability to virtualize more servers without the need to purchase more expensive storage resources.
Virtualization has a “big foot” – Be careful about VM sprawl and be very diligent in your process of keeping an up-to-date VM inventory so you can gain better control of your environment. There are compliance, performance, and financial ramifications that are directly tied to an uncontrolled virtualization project.

36% of VMware admins say Storage I/0 is a problem

2009-10-12T14:17:00.002-04:00

Todd Weiss wrote a great article on SearchServerVirtualization.com It sites a Virtualization Decisions 2009 survey which asked users to identify their server virtualization challenges. Not surprisingly to me backing up VMs and managing storage I/O made the top of the list As organizations scale their VMware environments both must be done with care. In our experience in working with customers to help them optimize their vmware environment we often come across both issues. Storage I/O bottleneck is very common as organizations add more VMs. Admins need tools to determine where the bottlenecks are and which VMs are causing it. The solution is often to move the offending VMs to another host or storage.

Hey VMware, Is "Focus" in your vocab?

2009-10-08T09:29:00.001-04:00

Even billion dollar companies have to focus to stay successful. This lesson seems to be lost with VMware. So let me get this straight. VMware will continue to be the leader in server virtualization, will win against Citrix and Microsoft in desktop virtualization, will become the leader in Cloud computing, will become the leader in mobile virtualization, will become a platform company and compete against Microsoft and in its spare time will become the leader in Systems Management biz. Hmmm. Can you say "focus"?

in reference to: VMware vs. Microsoft – Management Stack Strategies | The Virtualization Practice (view on Google Sidewiki)

VMware is still in the "Clouds"

2009-10-07T12:24:00.001-04:00

When Microsot sees a $1.9B business, they go for it. VMware should be a little more concerned. For Sjostedt to say that the cost of VMware is less due to management cost of MSFT is simply absurd. Of course MSFT charges for management products, but so does VMware. If fact VM charges a lot for its management products :)

in reference to: VMware hits back at Microsoft cost criticism - ZDNet.co.uk (view on Google Sidewiki)

Enterprises Need Virtualization Management

2009-10-06T15:51:00.004-04:00

In a recent study conducted by CA and VMware, data was collected from 323 IT organizations in North America that highlights the need for virtualization management. Not really a great revelation as we have been seeing great interest in our VKernel optimization and management tools for over a year and half now. But, this research does bring virtualization management issues to the forefront of importance now, including virtual sprawl, single points of failure, increased complexity, and configuration and capacity issues.

The CA/VMware study can be found here.

Don't wait for the big management vendors to solve your issues...VKernel software products are solving these issues today for hundreds of customers. Be sure to give us a try.

Vm performance

2009-10-05T19:24:00.001-04:00

One of the better posts I have seen to explain VM performance

in reference to: 10 Years of Virtual Machine Performance (Semi) Demystified | Engine Yard Blog (view on Google Sidewiki)

Jim Cramer got it...it is all about optimization

2009-10-05T18:54:00.002-04:00

In his latest blog post Jim Cramer, the Mad Money dude from CNBC said this about VMware

With VMWare, it's all about optimization

Jim is right on the money. Most VMware shops I have spoken with believe they have reduced their data center cost by about 50% with VMware. That's the good news. The bad news is that people are paying big $$$ for storage. We at Vkernel took a look at this issue and found that on the average about 30% of this supper expensive storage is actually wasted! Shocking I know. this storage, usually fiber channel SAN, is $50 per gigabytes. The usual place of waste is in

storage over-allocation when VM was created. Nobody bothers to go back and check allocated vs used
deploying VMs and forgetting to delete them. So typical in QA environments when we deploy VMs and forget to take them down
leaving unused snapshots and templates on disk. People remember that these templates and snapshots are GIGABYTE+ files. It does not take too many to start wasting a serious amount of storage

So check our our new apps WaterFinder and Rightsizer to help you with this issue. Our users are saying they are reclaiming 30% of storage....that's big buck in VMware environment

Vmware DRS - over exaggerated claims

2009-07-09T09:20:00.006-04:00

Yesterday VMware issued a press release called "VMware vSphere^TM Provides Nearly 50 Percent Application Performance Improvement With VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

VMware DRS Enables Optimal Performance of Virtual Environments, Enabling Higher Consolidation Ratios and Lower Cost per Application

While I agree that load balancing in a virtual datacenter is a must have, I do find some of the claims in this press release a bit over exaggerated. The press release states that "These tests demonstrate how VMware DRS optimizes efficiency while providing guaranteed levels of performance. ". Guatanteed levels of performance? Vmware ESX platform does not provide a guaranteed level of performance. DRS will do its best to balance the worloads by moving VMs from one resource constrained host to a less constarained ESX host if one exists, but if there are no resources available, performance will quickly degrade.

