Hyper9 - The Collective

Analyst Firm Gartner Cautions 'Tighten Up Virtual Server Security'

David Marshall — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:38:00 GMT

On Monday, Gartner announced a new and interesting report discussing security within virtual infrastructures. It stated that through 2012, nearly two thirds of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace. Wow, that's pretty staggering! Virtualization doesn't remove the need for security, but it does seem to often make folks a little more lax when it comes to processes and procedures for some reason.

The good news? Gartner predicts that by 2015, that number will decrease by half - where only 30 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical machines being replaced. Still, even that number seems pretty disturbing.

So why is that?

"Virtualization is not inherently insecure, but most virtualized workloads are being deployed insecurely as a result of the immaturity of tools and processes and the limited training of staff, resellers and consultants," said Neil MacDonald, vice-president and Gartner fellow.

Agreed. And virtualization management software needs to be easier to use, remove the complexity of the technology, provide better visibility, and have more collaboration between teams to help remove that old department silo mentality.

Gartner also states that at the end of 2009, only 18 percent of enterprise data center workloads that could be virtualized had been virtualized. However, they see that number increasing to more than 50% by the close of 2012.

The research and analyst firm identified six of what Gartner calls the most common virtualization security risks:

Information Security Isn't Initially Involved in the Virtualization Projects - Survey data indicates that 40% of virtualization deployment projects were undertaken without involving the information security team in the architecture and planning stages.
A Compromise of the Virtualization Layer Could Result in the Compromise of All Hosted Workloads - Gartner notes that hackers have already begun targeting this layer to potentially compromise all the workloads hosted above it.
The Lack of Visibility and Controls on Internal Virtual Networks Created for VM-to-VM Communications Blinds Existing Security Policy Enforcement Mechanisms - Most virtualization platforms include the ability to create software-based virtual networks and switches inside of the physical host to enable VMs to communicate directly. This traffic will not be visible to network-based security protection devices, such as network-based intrusion prevention systems.
Workloads of Different Trust Levels Are Consolidated Onto a Single Physical Server Without Sufficient Separation - At a minimum, enterprises should require the same type of separation required in physical networks today for workloads of different trust levels within the enterprise data center.
Adequate Controls on Administrative Access to the Hypervisor/VMM Layer and to Administrative Tools Are Lacking - Gartner recommends restricting access to the virtualization layer as with any sensitive OS and favoring virtualization platforms that support role-based access control of administrative responsibilities to further refine who can do what within the virtual environment.
There Is a Potential Loss of Separation of Duties for Network and Security Controls - Gartner recommends that the same team responsible for the configuration of network topology (including virtual LANs) in the physical environment should be responsible for this in virtual environments.

Why is Virtualization Management Adapting Slowly?

Dave.McCrory — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:50:00 GMT

When looking at the majority of management solutions for Virtualization presently available, the first thing that may strike you is that these solutions and products don't seem all that different from what was available 5 or ever 10 years ago. There are many reasons why this has occurred, the chief among them is a legacy base on which most of these products have been designed. Just like Microsoft Windows has traditionally offered backward compatibility for Windows based applications, most management...(read more)

Can Virtualization help IT become more Business Aligned?

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:38:39 GMT

This is a question that is often asked by CIOs and LOB Managers, but the answer seems to be different from company to company. All companies want (or at least should want) IT to be aligned with the business, to support business groups and the goals of the business. Companies also want IT to be able to tie themselves to different business functions to more easily adapt to the needs of the business. Traditionally, IT has been more of an independent business unit providing services to other business...(read more)

Join Hyper9 at the Next Minneapolis VMware User Group Meeting - February 26, 2010

David Marshall — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:00:00 GMT

For those of you in the Minneapolis area, please join Hyper9 at the next Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting taking place on Friday, February 26, 2010. The VMUG meeting will begin at 1:00 PM.

Hyper9's presentation, Virtualization Best Practices around Storage, VM Sprawl, and Management Level Reporting with VMware vSphere and Hyper9, will take place around 3:00. The meeting takes place at the 3M Auditorium, Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. We look forward to meeting you at the event! Please come by before or after and speak with our team members.

And there should be plenty of drinks and snacks at the event, along with some really great door prizes during the end of day raffle. Space is limited, so please sign-up as soon as possible to reserve your seat.

