April, 2008

No virtualization-specific requirements for PCI audits

If your company deals with credit cards, you are required to follow the Payment Card Industry's data security standards (PCI DSS). The major credit card players -- Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover -- set forth these requirements in...

Using ISO files with virtual machines

ISO files offer an advantage to virtual machines (VMs), chiefly as a means of loading operating systems and applications on virtual servers without the hassle of using physical media. Many tools for creating, editing and mounting ISOs are readily available and if you haven't been creating ISOs...

Is hypervisor-based virtualization doomed?

The following is a guest blog written by Schorschi Decker, an IT professional specializing in virtualization and enterprise-level management with over 25 years of experience in the industry. Operating system isolation or hypervisor-based virtualization remains popular, but are we settling...

Choosing your next virtualization project

For organizations with an established server virtualization environment, future virtualization projects are looming on the horizon. Whether it is desktop or application virtualization, much deliberating will undoubtly be given to the best product for the new virtualization endeavor -- as it...

Attend the best of VMworld (virtually)

Didn't attend last year's VMworld? Don't worry: You can download many of the sessions for free from the VMworld website.

VMware has been gradually releasing the sessions on the website. After last year's conference, VMware chose not to...

VMware Certified Professionals command higher salaries, report shows

It's been six months since I posted about the value of the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certificate, and I thought I'd provide an update. As the...

VMware’s ESX 3i for free?

The Inquirer recently published a story on how Dell is considering giving away VMware VI 3i licensing on its PowerEdge servers. While I won't rehash the details of the rumor here, I'll...

Virtualization of Citrix Presentation Server in VMware calculations

In following with Joe Foran's recent blog about virtualizing Citrix Presentation Server (PS) systems, I too have had success with this practice. I took...

VMware white paper review: “Comparison of storage protocol performance”

Since I just love to read white papers (n.b., sarcasm), I grabbed a copy of VMware's Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance. Actually, I found it to be a good read. It's short and to the point. This sums...

Saving money by using virtualization

As part of a business case to justify our server consolidation/virtualization project, I had to show the benefits of what the project would provide. Virtualization provides a lot of "soft" benefits like reduced administration, maintenance costs, head count, etc. but one of the "hard" benefits is...