Archive for category Cloud
VMware Will be a Public Cloud IaaS Provider
Let’s face it. Sometimes being an “enabler,” is admirable. However, if you’ve seen an episode of Intervention lately, being an enabler is not always a good thing. VMware’s IaaS strategy was to enable its partners to offer vCloud services and give it’s customers near unlimited (>9,500 partners) choice of cloud providers. There was a big issue with this strategy – it assumed that VMware’s cloud partners would be A-OK with allowing customers to come and go. At the end of the day, that didn’t meet VMware’s provider partners business model. No one wants to race to the bottom of a (Read more...)
The 90s Called: They Want Their Procurement Team Back
Posted by Chris in Cloud, Virtualization on February 4th, 2013
Today I talked to a client about their private cloud architecture and pending investments. The talk hit on a lot of areas, ranging from software licensing, to vendor support, to orchestration, and finally to standardization. When we got to the topic of standardization and procurement, they couldn’t contain themselves. One member of the organization said:
We can’t even say we’re a Microsoft Exchange shop. As far as procurement is concerned, we can’t even have a standard for email.
If that sounds odd to you, then consider your investments for private cloud. Providers achieve tremendous economies of scale through high degrees (Read more...)
Heterogeneous Virtualization Trends at Gartner Data Center
Posted by Chris in Citrix, Cloud, Microsoft, Oracle, Server Virtualization, VMware, Virtualization, redhat on December 11th, 2012
Heterogeneous virtualization has been a hot topic among clients and last week at the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas I presented a session on the subject. During the session, I polled the audience on their heterogeneous virtualization plans. Fifty participants responded to each polling question.
The first question I asked was about the current hypervisors that were deployed (note that the values are the number of respondents and not a percentage).
As you can see, most participants used VMware vSphere as expected, and there was a good mix of Hyper-V, XenServer, and some RHEV and Oracle VM.
It’s (Read more...)
Catalyst 2012 and Mobile Futures
Posted by Chris in Client Virtualization, Cloud, GartnerCat, Mobility on August 3rd, 2012
This year at Catalyst we are going out with a bang, with industry heavyweights Brad Anderson (Microsoft) and Simon Crosby (Bromium) offering keen insights into mobility, application, data, and endpoint futures. If that’s not enough, some of my Gartner colleagues (Tom Austin, Larry Cannell, and Ken Agress) will share their knowledge of mobility futures as well. If you’re at Catalyst, be sure to stay through the Thursday morning sessions or you’ll miss out on great perspectives regarding future planning considerations. If you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late! Besides, is there a better place to be in August than (Read more...)
Standardization ADD: We are all Hypocrites
Posted by Chris in Cloud, Server Virtualization, Virtualization on June 21st, 2012
Standardization Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or (SADD): (n) A condition in which one professes to support standardization, yet can’t help but be distracted by the newest, shiniest object – Opex costs be damned.
I’m a hypocrite. There. I said it. It’s almost therapeutic. Are you one too?
Here’s how I see it. We are all taking part in a great conspiracy. Many of us are both victors and victims in this circular history that we can’t help but repeat. End user organizations are spending way too much on IT services, and we are all at fault. Why? Let’s start with (Read more...)
VMworld 2011: If Amazon is the Benchmark…
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., Cisco Nexus 1000V) was absolutely necessary, especially if the cost made the internal cloud less competitive with Amazon. These organizations weren’t doing apple-to-oranges comparisons either. They came up with a per-VM cost broken down by both infrastructure and management/operations software. The cost of operational software (Read more...)
VM/Cloud Mobility Town Hall at Catalyst
Posted by Chris in Cloud, Virtualization, cat11 on July 20th, 2011
Kyle Hilgendorf and I will be hosting a Twitter Town Hall at next week’s Gartner Catalyst Conference. Attendees at the conference will be able to participate in the open Q&A and white boarding session. In addition, we’re looking for folks to submit questions via Twitter as well. The topic is a good one – we’re talking about VM and cloud mobility. We spent a lot of time this year with early internal/private cloud adopters and learned a lot about problems end user organizations have with mobility. We’ll be sharing those finding not only in our Catalyst sessions, but in (Read more...)
Is VMware a Provider or Enabler?
Posted by Chris in Cloud, Server Virtualization, VMware on April 12th, 2011
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 VMware taking over operations for EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service.
So in the past week, VMware has quietly announced that it will host two cloud service offerings. I say “quietly” because there were no press releases or the usual fanfare. VMware has long (Read more...)
Hybrid Cloud Mobility: Converting the VM is the Easy Part
Posted by Chris in Cloud, Server Virtualization, VMware, amazon on December 21st, 2010
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 – when it comes to mobility, converting the VM is the least of your worries.
In some use cases such as training, the underlying hypervisor may not matter. However, for most production roles hypervisor parity remains important today. For starters, consider test and development. (Read more...)
Oracle Broadens x86 Virtualization Support, but Work Remains
Posted by Chris in Citrix, Cloud, Microsoft, Oracle, Server Virtualization, VMware, Virtualization, amazon on November 10th, 2010
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 to be as a result of running on VMware.” In other words, if it’s not a known bug, customers may be asked to reproduce problems on the bare metal.
Like Chad, this is an issue I have blogged about repeatedly over the last couple of (Read more...)
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