May, 2008

Intel Premier IT Professional series provides virtualization resources

New vendors, strategies, technologies and capabilities seem to present themselves daily to the virtualization administrator and manager. One resource that can help is the Intel Premier IT Professional (IPIP)...

Virtualization performance benchmarks needed ASAP, vendors say

Big players in the virtualization world griped about the absence of performance benchmarks for virtual machines on CIO Talk Radio yesterday and discussed some of the issues surrounding virtualization standards.

Guests on the show included: Simon...

Xen: An endangered species in the virtualization ecosystem?

While Citrix Systems’ Xen's ubiquity may help the technology earn a legacy as the invisible hypervisor, it may also prove the most challenging next step for IT administrators and developers who want to find or develop software that leverages, supports or extends the Xen hypervisor. To understand...

VMware will cut hypervisor prices, says virtualization guru Chris Wolf

Hypervisor price competition will get intense this year as Microsoft enters the market with Hyper-V, and VMware will have to respond, says Chris Wolf.

Wolf is Burton Group's senior analyst for data center strategies, and he's probably everyone's go-to expert on virtualization.  He...

Virtual machines bleed money

This blog post was written by Megan Santosus, Features Writer. A recent white paper published by Embotics Corp. on the hidden costs of virtual machines (VMs) paints just the kind of picture one might expect from a vendor of VM...

Storage utilization is a new battle

I was recently asked, "do you have any visibility of the storge utilization you provide your virtual machines?" I stopped, thought about it and said "no". However, in my situation, this is not yet a problem. A pitfall for most enterprise server virtualization strategies is in a reservation for...

VMware entering final phase of virtualization evolution: Cloud computing

As new vendors enter the x86 virtualization space, pioneer VMware, Inc. is moving on to the next frontier, cloud computing, said VMware President and Chief Executive Officer Diane Greene in her keynote address at the JP Morgan Technology Conference in Boston...

Using virtual appliances with VMware

VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace has over 800 appliances available for download over a wide range of categories that can be used in your VMware environment. For those who may not be familiar,...

Still no Linux VMware VI client

As this long running thread in the VMware forums indicates, many users are frustrated with VMware’s lack of support for a Linux-based Virtual Infrastructure client to manage VI3 environments. Currently,...

Virtual environment architecting requires network zone placement

Almost every virtualization admin that I interact with has materially changed their strategy at some point with their first generation of server virtualization before the entire project is complete. Among the strategy changes are those related to network zoning, which will become a more...