January 29, 2012

Virtual Machine Mobility: Of What, and to Where and in What State?

Stepping out of a subway car is an entirely different matter when it's moving!

Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.

Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5

VMware mucked with vSphere licensing again...

Once again, VMware added a ton of new storage enhancements to vSphere. With storage rapidly becoming the limiting factor in scalability and performance of virtual machine environments, this is no surprise. Also not surprising is the fact that major features like Policy-Driven Storage and Storage DRS (along with SIOC) are exclusive to “Enterprise Plus” licenses.

EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?

As I guessed on Friday, EMC has officially announced their Maui Atmos software layer today, calling it the “industry’s first COS (cloud-optimized storage) offering”, “a new era for IT”, and “a new category of storage.” So the new era for IT is a cloud with globally-distributed object stores with policy management? Great! But I thought [...]

Toot toot: Cut the Costs of Disaster Recovery

Swing on over to InfoStor for an enlightening article on cutting the costs of disaster recovery by the most excellent Michelle Hope.  I’m proud to be part of this article – it’s packed with common-sense advice. Not to sound too much like Mr. Toigo, but I’ve been telling people this for a long time: Rather [...]