Sign-up and Register for the event: http://campaign.vmware.com/usergroup/ug-signup.php?session=Minneapolis

Or click for more details: http://campaign.vmware.com/usergroup/invites/Minneapolis_2-26-10.html

When:

Friday, February 26, 2010 at 1:00PM

Where:

3M Auditorium
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota
321 19th Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Directions

Columbus, OH VMUG Meets Mother Nature

David Marshall — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:41:00 GMT

"Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow..." might be the motto of the United States Postal Service, but the VMware users in Columbus, OH and our Hyper9 team members are just as brave and share a similar belief. Even though we're from Austin, TX, we weren't going to let a little bit (or a lot) of snow stop us. Some of that can be attributed to bravery, and some of that could be the fact that we in Austin have no idea what snow is!

In spite of Mother Nature trying to ruin our fun, we had a great VMUG meeting in Columbus, OH on February 16th. I think the city received something like 8+ inches of snow that day, and a lot of businesses closed down because of it. It was touch and go for a while there; but luckily, there was a small enough window for our flight to sneak through and arrive in Columbus without being diverted somewhere else.

Thanks to everyone who made the journey and came out to the meeting. And thanks to VMUG leaders Randy and Eric for helping to coordinate everything.

We'd also like to give special thanks to Steve Gruetter, a director at Platform Lab. Platform Lab provides a great service, offering short-term physical or remote access to IT hardware, software and massive amounts of bandwidth for all types of companies for the explicit purpose of IT testing and projects. And they also just happen to be the host facility for Columbus, OH VMUG events. On this day, while the facility itself was closed from doing normal business due to bad weather, Steve was able to keep the facility open so that the VMUG event could still take place.

We had some 50+ brave individuals attend the meeting, and that included the good folks from Panera Bread who we hired to cater breakfast. Nothing better than hot coffee, bagels and pastries on a snowy morning, eh?

At the meeting, Hyper9 talked about the practical ins and outs of virtualization reporting and best practices that address the challenges related to storage (how to squeeze the most disk space out of your environment as possible), VM sprawl (how many VMs do you actually have and which VMs are you actually using?), and management reporting (who owns what and how much does it cost?).

We hope everyone had a good time at the event. And we certainly enjoyed speaking with and meeting everyone. Hopefully, we'll be invited back to Columbus in the future - Spring or Summer preferred. :)

What happened to the Goal of Business Agility?

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:27:00 GMT

This was a mantra that many of the large software companies were speaking about several years ago ( Microsoft , IBM , SAP , ...), "what happened to Business Agility?" There was definite interest from businesses, as being able to react more quickly to lower costs and more effectively leverage resources within the business would attract virtually any executive, member of management, or business owner. The Answer: It turns out that implementing a system that coordinates an entire businesses...(read more)

How Cloud Providers are Spreading Their Bets...

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:13:00 GMT

As the Cloud Market continues to take shape, many of the Cloud Providers have chosen to provide combinations of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS. The reasoning behind this is that the market continues to be uncertain and probably will remain uncertain into the foreseeable future. Why is the market uncertain? Because different businesses have different demands and requirements. Mix this with the fact that developers are using the Cloud for portions of both public and private applications and you end up with no...(read more)

Nicira = Virtualization + Networking * Diane Greene

Dave.McCrory — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:48:00 GMT

After reading a news bit on virtualization.info covering a stealth company called Nicira and its connection to Diane Greene (former CEO and Co-Founder of VMware), I thought it would be interesting to dig deeper into what was being done by Nicira and why it was different/significant. What is Nicira working on? Network Virtualization, but not the sense of what most virtualization industry veterans are used to, however. When people in virtualization think of Network Virtualization they think of two...(read more)

Hyper9 Expands in Europe with a New Reseller Agreement with DNM Technology

David Marshall — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:54:00 GMT

If you haven't heard by now, Hyper9 was excited to announce that it will be getting some additional help across the pond with a new strategic partnership signed with DNM Technology, an Ireland-based infrastructure consultancy specializing in virtualization, database services, storage management, backup and recovery, and business intelligence. DNM also offers Virtual Assurance services which include the design, implementation and support of business-focused virtualization solutions spanning server, desktop, network, storage and application environments. The company believes in vendor independence, working closely with leading virtualization organizations such as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, all of which are Hyper9 partners as well.

The joint partnership will help Hyper9 and DNM provide Hyper9's Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) solution to organizations across Ireland and the UK, allowing these organizations to virtualize more resources, faster and with greater confidence.

