Virtualization Round Up 20090918

Well, it’s been two weeks since the end of VMworld, and how the time has flown.  Everyone should have seen plenty of write ups on VMworld by now (so I won’t bother) and the labs and sessions are now available at the VMworld site.   Based upon comments I saw twittering about online, it appears that some people didn’t realize that the data center built at VMworld was actually in use for all the hands on labs.  VM /Etc did a great interview with the Operations Team manager for the VMworld Data Center, to provide more of the back story on that.

And so, back to the regular roundup from the past few weeks, the usual collection of things that caught my attention recently for this reason or that.  Thanks goes out to all my colleagues and my twitter network for leading me to many of these gems!

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases
  • VMware View Manager 3.1.2 was release don Sept/04 (Release Notes)
  • VMware Data Recovery 1.0.2 was released on Sept/08 (Release Notes)
  • VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager 1.0.2 was release on Sept/10 (Release Notes)
• This is not new information, but I finally had a chance to watch the Burton Group’s Debating Hypervisor Performance session from their recent Catalyst Conference.  I thought it was great to actually see VMware and Citrix stand side by side and have the performance debate in person (versus the usual venue of blog posts).  40min video makes for a perfect lunchtime edutainment.
• Looking for a VMWare View Open Client for OSX?  Ron Peters has worked to port the linux open client to run on the Mac.
• As most VMware users should now be aware, the service console-less ESXi is the stated architecture for the future.  But in the meantime a document details Changes to the ESX Service Console for ESX 4.0 has been posted tot he Communities site.  Find out what’s new, different, and incompatible between ESX 3.5 and 4.0 service console.
• Looking to reduce data center power/cooling costs?  Have you looked at DPM?  There is a new whitepaper out entitled VMware Distributed Power Management: Concepts and Usage.  One of my clients just started evaluating DPM to power off servers during low demand times with huge potential for cost savings for them.

General Virtualization Links

• EMC’s Chuck Hollis recently wrote about Chargeback vs Pricing where he discussed how Pricing can be an effective tool to force consumers to change their consumption behaviors.  I had this general discussion this week with two clients on the path to private clouds; they are interested in VMware Chargeback so they could  start exposing consumption to their virtualization users even if there is no price associated with it…just to get the IT users to start realizing what they are consuming.  IT organization who are still trying to just drive users off of physicals onto VMs can use Chuck’s advice to drive this change of behavior through pricing.
• Cloudy days ahead:  2 In 3 IT Managers Have Cloud Funding, according to a recent survey.  This jives with my experience as 66% of my clients are actively moving forward with private clouds and the expectation of a federate cloud.
• Citrix announced plans to evolve Xen into the Xen Cloud Platform.
• In what appears to be a move into the Cloud space, Tibco Acquires DataSynapse. While I’m sure some of the folks I know at DataSynapse are happy about this, I haven’t had a chance to get their take on this acquisition yet.
• Floyd Strimling has an interesting view of the the newest battle between IT Giants, Why Cisco should fear HP.