cloud computing

VMware: Hyper-V turns Windows into DOS

The trash talk in the Microsoft vs. VMware feud once reached Reggie Miller vs. Spike Lee heights. The two companies rarely passed up the opportunity to disparage, make fun of or even spread lies about each other.

But things had quieted down lately, and a lot of the more recent trash talk just rehashed old criticisms and insults. That is, until VMware issued its “Competitive News Flash” about Hyper-V R2, which compares “Microsoft myths” to “VMware realities.” (Hmm, where have we heard that before?)

The four-page document, marked “confidential,” is to help VMware resellers “understand VMware’s positioning in regards to Microsoft’s virtualization offerings and to respond to customer questions about Hyper-V R2.”

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VMware: Amazon, Google and Azure aren’t real clouds

VMware is going to be a cloud company. A real cloud company.

That was the message at Thursday’s New England VMware User Group summer meeting in Brunswick, Maine. Mike DiPetrillo, VMware’s global cloud architect, described the one thing that will set VMware apart from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other cloud providers: interoperability.

“These guys are completely proprietary,” DiPetrillo said, referring to Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft Azure.

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Cisco hires Christofer Hoff as virtualization director

Cisco Systems has a new virtualization and cloud computing director: Christofer Hoff, the security and virtualization expert and popular blogger.

Hoff, aka “Beaker,” runs the Rational Survivability blog and has held high-ranking security positions at several IT vendors and other firms — albeit none as big as Cisco. They include Unisys, Crossbeam Systems and the WesCorp federal credit union.

His hiring at Cisco comes as the networking giant is making its move into the virtualization and data center markets with its Unified Computing System.

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Microsoft TechEd, virtualization and you

Windows 7 is supposed to be the star of next week’s Microsoft TechEd show in L.A., but the conference will also have a ton of stuff for all you virtualization users out there.

Some sessions will focus on Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2, System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 and other products. Others will cover cloud computing, green IT and more hot topics in virtualization. I’ve just gone through the entire agenda to set my schedule, and I’ve picked out what look to be some of the most interesting sessions:

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VMware CIO puts kibosh on my VMware-as-cloud-provider suspicions

Ever since I learned last summer that VMware had leased a massive 100,000 square feet of data center space along the Columbia River in East Wenachtee, Wash., I’ve always assumed that they would eventually become a cloud computing provider, and not just a provider of the underlying cloud infrastructure software. Turns out I was wrong.

At a lovely dinner for press and analysts at L’ecrin in Cannes tonight, I had the pleasure of speaking with VMware’s CIO Tayloe Stansbury, who assured me that the company has no designs on becoming a cloud provider. Not that they didn’t consider it. But the more they thought about it, the more they came to the conclusion that it would be reckless to compete with their partners (folks like Savvis, T-Systems and Terremark), Stansbury said.

So what are they doing with that ginormous data center in East Wenachtee? Testing and development, pure and simple. “It’s one of the ironies of being VMware that we have to develop our code on physical hardware,” Stansbury said. In order to assure that ESX can effectively virtualize workloads on any x86 system, VMware’s R&D must test the code against every conceivable server and storage platform. These days, all that hardware is being shipped to East Wenachtee, where it runs on electricity that costs two cents per kilowatt hour, versus the 20 – 30 cents per kilowatt hour VMware pays for power in the places like Palo Alto and Cambridge, Mass.

So I stand corrected (it won’t be the first time). Going forward, I hope VMware decides to share further details about its new data center.