Hyper9 VEO combines usability and dashboard features with in-depth analytics and reporting to help users find and reclaim virtual resources. The solution delivers instant insight into virtual environments, thereby eliminating manual assessment and reporting efforts. Organizations can also use Hyper9 monitoring and alerting to establish best practices around how their virtual infrastructure should perform, and how to proactively maintain those activities over time.

The partnership comes at a great time as European organizations are beginning to address more sophisticated business requirements with their virtualization initiatives which is an area where Hyper9 has really thrived and been able to provide valuable assistance.

Find out more information about Hyper9's VEO in 9 easy steps.

What is a Spring Container and what might VMware want to do with it?

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:14:00 GMT

What is a Spring Container? If you are a virtualization administrator type and heard about VMware's acquisition of Spring Source and therefore control of the Spring Framework (including the Spring Container) you might be wondering why you should really care or what this has to do with virtualization to begin with. Hopefully at the end of this blog entry you will have some of your own thoughts and opinions on where this all may be going. A Spring Container isn't something that you put into...(read more)

Wikipedia and Cloud APIs (Universal Cloud APIs - Revisited)

Dave.McCrory — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:51:00 GMT

There aren't many independent sources covering "Cloud APIs" - whether referring to "Independent" groups, standards bodies, or specific providers. This lack of sources without an agenda of some type makes it incredibly difficult to bring together good information that isn't somehow tainted. By creating this new Wikipedia entry, the hope is that a solid, independent, and over-arching resource can be created for the community to share. The cloud computing concept covers a...(read more)

Why are some Apps better in the Cloud?

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:56:00 GMT

Some applications are more easily adapted or are just plain better running in the Cloud than they are hosted or running locally. Some people don't necessarily subscribe to this notion, however after looking as some of the reasoning behind this, it may make a bit more sense. Realizing that not only are some applications more easily put in the Cloud, others may be more difficult or nearly impossible to put entirely in the cloud (without substantial changes to code). Games, CAD, and other video...(read more)

Universal Cloud APIs Examined

Dave.McCrory — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:35:00 GMT

With the recent announcement of the vCloud API SDKs for both Java and Python, it seemed as though it might be relevant to investigate the available Cloud APIs, what they do, where they come from, and how they work. There are four Cloud APIs that are abstraction APIs (at least four of which that seemed to have a relevant amount of information around). Each of these APIs has its own take on how Clouds should be provisioned and managed through their API. All of the APIs do appear to have a common goal...(read more)

Hyper9 Finishes 2009 Strong - Ready for 2010

David Marshall — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:24:00 GMT

I don't have to tell you - 2009 was, well... not the greatest economy. But despite those economic woes, the Hyper9 team pulled together and we were able to still have a very exciting year!

We recently launched a press release that showcased a few of the exciting things that happened to Hyper9 over the course of the year. In 2009, we:

Launched a 2.0 version of our Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) suite

Had record quarterly profits in the 4th quarter, closing deals with some really fantastic marquee accounts

Were named one of the "10 virtualization vendors to watch in 2010" by the widely read and well respected CIO Magazine

Open sourced our popular Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM) tool

Were named a Gartner Cool Vendor in IT Operations and Virtualization for 2009

Closed a number of strategic partnerships and alliances with key service providers

As a company and as a team, Hyper9 is looking forward to the fun and excitement as well as the new challenges that await us in 2010.

Get ready for more from Hyper9...

Read our press release for more details.

Is Cloud Computing Really New? (The History Behind the Cloud)

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:45:00 GMT

Is Cloud Computing Really New? Where did it come from? These are questions that are often unanswered or not covered in all of the buzz that companies like Google , VMware , and Microsoft are putting out there around the Cloud. Let's step back and look at where the Cloud actually came from. In the beginning, there were great big hulking monstrosities that took up rooms of space, these were called mainframe computers. Mainframes brought us many of the terms used in computing today, along with a...(read more)

VMware GO - VMware Officially Enters the Hosted / Cloud Application Business

Dave.McCrory — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:50:00 GMT

With Yesterday's announcement of the launch of VMware GO, VMware has finally entered the Hosted (Cloud/Web) Application market. Providing services to small and medium businesses to more easily manage their ESXi implementations. On the management side, VMware GO provides a guided installation, ESXi Media Download and CD Burn (from ISO), VM Provisioning (P2V , Manual Creation, or Virtual Appliance - via the VMware Marketplace), Console Application Linking is Provided (the VMware Remote Console...(read more)

Will Cloud Computing help 2012 become the end of IT as we know it?

