Virtualization management

Some Common Sense Ideas When Designing a Virtualization Environment

This is my attempt at putting together something that every sysadmin and supervisor should have when they look at whether to take the next step in virtualization - a Common Sense (tm, patent-pending, sm, r) guide to putting virtualization in place. Truth be told, it works with any server...

Is Xen ready for the data center? Is that the right question?

Article after article and post after post have compared and contrasted Xen, VMWare, Veridian, and a host of other...

Virtualization Today and Tomorrow

A couple of weeks ago I spoke with Alex Barrett regarding what I though was a talk on the direction of the server virtualization landscape. Our conversation resulted in her article "Xen...

Parallels Server

While browsing another blog, the famous virtualization.info, I came across a very interesting story of Parallels making an alpha...

The next big hassle: SOAs will pose bigger management problems than power and cooling

If it's not one thing, it's another. Today, it's data centers' power and cooling hassles. Tomorrow, according to researcher Jerry Murphy, "your next big problem will be managing your service-oriented architectures (SOAs)." Murphy, senior vice president and service director for Robert Francis Group,...

BladeLogic sees virtual environments

I chatted with Vance Loiselle, the vice president of marketing at BladeLogic yesterday, who told me about BladeLogic's new Virtualization Manager module for its Operations Manager suite, a configuration management tool. Talking with him gave me a little bit...

Virtual machine back up licensing challenges

Recently, I chatted with a sys admin about his experience with VM migrations and management challenges. His primary goal right now is creating backup copies of his VMs as part of his disaster recovery plan. The biggest hurdle? Licensing. Or rather, the cost of licensing, because he wants...

Good News from Novell – Update from BrainShare 2007

I just returned from the Novell BrainShare 2007 conference in Salt Lake City, and I have to say that I was very excited about the amount of attention that virtualization received at the conference. Here are some of the highlights:

• Novell and Microsoft partnership - both Microsoft and...

Virtual machines: Lost, not found?

In this blog entry, I passed on system administrators' complaints about the difficulty in tracking virtual machines in their large companies. The fact that this is a problem surprised me and also surprises...

Spiceworks with VMware

I'm a big fan of free... free as in beer and free as in speech. Sometimes that even means free as in ad-supported. NOT Adware-supported, mind you, but ad-supported free software runs second in my book to truly free open-source software. Anyone remember Pointcast? Yeah, it was a bandwidth hog in an...