by Chris Wolf | September 20, 2011 | 6 Comments
Remember the days of Windows NT Server? I was among the many who mocked it as a serious data center server operating system. Then came Windows 2000 Server, and perceptions began to change. With the release of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft turned the tide of server OS dominance in the data center, placing Microsoft on [...]
Category: Server Virtualization Tags: microsoft, vmware
by Chris Wolf | September 8, 2011 | 4 Comments
In a recent Gartner field search study, two early internal IaaS cloud adopters noted that if Amazon was the benchmark by which they are measured in terms of cost, then they had to make tough decisions regarding best-of-breed vs. good enough. In particular, the two clients cited whether deploying a third party virtual switch (i.e., [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Tags: citrix, microsoft, vmware, vmworld
by Chris Wolf | April 12, 2011 | 5 Comments
Today VMware announced the launch of Cloud Foundry – a cloud service that makes it easy for developers to get started with VMware’s Open Platform-as-a-Service (Open PaaS) offerings. VMware CTO Steve Herrod offered good insight into VMware’s plans for Cloud Foundry in this post. In case you missed it, last week Steve Herrod blogged about [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Tags: vmware
by Chris Wolf | December 21, 2010 | 2 Comments
This week Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been in the news for offering a tool that imports VMware VMs to the Amazon cloud. You can read the announcement on the AWS blog here. While this is a good and important step for Amazon, the announcement reminded me of a conversation I frequently have with clients [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Tags: amazon, vmware
by Chris Wolf | November 10, 2010 | 9 Comments
Today EMC’s Chad Sakac blogged about a significant update to Oracle’s support policy for VMware ESX environments – Oracle no longer explicitly excludes Oracle RAC from being virtualized. It should also be noted that Oracle’s support is limited to “issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Virtualization Tags: amazon, citrix, microsoft, oracle, vmware
by Chris Wolf | September 16, 2010 | 10 Comments
Today the Wall Street Journal reported “VMware in Talks to Buy Novell Unit.” The rumor likely comes as no surprise to those who have followed the recent VMware/Novell OEM agreement. The agreement resulted in VMware including a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) subscription with vSphere licenses. VMware and Novell first started talking about an extended [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Virtualization Tags: microsoft, novell, oracle, vmware
by Chris Wolf | August 11, 2010 | 2 Comments
I have three sessions at this year’s VMworld North America conference and thought I would post them here in the event you’re interested in attending one of them. Each session will run two times, and the session descriptions, times, and locations are listed below. I hope to see you at the conference. The in-depth discussions [...]
Category: Client Virtualization Cloud Server Virtualization Tags: citrix, microsoft, vmware, vmworld
by Chris Wolf | August 5, 2010 | 14 Comments
Today I was working with a client on their next generation data center architecture. They are building a highly virtualized data center with the goal of offering cloud IaaS to other departments within the organization. While talking about VM templates we discussed a favorite topic of mine – virtual hard disk structure. For several years, [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Tags: hyper-v, Virtualization, vmware
by Chris Wolf | July 16, 2010 | 3 Comments
On Monday VMware announced the release of vSphere 4.1. VMware published a document describing the new features, and I also recommend checking out VMware CTO Steve Herrod’s post as well as Eric Siebert’s great vSphere 4.1 links post. I was planning to link to several good perspectives on the vSphere 4.1 release, but Siebert’s “links” [...]
Category: Cloud Server Virtualization Virtualization Tags: vmware
by Chris Wolf | July 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
On Tuesday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced the availability of the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Since Azure was first announced, I had been advising clients that an on-premise Azure offering was only a matter of time. With Tuesday’s announcement, Microsoft took a first step toward an Azure platform that is capable of [...]
Category: Client Virtualization Cloud Server Virtualization Virtualization Tags: WPC10