David Marshall — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:38:00 GMT

The year 2012 is surrounded in a shroud of mystery, with many believing that some sort of cataclysmic or transformative event will take place December 21^st or 23^rd of that year. Predictions of impending doom stem from interpretations made about the Mayan and other ancient civilizations and the Long Count calendar which is said to "end" sometime around that same date in 2012.

IT folks aren't strangers from thinking about facing doom and gloom in the future. While we may not be following the Mayan calendar at work, our own calendar has certainly put misplaced fear in many of our hearts. Remember the "Year 2000" problem or Y2K? I for one was certainly glad the Millennium Bug didn't end my career like it was supposed to.

But Gartner recently announced a bit of prognostication that got me thinking. Yesterday, the analyst firm launched their 2010 and beyond predictions which spanned some 56 markets, topics and industry areas, with around 250 predictions in total.

The one that quickly caught my eye stated: "By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets."

What? No IT assets in one out of every five companies in as little as two years from now? Wow! That's a pretty powerful statement and quite a bold prediction.

Gartner says this will be the result of virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees bringing in their own desktops and notebooks to work.

Gartner writes, "The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points."

This prediction is not entirely a surprise, however; as we have witnessed this change happen over the last seven years to hosted Websites and e-mail. Most companies are using outside providers for these types of services today rather than burdening their internal IT staff.

Virtualization has definitely done its part thus far in shrinking down the data center footprint of server equipment. But this latest prediction has one in five companies with a zero footprint - NO IT assets!!! That seems like an awfully heavy burden to place on the cloud community. It means that cloud technology will need to mature a lot faster than has virtualization in order to reach those goals.

If we plan on getting to a zero footprint of IT assets, cloud technology definitely seems to have the best chances to get us there; but that would also assume we are talking public cloud technology, and not private. In the interim, many may choose to attempt a hybrid cloud in order to help bridge the gap. But the clock is ticking, so people need to get moving if we are going to meet a 2012 time frame.

As we enter 2010, 2012 no longer seems to be that far off into the future. So if you live in the world of IT, make up your mind. Which will it be... the end of IT as we know it? Or will it be the end of the world itself? I saw the movie... so I'm voting that we change IT if we have to!

Hybrid Clouds

Dave.McCrory — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:33:13 GMT

What is a Hybrid Cloud?

Clouds are made up of resources (in the form of Servers and/or Services) that are delivered to one or more consumers without the consumer being required to have knowledge of the specific underlying infrastructure. What makes this a Hybrid Cloud? A Hybrid Cloud has the ability to cross one or more boundaries based on either a set of conditions or manual intervention. What might be a condition? Maybe a datacenter has run out of capacity and still needs to meet additional demands on its web servers. In this example, by leveraging a Hybrid Cloud model, the datacenter could automatically have additional webservers brought online by a third party service provider to provide additional capacity. This means that the data center's cloud extended accross its normal boudndaries and leveraged resources from the service provider's cloud. This is a simple scenario, more complex scenarios are certainly possible and are leveraged by some companies already.

What makes this an attractive model for businesses?

Businesses need to be able to meet demands on a real-time basis, yet they don't want to pay for excess compute capacity that will sit idle. This was the inital catalyst for what became the call for server consolidation (this is what led to VMware's explosive growth and the reason it became so popular in data centers). Now that many larger businesses have consolidated, they continue to look at ways of adding more business applications however they don't want to buy resources based on peak usage. Enter the Hybrid Cloud Model, providing the benefits of having critical data locally (meeting laws and regulatory requirements) while having services and dynamic expansion/contraction abilities beyond the capacity of the local/private cloud (or traditional IT Datacenter)

Illustrated In the Series of Images Below is a Typical Use Case for a Hybrid Cloud:

Because Hybrid Clouds can provide a greater depth and flexibility versus simply an internal cloud (or an external cloud for that matter) businesses are beginning to look at what cost savings can be brought on by leveraging this model. Companies like VMware and Microsoft have seen this and have begun to take Amazon's lead in public cloud (external cloud) offerings and attempt to make private and hybrid clouds accessible to medium and large businesses. Hybrid Clouds will become a core tool that businesses leverage over the next 5 to 7 years. The problem will be in the management of these highly abstracted, complex, fast moving environments as complex workloads cross cloud boundaries. Once Hybrid Clouds have built appropriate momentum, they will be the norm for many years to come.