Futhermore DRS only considers memory and cpu resources. In a typical Vmware ESX environmrent the most common resource constraint occures not in memory nor CPU. The most common bottlenecks occures in Storage I/O. As more VMs are added to ESX data center, I/O performed by additional VMs causes problems because all VMs roughly speaking read and write to the same disk. You may say that why would people put all or most VMs on the same disk or more specifcally common storage. The reason is VMotion. In order to take advanatge of vmotion, VMs have to be on common storage.

The press releases then goes on to say "DRS has eliminated the need for administrators to monitor CPU and memory for bottlenecks". Wow. I wish this was the case, but the reality is that DRS is not a substiture for capacity monitoring and capacity planning. Capacity bottlenecks can occur in memory and cpu at level ie. in VM in a host and in cluster or resource pool. what happens when you max out memory or cpu resources in a cluster created by multipe hosts. DRS moving VMs from one host to another will not ease the capacity over load if memory resources are maxed out.

We all love VMware ESX, but I think it is important for our customers to know the truth

The Need for a Capacity Manager

2009-06-30T15:43:00.003-04:00

In this latest article in Computerworld, "Hot Jobs: Capacity Manager," it states that many organizations are looking to add a capacity manager to make sure the right amount of IT resources support the business and that the IT infrastructure is fully optimized. Virtualization is the primary driver for this need as the dynamic nature of the virtual environment goes beyond traditional capacity planning.

"The rapid adoption of virtualization technology, the cloud computing trend and the pressure on CIOs to get the most return on investment from IT purchases have helped to make this a "hot job" in recent years."

With more and more of the data center becoming virtualized, the capacity planner and capacity manager positions are now increasingly more important. But in order to more effeciently do these jobs, automated tools that can help continually monitor and manage capacity and ongoing and changing resource utilization are a must. Even with dedicated people in place, manual processes of making sure there is the right balance of capacity to meet performance metrics and usage demands cannot keep up in the dynamic data center. The companies that will succeed with virtualization and achieve the ROIs that they desire will be the ones that best address capacity management with people, processes and tools.

VKernel Secure $7 Million in Round B Funding

2009-05-12T09:33:00.002-04:00

Today, VKernel is announcing we have secured $7 million in Round B funding led by new investor Longworth Venture Partners and joined by existing investors Hummer Winblad and Polaris. The entire VKernel team is very excited about this latest round of funding as it validates the hard work and countless hours everybody has put in over the last year and half. To receive this level of funding in these economic times shows that top-tier investment firms believe in our company, our people, our products, and our overall direction.

Longworth posted a Blog entry, "Our investment in VKernel," on its site this morning that captures the essence of why they chose to invest in us.

Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel, offers this statement about why VKernel is different from the other virtualization management vendors and what the funding means to the company.

"From the start, VKernel made the decision to take a different approach to this market using a high velocity sales and marketing strategy to offer low-cost, simple-to-use products that deliver instant value,” said Bakman. “As a result, we are quickly becoming a ‘go-to’ company for organizations wanting to optimize their virtual data center investments. This latest round of funding is validation of our strategy and our success to date.”

To learn more about VKernel and how we can continually help you optimize your virtual data center, visit www.vkernel.com.

Finding the Root Cause of VMware Capacity Bottlenecks

2009-04-22T09:03:00.002-04:00

With the initial release of our Capacity Analyzer about this time last year, we were helping our users get visibility into their resource utilization to better manage and optimize their CPU, memory, and storage capacity. The feedback we have received has been very positive. Over time, the biggest request we continued to hear was ‘can you show me where bottleneck problems are occurring and how can I quickly fix them before performance is drastically impacted?’

Yesterday, we released Capacity Analyzer 4.0 to our internal sales and marketing database. The public press announcement is planned for 4/28. This latest version is a major upgrade that you can download now. With Capacity Analyzer 4.0, we are now showing you the root cause of your capacity issues, where they are occurring, and providing suggested recommendations on how to quickly resolve them.

With deep drill down capabilities and advanced predictive analytics, Capacity Analyzer 4.0 helps users:

Find an average of 20% or more capacity in your existing VMware ESX data center by right sizing VMs and removing bottlenecks
Predict problems, set alerts, and proactively monitor performance and capacity
Save time, reduce costs, and relieve the headache of trying to find where your bottlenecks are

All of the functionality that has made Capacity Analyzer extremely popular and valuable has been enhanced to provide even more detailed information. Here’s a sampling of some of the new enhancements:

Peak usage analysis – see utilization peaks, averages, and when they occur
More CPU statistics – usage, peak usage, CPU ready, CPU ready peak, I/O wait
More memory statistics – usage, peak usage, swapped, swapped peak, balloon, balloon peak
More disk/storage statistics – latency, latency peak, queue latency, queue latency peak, throughput, throughput peak, swap, swap peak, I/O wait, BUS resets, commands aborted
Setting importance levels for VMs – resolution recommendations can be based on importance levels
Role based access management for different types of users
Filtering objects by name to find information faster

To see more, check out this quick overview and “how to use” video by Chris Chesley, a VKernel senior systems engineer. And, if you would like to try Capacity Analyzer 4.0 for free, you are welcome to download it today.

