Now that you've stood up your bright shiny new virtualization pod, all of your OS management issues are behind you, right? Not so fast. Virtualization does nothing for you in patch and configuration management, and can actually exacerbate the problem. Many workflows surrounding virtualization lean toward image based techniques, which can be more of a problem than traditional bare-metal techniques. Let’s look at the problems of image management and how you need a systems management solution in a virtual environment as much, if not more, than you do now.

Not new to the dance, the perennial wallflower, virtual desktop, is now showing up on people's dance card.  As administrators and managers realize the benefits of server virtualization, virtual desktop is coming to the forefront of the virtual discussion.  Centralized management of the desktop has clear advantages, but until recently desktop virtualization had pitfalls that made it untenable for most shops.  The open source SPICE protocol looks to change the playing field. Late last year,

The Federal Government has recently embarked on an initiative to consolidate its 1,100 data centers - the advertised primary objective being cost reduction, primarily through energy savings. While a simplistic approach to consolidation (virtualize everything and use lots of Clouds) may be tempting, changes taking place in the IT industry argue for careful consideration of the technology suites now coming to market. The storm that I see rising is the war between Oracle-Sun, H

Please welcome NetBackup version 7 to the Symantec NetBackup family of products!  One of the feature enhancements in this version that I am really excited about is the VMware ESX backup utilizing the vStorage API.  Prior to NetBackup 7, it was required to setup and configure a VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) proxy server to backup VMware guests with NetBackup.  This required you to potentially add additional hardware, an additional operating system license, and another device/layer to troubleshoot when things are

My interest in virtualization started many years ago, and I have played with Xen, Zones, VmWare, etc.  VmWare is without question the 800 LB gorilla in this space.  They have many, many great features that come at a price.  Sun XVM is a solution that is not quite as mature but comes at a cheaper price and Virtualbox is free and competes with VmWare Player. Sun now has a product line ready for cloud computing:

• CMT Systems
• Intel/AMD Systems

Most features in Storage Foundation are supported in a VMware environment, but let’s focus on the features that work differently in VMware environment and why certain features are not supported. Storage consumed by a virtual machine can be allocated directly over the virtual machine network interface (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI protocols), by passing the virtualization layer, and is therefore not affected by virtualization. VMware certification mark means that Version 4.1 and 5.0 of VERITAS Storage Foundation has been certified to run in a VMware Virtual Machine environment.   VMware server

Virtualization is very much on the minds of IT managers this year. Some have the vision of a low power, smoothly running, optimized data center; thinly staffed but capable of provisioning new users almost instantaneously (AKA 'Nirvana').

In my previous blog  IT Services Delivery- “From the Ground to the Cloud”, I touched on the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Service Transition; 4) Service Operation; 5) Continual Service Improvement, as they pertain to “physical” –  non-virtualized IT environments.  For this blog, I will examine the pillars 1) Service Strategy and 2) Service Design, as they pertain to virtualized or cloud based IT environments.  IT Service Strategies in virtualized environment

With the recent rush over the last decade to virtualize everything in the enterprise and products being marketed with “Green” or “Cloud” somewhere in the tagline, you would think that there was nothing left to virtualize.  If you make that assumption, you would be wrong. In many cases virtualization has truly consolidated the overall data center footprint, brought high availability to most environments that would otherwise not have it, and simplified the management of our overall servers.  I am quite sure the list can be elaborated on to include several points about being

With the release of Netbackup 7.0 scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, I wanted to give you my take on the substantive features. There are three:

1. Expanded protection and recovery for virtualization NetBackup 7.0 is going to reduce the hardware requirements for VMware by eliminating the need for a Proxy Server for off-host backups.