At last week’s New England VMware User Group meeting in Atkinson, New Hampshire, there was no shortage of cloud talk.

Guy Bowers, senior systems engineer for VMware, started off the morning with his keynote on using Lab Manager to configure and set up virtual environments that can be disposed of once used, and he also touted vCloud Director as the tool for “providing the interface, automation and management required by enterprise and solution providers to build public and private clouds.” Attendees were still buzzing that vCloud Director will most likely be Lab Manager’s replacement, which is a conversation that really began at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco.

A VMware marketing and sales representative, who chose to remain anonymous, said cloud security continues to be the main concern voiced by potential customers. Data privacy and protection anxieties have weighed down cloud adoption since its introduction, despite the onslaught of new security tools and services from industry leaders, including IBM and EMC.

The second part of the keynote focused on virtualizing Microsoft Exchange with vSphere. Here are the top best practices to follow when testing Exchange in a vSphere cloud, according to VMware:

1. Don’t over-commit memory.

2. Set the memory to the configured size of the virtual machine (VM).

3. Make sure to right-size the configured memory of a VM

4. Enable VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to ensure workloads are balanced

The keynote also highlighted hot topics from VMworld, including a summary of the top five labs at the conference:

1. VMware View 4.5 installation and configuration

2. VSphere performance and tuning

3. VMware ESX 4.1 new features

4. VCloud Director installation and configuration

5. Basic vSphere installation and configuration

Finally, a ray of sunshine for solution providers suffering from lackluster corporate IT budgets. For the first time in three years, companies are reporting an increased budget for technology expenses in 2011, according to a Corporate Executive Board survey that’s set for publication at the end of October.

The survey gathered data from 150 companies and found that budgets for services and consulting are expected to increase to 20% in 2011 from 16% in 2009. In turn, companies will cut back on internal technology staff as more projects are outsourced.

 The survey also revealed that the anticipated 3.3% budget growth is due to new technologies, including cloud computing and data mining, and analytics tools. On the flip side, increased spending on virtual investments also means that funds for hardware will decline as more companies rely on the cloud for data storage.

Many solution providers have seen cloud computing as a somewhat mysterious model, not being sure where they fit in or how to integrate cloud applications and services into their own consulting gigs. But the same technologies that you would provide to your customers on premise – servers, monitoring and reporting tools, I/O and data networking, etc. – can all be provided through the cloud.

When developing your own cloud strategy, you have to first be able to distinguish between the different types of cloud environments (public, private or hybrid), determine which cloud services align with your expertise and finally, make sure you have the hardware and software necessary to support a cloud environment. If you’re still concerned about how cloud computing can affect your hardware sales, check out SearchSystemChannel.com’s Ezine on weighing the potential (or nonexistent) threats of cloud computing.

A few months back, I wrote an article about the rising demand for IT energy consulting services. VARs agreed that going green is more than a passing fad in the IT industry; the driving factor for customers purchasing energy-efficient technologies is simply saving money in the data center. And recent findings from Gartner say that spending on power consumption is expected to continue to pose a problem.

“Energy-related costs account for approximately 12% of overall data center expenditure and are the fastest-rising cost in the data center … cost problems are likely to worsen during the next few years as organizations grow their technology infrastructure as they emerge from a recessionary period,” according to Gartner.

The company also predicted that server shipments should grow 5% per year over the next two years and that “continuous power utilization efficiency (PUE) readings will become the norm for most large data centers.”

These findings translate into big business opportunities for solution providers. If you aren’t already offering energy consulting services, now would be the time to look into tools that can measure power consumption of data center technologies, including servers and cooling equipment.

APC just released its new InfraStruxure software that could help solution providers with analyzing energy consumption. There are also a number of third party data center energy-monitoring tools on the market from companies like Emerson’s Avocent software, Modius, 1E, and Raritan.

If word from Gartner isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of power management, check out what Yahoo! has done with its new “Chicken Coop” data center and the latest efforts from NASA to manage energy consumption.

A few months ago, I wrote about the bright future of cloud computing services. Many experts agreed that the demand for cloud computing platforms and applications would continue to increase, and it looks like their predictions are proving true. Just check out the news from the past few weeks alone:

·         VMware recently unveiled its “Move Beyond” campaign, which encourages customers to use cloud computing for data center management. VMware launched the campaign, which is expected to run through the end of the year, in response to feedback from channel partners who wanted their customers to be more aware of virtualization, according to a company blog post. And, of course, VMware is touting vSphere as the virtual infrastructure product of choice for enabling cloud computing.

·         Hewlett-Packard also made cloud headlines this week, cutting roughly 9,000 jobs and revealing plans to invest $1 billion into its Enterprise Services business. The company said it will reduce the number of its data centers by half and will focus on cloud computing initiatives, according to SearchCloudComputing.com.

As expected, VARs reeled from the news, especially since of the 9,000 jobs cut, HP will re-hire 6,000 people for sales and services delivery. In a call today with SearchITChannel.com’s advisory board, several members expressed angst over what HP’s news means for their businesses.

 “HP is adding 6,000 new service delivery and sales professionals. [So] they’re cutting 9,000 and adding 6,000 in direct competition to us,” said one member.

HP’s move means that VARs have to either stay in the trenches with two or three points in margin or figure out some sort of angle around business engineering and business processes at a higher level, said another member. Overall, board members agreed that business intelligence services are going to be a VAR’s best bet at ongoing revenue.

“Since Dell started selling direct, that’s when you started to see that vendors can make money without VARs. We’re five years out with just making money on services and implementations. We’re moving toward business intelligence, software compliance [and] workflow management, things that vendors can’t do with clients,” said board member Kevin McDonald, executive VP with Alvaka Networks.

·         Finally, Google continues to encourage cloud adoption with its new Go Google cloud calculator. Google partners can use the calculator to show customers the benefits of Google’s cloud computing applications. It asks a series of questions and uses the responses to generate custom URLs, presentations, spreadsheets and posters about the benefits that cloud computing will have for that particular company, according to V3.co.uk.

Many solution providers remain unsure of how they fit into the cloud scheme, and at least one company is trying to help in this area. Arrow Fusion, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions’ professional services business unit, is aimed at helping resellers with their service offerings.

 Arrow Fusion offers new cloud services that solution providers can use, including Security and Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), data center monitoring and management, business continuity and disaster recovery. Solution providers can implement Arrow Fusion’s SaaS offerings for email disaster recovery and archiving, Web defense and message archiving. They can also use Arrow Fusion’s services to give customers reports on data center performance and monitoring.

One thing is clear: VARs will have to work hard to compete with big vendors that are eyeing cloud services.

SearchITChannel.com’s board members agreed that small businesses and large enterprises that can afford to set up test environments for the cloud will benefit the most. But mid-sized companies and small-end VARs will find it hard to succeed as the cloud continues its ascent.