OVF 1.0 is Finalized

2009-04-15T09:37:00.000-04:00

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) recently released the first finished Open Virtualization Format version, OVF 1.0. We are excited about this because VKernel has been shipping its virtual server management products as virtual appliances using OVF from day one.

While we have had to educate the market about what OVF is, users of our software instantly see the benefits. Technology advances and virtualization in particular are designed to continually make things easier and more streamlined. The OVF format does exactly that by making virtual appliance deployment ever so simple and fast.

The news about OVF being finalized was quite sparse for such an interesting topic and technology. David Marshall covered it in this article, DMTF OVF Standard Reaches 1.0. And, Mark Bowker and Jon Oltsik at ESG had this to say, Why not more talk about Open Virtualization Format?

To see just how easy it is to deploy a virtual machine using OVF, we welcome you to try our products that will help you better manage your virtual infrastructure.

Documenting a VMware ESX Data Center

2009-04-06T15:16:00.001-04:00

We recently released a new free tool called SnapshotMyVM that allows users to quickly document all VMs in their VMware ESX environment. While we thought it would be a popular download, we were extremely surprised to see just how popular it was. After thousands of downloads of SnapshotMyVM over the last few weeks, we’re pretty certain that there is a big need for a tool that automates the process of documenting VMs.

From a lot of the feedback we’ve been receiving on this tool, it’s apparent that documenting VMs either is not happening today or a lot of manual work is being spent trying to do it. Documenting physical servers was difficult enough. Now, in a truly dynamic environment, there is no way to keep up with all the changes unless you use automated tools.

The idea for SnapshotMyVM came from one of our customers. There was a need to have documentation that showed VM name, server hardware, guest OS, and resource configurations. We’re enabling you to get this data and about a dozen more attributes. You can also save your data to XML formatted files to run more detailed and graphical reports in MS Excel. Having updated documentation is important for knowing what’s in your environment, troubleshooting problems, and showing you are in compliance.

If you haven’t downloaded and tried the free SnapshotMyVM tool, get it here today. We will be releasing a much more comprehensive Inventory tool this quarter that will address even greater issues.

vmware performance and wasted resources

2008-11-10T10:50:00.007-05:00

I am amazed at how many environments I see where expensive hardware resources are just plain wasted in the name of improving Vmware performance. The common areas of waste include:

-Storage. Often VMDK are allocated much bigger then they need be. This is especially painful to see on expensive fiber channel SAN storage at $30 to $50 per Gig!!

- Memory. The typical scenario is that when a server gets virtualized, admins allocate the the same amount of memory as it did when it was physical. This is a very common mistake especially if you are running similar workloads and are getting the benefit of memory reduction in ESX via TPS ( transparent page sharing)

- VMs that do nothing. They were deployed at one time and still occupy memory and storage but do nothing. Not a lot of talk about taking VMs down!

Now granted, Vmware perfomance is almost 100% dictated by available resource capacity in the core four: memory, cpu, network and storage, but blind overallocation of hardware resources is not going to help improve performance if for example you are having a disk I/O bottleneck.

Maximizing Performance with Minimal Resources

2008-10-30T11:33:00.001-04:00

Mark Bowker, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), visited VKernel earlier this week to meet with us and hear the details of VKernel’s business. He immediately turned around this Blog entry, “Investing in Virtualization With an Economic Headwind,” which really captured exactly what VKernel is trying to help our customers accomplish.

With the economy making us all nervous, organizations are taking many drastic financial measures to limit the impact on their core businesses. As a result, IT budgets are shrinking or being frozen. So despite the need to further virtualize their infrastructures to take advantage of cost saving moves, IT departments will need to find ways to do this without additional large hardware, software, and storage expenditures.

The good news is that many organizations have way over-provisioned their virtual infrastructures as a means to initially ensure optimal performance levels. There is plenty of available resource capacity out there; they just need to know where to find it and how to effectively use it. Mark Bowker does a great job of describing this for us in his blog entry.

To find out for yourself how VKernel can help you maximize performance with minimal resources, thus lowering your cost per virtual machine, we welcome you to try our products.

VirtualCenter Update 3 Release

2008-10-14T10:39:00.003-04:00

I was waiting for a new VMware update to come out - after ESX 3.5 Update 2 experienced its issues, I wanted to see if the next one would come out smooth - all looks smooth so far.

