There’s evidence in the channel that organizations are growing increasingly gun-shy about following through on desktop virtualization pilots and deployments. Their uneasiness, according to virtualization experts, stems from higher than expected infrastructure costs, technical complexity and a return on investment that’s typically slower to materialize compared to server virtualization. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Desktop virtualization goes hand-in-hand with mobility, and the arrival of Windows 7 and Apple’s iPad were expected to be […]
server virtualization
Server virtualization is perhaps not as pervasive as many believe, and customers are not as locked into any particular hypervisor as many companies peddling this magic software layer might hope. This info comes from the latest V-Index survey from Veeam Software, a maker of add-on management tools for VMware’s ESXi hypervisor, which is conducted on a quarterly basis in the US, UK, France, and Germany. The survey only talks to fairly large companies – those […]
As enterprises adopt storage and server virtualization strategies, they are realizing that monitoring, reporting, and managing such an environment actually increases the complexities of storage management. This has been a challenge even in a physical environment as administrators try to understand the resources upon which business-critical applications depend. This assumes a higher degree of complexity in a virtual environment, wherein physical storage is now separated by two or more degrees from the application, making a […]
Small and medium businesses have yet to fully embrace server virtualization, and ones that have already deployed the technology aren’t paying enough attention to backup and security in virtual environments. That’s the takeaway from a recent Symantec-commissioned survey of 658 businesses worldwide, which ranged in size from 5 to 240 employees and spanned a variety of industries. The survey, conducted in May by Applied Research and published by Symantec on Wednesday, shows that 70 percent […]
Enterprise-level business and IT executives and decision-makers may now have a greater understanding of the benefits of private and hybrid cloud computing environments, but a new study has found that there is still a large gap between expectations and the reality of what cloud computing and virtualization offer. Symantec’s “2011 Virtualization and Journey to the Cloud Survey” surveyed 3,700 executives and decision-makers from 35 countries about their perspectives on the adoption and deployment of private […]
In organizations’ mad rush to virtualize their IT infrastructure, some are running into unforeseen obstacles that cause them to put the brakes on virtualization deployments, sometimes indefinitely. This phenomenon, known as “virtualization stall,” has more to do with psychology than technology, but it could potentially erode confidence in virtualization and slow growth of cloud computing. According to solution providers, virtualization stall has several root causes: Some companies are unwilling or afraid to virtualize their tier […]
By now, most IT professionals are familiar with server and application virtualization. But Microsoft says it’s time to get ready for the next layer: server application virtualization. This new capability is now available in beta as part of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and will hit general availability later this year as part of the larger System Center 2012 release, Microsoft said this week. Microsoft isn’t the first vendor to virtualize server applications, but it […]
Citrix CTO Simon Crosby looks back at 2010 in the cloud computing sector–and ahead at what 2011 may bring–and isn’t very comfortable with a number of things emerging on the security side of that very hot business. Crosby has become a go-to resource for knowledge in virtualization, cloud computing and data security. He was founder and CTO of XenSource prior to its acquisition by Citrix for $500 million in 2007. Previously, Simon was a principal […]
When we first heard about cloud computing, public clouds got most of the attention. But as IT managers looked at the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall, they turned their attention to private clouds, which analysts and various surveys suggest will get more enterprise investment in the next few years. But private clouds have their share of challenges too. There are management issues and operational processes to figure out. And, of course, […]