Amazon, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Google, Microsoft, VMware

Hyper9 Named One of Top "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010"

David Marshall — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:33:00 GMT

Hyper9 was recently recognized as one of 2010's top 10 virtualization vendors to watch by the highly respected print and online publication, CIO.com.

For the third year in a row, CIO takes a look at which virtualization vendors should be on consumers' radar screens; and for 2010, they have identified ten "intriguing innovators" in virtualization management, security and more. Making the CIO.com 'Top 10 Watch List' not only validates the direction and choices that Hyper9 has made with its solution, but it also recognizes the successes that we've had in the marketplace. And it was quite an honor to be listed in their top 10.

Hyper9 believes that with rising data volumes, lack of cross-domain visibility, and shifting data center roles and responsibilities, today's virtual environments require more proactive management to maximize the business value of virtualization investments.

The CIO article states that management tools still remain hotly desired by customers, and says that Hyper9 broadly promises to help customers "achieve higher virtualization management maturity to meet more sophisticated business requirements."

According to industry expert Mark Bowker, a virtualization specialist at Enterprise Strategy Group, the benefits become more clear when looking into the details. Bowker explains, "Hyper9's Virtual Environment Optimization keeps track of workloads and virtual machines, categorizing them by geography, business unit or other criteria, and then reports on both performance levels and resource utilization. In other words, it tracks who is using how much of the available compute power and monitors performance problems to real or virtual sources to make troubleshooting easier."

And Bowker adds, "You can't optimize anything without seeing what it's doing first."

Read the 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010 from CIO.com, here.

Hyper9 Sponsors the January Wisconsin VMware User Group (WI-VMUG) Meeting

David Marshall — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:07:00 GMT

For those of you in the Wisconsin area, please join Hyper9 by signing up and attending the next Wisconsin VMware User Group (WI-VMUG) meeting taking place on Tuesday, January 12, 2010. Registration and breakfast kicks off the event at 8:30AM, with a welcome message at 9:00AM followed by Hyper9's presentation, Take Back Time: Virtualization Best Practices – Reporting. The event takes place at the Promega/BTC facility in Madison. We look forward to meeting you at the event!

You can sign up or keep up with the Wisconsin VMUG at the official VMware site: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmug/forums/us-central/wisconsin

The agenda for the day's meeting:

8:30 Registration: Refreshments served
9:00 Welcome Message
9:05 Hyper9 presents Take Back Time: Virtualization Best Practices – Reporting by Zahid Ghauri; Director, Systems Engineering
- Discussing virtualization best practices and technology around storage, VM sprawl, and management level reporting using VMware vSphere and Hyper9. Learn about the practical ins and outs of virtualization reporting and best practices that address the challenges related to storage (how to squeeze the most disk space out of your environment as possible), VM sprawl (how many VMs do you actually have and which VMs are you actually using?), and management reporting (who owns that and how much does it cost?)
9:50 VMware presents VMware View 4.0 by Rob Millette; VMware SE
- Discussion of what’s new in VMware View 4.0.
10:30 Break
10:50 Compellent presents Compellent Storage Center: Optimizing your Virtual Server Environment with Virtualized Storage
11:45 Wrap-up: End the meeting with a round of Q&A, announcements, and prize drawings.
12:15 Lunch

Directions:

5445 East Cheryl Parkway
Madison, WI 53711
Directions
Google Maps

For more information about the event or the Wisconsin VMUG, visit their official Web site. And for more information about Hyper9 and our virtualization solutions, check out our Web site: http://www.hyper9.com.

Get a Better Understanding of Your VMware Environment with Hyper9's VM/Host DNA Technology

David Marshall — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:01:00 GMT

You understand about virtualization configuration management, configuration drift, troubleshooting performance problems, and addressing security and compliance issues in your VMware world. But these challenges don't have to cause you a lot of manual pains. Find out how Hyper9's VM/Host DNA technology can help you in your virtual dynamic datacenter by reading this whitepaper titled, "Hyper9 DNA Profiling - VM/Host DNA Forensics for Virtual Infrastructure Optimization."