This one has some resolved some notable issues and alot of them are specific to the VI client as well as VirtualCenter.

Flex License Upgrade (upgrades the Flex License Server to 10.8.6) - but what's interesting is that existing license servers require a standalone installer - Hmmm....
WebAccess component JRE goes to 1.5.0_16 (due to security fixes).
Fixed the VirtualCenter password diplaying in clear text (only on VC 2.0 with VIC 2.5)
Connecting to an ESX Server host through VirtualCenter will not upgrade a localized VI Client (affects the Globalized Version of VC not the english only version)
VirtualCenter Server Remains Responsive with More Than 2400 Virtual Machine in a Folder Structure
Permissions Can Be Configured for Individual Virtual Machines and Resource Pools in VI Client via direct connection to an ESX server.

Virtualization and the Current Economy

2008-10-10T13:07:00.002-04:00

In his recent Blog post, “How can virtualization help when the economy falters?,” Dan Kusnetzky discusses some of the ways organizations can use virtualization technologies to reduce costs, but still provide services needed to successfully operate the business.

One of the topics he jotted down in his bulleted list strikes a chord with VKernel. He wrote, “Management and security software for virtualized environments may be the area having the biggest opportunity for cost reduction.”

Despite needing to overcome virtualization management issues, organizations continue to virtualize their data centers because of the promise of cost savings. What we are hearing from our customers is that without specific management tools cost savings and other efficiencies are not being realized. Part of the problem is understanding shared resource allocations and capacity, so that hardware can be better utilized and lower costs per virtual machines can be achieved. Fear of performance problems is now holding back IT staffs from fully utilizing the capabilities of expensive new servers that could potentially handle 50% or more added virtual machines.

VKernel’s suite of systems management solutions (Capacity Analyzer, Chargeback, Modeler) provides users with detailed insight into resource consumption and allocations to help them proactively prevent performance issues, better plan and optimize their virtual infrastructures, and maximize their investments. Our solutions provide the confidence needed to gain control of the virtual infrastructure as well as eliminate overspending by leveraging their existing equipment.

Virt + InfoSec + BC/DR

2008-10-07T10:22:00.008-04:00

AT&T has an interesting study on 2008 Business Continuity practices - its of larger enterprises - revenues larger than $25 (and I agree - smaller companies have BC Practices to but it's their survey).

"Two-thirds of IT executives predict that hacking will be the biggest threat in the next five years. "

This is pretty consistent, with infosec spending being up

"INPUT’s “Federal Information Security Market Forecast, 2008-2013” predicts that government information security spending will rise from $6.6 billion in 2008 to $9.6
billion by 2013...contract spending on information security will grow at 7.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), rising $3.0 billion over the next five years."

Information Week's 2008 Stategic Security Study also backs this up

"95% will see their budgets either hold steady or increase this year."

The industy is blending business continuity and information security together - both solving a common problem - encounter a fault or an problem and keep the systems running.

If 66% of the faults or problems are caused by hackers then BC/DR becomes intertwined with Infosec.

I want to add a third layer to this puzzle - virtualization.

It's on the rise - three big companies making virtualization products, companies are virtualizing servers and desktops as fast as they can and one of the biggest features and benefits - encounter a fault and keep the VM running.

With Site Recovery Manager, Vmotion, and newly announced stuff like VMware FT and if we add VMsafe - we want these VMs highly available, highly secure, but flexible enough to move between datacenters (SRM) or hosts (VMotion) or SANs (Storage VMotion) and we want users access them from anywhere in the world (VDI).

My concern is performance and assuring that performance levels remains the same or if it operates a dinimished capacity in a BC/DR environment, that IT shops have a mechanism and tools to keep an automated eye on resource utilization and resource capacity.

Friday Afternoon Links

2008-10-03T14:43:00.003-04:00

So I don't post a link round up that often but we had a bunch of good ones come through the system today.

This one is a bit older but if you are looking for a short intro video to XenCenter (think Xen's version of VirtualCenter).

VKernel's tools (Capacity, Chargeback, Modeler and Search) are all built on the VIM API.

So we move on to the XEN API (vs. the XenCenter API).

Finally kudos to Roger Levy for pointing out the Mono project - where folks can run .NET applications on non-Windows (i.e. Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. ) hosts/vms.

For fun, imagine a use case scenario where you to run .NET on Windows using MONO vs. Windows.

On to other Hypervisors (well Hyper-V's) - Microsoft announces a free download of Hyper-V servers - thats Microsoft-based Virtual Machines without any Windows 2008 in the way.

Lenovo announces their server lineup.

“With ThinkServer Lenovo delivers exceptionally engineered hardware and easy-to-use software all developed specifically for the SMB customer,” said Marc Godin, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Business Unit, Lenovo.

I love when a VP of Enterprise Business is the quote used for SMB customers.