May 19, 2012

VMware Virtual Datacenter Operating System: Heavyweight or Hot Air?

NTS Barrage Balloon

Paul Maritz of VMware dropped a bomb on Las Vegas today, introducing their Virtual Datacenter Operating System concept. But is VDC-OS a nuclear strike at the heart of the data center, scattering everyone from Microsoft to Cisco to (big daddy) EMC? Or is it just more hot air, conflating the latest big thing into a [...]

Xen 3.3 Update Brings Paravirtualized SCSI

PVSCSI gives virtual machines direct access to SCSI and FC HBAs, and plays nicely with NPIV (Xensummit diagram by Fujitsu)

One of the new features in Xen 3.3, released this week, caught my eye: Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), which allows a guest OS to directly interact with a SCSI (or Fibre Channel) HBA. This should allow more specialized applications to be virtualized in Xen environments that use SCSI or FC storage without requiring the addition of [...]

VMware Acquires Virtualization Management Firm, Dunes

There was lots of speculation last month about what VMware would do with all that post-IPO cash. Well, today at VMworld, the company announced it had acquired Swiss virtualization management company, Dunes. This just hit the wires, and there’s no information as of now on either company’s web site. It looks like this will add [...]

SRM For VMware (Thank God!)

So Symantec’s CommandCentral version 5.0 includes VMware-integrated SRM.  Thank god!  Has anyone out there been banging their head against the wall trying to figure out what’s taking up all their unstructured filesystem space?  Well trying to get that information in a world of VMware virtual servers is like drilling through your forehead with an auger.  [...]

Storage Management Integrated with Server Virtualization (Where’s EMC?)

XenSource just announced that they’ll embed Symantec-née-Veritas‘ server-side storage virtualization software into their server virtualization offering. This is great news, since server virtualization has boiling for more than a year now with precious little storage integration to be seen. Although XenSource is a distant second in the world of server virtualization, they’re close enough to [...]