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 […]
virtual machines
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While conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosby, says virtualization actually holds a key to better security. Isolation — the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context — is a fundamental characteristic of virtualization that can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, says Crosby, a creator of the […]
More and more enterprise IT shops – as they get comfortable with virtualization practices in their own private clouds – are considering a jump to the public cloud. But before making that leap, consider these pieces of advice from those that have already jumped. 1. Make sure your provider has VM-specific security “Hypervisors were never really designed to be running in a public environment,” says Beth Cohen, senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, a […]
If you came here for the article with the title, “How Cloud Computing Will Change IT”, unfortunately, it has been removed at the request of the publisher of the website from which it was obtained. Asking me to remove it was within their rights, but I believe it was a shortsighted decision based on old media ideas about the copyright “protection” of assets and the imagined potential loss of ad revenue. I am not competing […]
The move to almost fully virtualized computing environments is driving a fresh approach to security [1] in the enterprise, according to information technology security managers applying controls for VMware and Microsoft [2] Hyper-V. “We’re very close to being 100 percent virtualized,” says Gurusimran Khalsa, systems group supervisor in the state of New Mexico’s human services department. That organization’s servers are based on VMware’s vSphere, and a virtual desktop project is being started, too. The agency’s […]
After a delay due to a complicated vendor-authorization process, the General Services Administration (GSA) is finally offering cloud computing services via its Apps.gov website. Federal agencies now can order from a menu of three Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings–cloud storage, virtual machines and Web hosting–from service providers that have received GSA authorities to operate (ATOs) to offer them. It was the process of acquiring ATOs that delayed the GSA’s plans to offer IaaS on […]
Traditional systems management has been obscured in large part by the advent of cloud, where, after all, the promise is cheap, automated infrastructure you don’t have to manage, just use. But as the public cloud paradigm has proven out, more and more businesses, both small and large, want to replicate that success in their own operations. For some small businesses, the case for cloud is pretty obvious. Chuck Spalding, a hydrogeologist with McDonald Morrissey Associates, […]
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 […]
It may sound like a PR ploy, but “cloud computing” truly is a different way of using technology resources, and more firms are adopting it. If your head hasn’t been lost up in the cirrus or cumulus, you’ve probably heard of cloud computing over the last few years. “The cloud” has figured prominently in President Obama’s technology initiatives, in the business plans of familiar tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and even in […]
Researchers propose using hacker tactics to secure cloud computing systems. Handing sensitive data over to a cloud computing provider makes many companies skittish. But new software, called HomeAlone, could help them come to terms with using such services. Cloud computing can save companies money by providing inexpensive, flexible storage and processing resources that are managed for them. All the same, many companies remain hesitant to turn their data over to a third party. Cloud computing […]
Four years ago, data center server utilization was just 18 percent. To put it another way, on average 82 percent of the server capacity in major data centers was underutilized. Given all of the emphasis on server virtualization in the last few years, you’d expect utilization to have increased sharply. But it hasn’t. According to Gartner research, overall utilization is still at 18 percent — and utilization of x86 servers is one-third lower at 12 […]
This article is based on the book “Creating the Infrastructure for Cloud Computing: An Essential Handbook for IT Professionals” The virtualization models for clients are, arguably, more diverse than those for servers. For servers there are essentially two, the earlier model of static consolidation and the more recent dynamic model where virtual machines lightly bound to physical hosts can be moved around with relative ease. With virtualized clients there are also two main models, depending […]
The industry reached a “virtual” tipping point in 2009 when, according to IDC, the number of newly installed virtual machines surpassed the number of newly installed physical servers. This inflection point is having a profound impact on how we manage, secure and provision IT resources. No doubt the network will look completely different in just a few years too, but here are five predictions for how virtualisation will change networking in 2011. 1. VLAN technology […]