Change is the only constant in the dynamic datacenter. Virtual resources are easy to create, deploy and easy to reconfigure. As a result, operations teams are constantly plagued by problems after patches, updates and other configuration changes have been made to VMs and hosts. Gartner's research consistently shows that people and process issues, not technology issues, cause 80% of mission-critical outages. These problems include inconsistently applied patches and hotfixes, unauthorized software installations (in the guest or console), changes in assigned resources and other misconfigurations that may not be immediately obvious but over time impact the integrity and performance of the virtual infrastructure. When performance problems arise, or when a new bottleneck is identified, how can the operations team quickly identify VM and host configurations that don’t comply with standards?

In IT operations, it's well known that you can't manage what you can't measure. It's equally true that you can't measure what you can't even see. Just like genetic fingerprinting, Hyper9 DNA profiling provides analysis about VM and Host characteristics and interactions that construct the components of the ever-changing virtual environment. Hyper9 VMDNA provides a deeper level of insight that can quickly and easily compare the differences between one virtual machine and another, virtual machine and a template image, or even compare a virtual machine to itself over time. Hyper9 HostDNA captures the most critical host configuration data on a configurable periodic basis, allowing for change tracking, remediation, compliance and best practice enforcement to be done at any time.

In this whitepaper, we examines in-depth, the specific use cases for how Hyper9 DNA tackles key operational challenges brought on by today’s widely deployed and rapidly growing virtual infrastructure as well as address the most commonly asked questions.

Download the Whitepaper, here.

Is VMware attempting to go head to head with Microsoft in the Cloud?

Dave.McCrory — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:35:29 GMT

After VMware announced their acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo, I began to think about what VMware might actually be doing with their strategy for the Cloud that is perhaps different than what most would expect. VMware is moving from being a Virtualization/Virtualization Management company, to a Cloud company. What do I mean by that? VMware has seen the writing on the wall that in order for them to continue to grow at the pace required by the market, they must diversify further and provide more offerings. Simply put, VMware needs to offer a holistic suite, much like Microsoft does in order to keep shareholders happy. This is where the mirroring of Microsoft and the head to head competition begins.

Microsoft has Exchange, Outlook, OWA (Outlook Web Access), and Sharepoint as a messaging and collaboration platform. VMware now has Zimbra, which provides strikingly similar functionality. VMware has a stake in Terremark a vCloud Hosting Provider and is providing similar VMware centric capabilities to other hosters. Microsoft has Azure (launched yesterday). VMware acquired SpringSource in order to court the Enterprise Java community, how do they plan to do this? Indirectly of course. VMware will continue to allow SpringSource to act as an independent entity, however as Spring evolves and their CloudFoundry technology evolves, it will be focused on a deeper level of integration with VMware's platform. Why is this significant? Because it will mean the Java Developers will be more inclined to want their applications to be hosted on VMware because it will be a trivial integration due to the ease of using Spring (which in most cases will already be leveraged in their Java Application). Microsoft on the other hand, will allow developers using Visual Studio (Look to VS 2010 to offer tighter integration - It is currently in Beta) to leverage and deploy Azure services right from their IDE and won't require code changes to get integration with their cloud. Microsoft has a very large developer base and intends to use that as much as possible.

Who will win?

If you just look at the pure track history of both companies, it is still very difficult to place any bets. VMware is new to the Cloud Services space, but is leveraging its Virtualization expertise and has been an execution machine over the past 5 years. Microsoft is the 800 lb. gorilla with a larger development base, however Microsoft hasn't been incredibly successful in previous hosted service offerings (examples such as MSN, passport, and others come to mind). It will be an interesting next few years as the industry evolves from a set of pure platform and infrastructure to a services, cloud, and integration suite focused industry.

Cloud, Cloud Computing, IaaS, Microsoft, PaaS, VMware, XaaS

Hyper9 GuessMyOSToo Updated and Goes Open Source

David Marshall — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:20:00 GMT

Earlier this month, the GuessMyOSToo plug-in was updated in order to work correctly with the VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 patch. If you've been using the older version and experienced problems with the vSphere client after upgrading to Update 1, you should upgrade your GuessMyOSToo plug-in to the latest version.

In addition, Hyper9 is also making an effort to encourage more VMware community developers to stand up and create new useful and interesting plug-ins for the VI and vSphere client. To that end, we have decided to open source the GuessMyOSToo plug-in for the VI and vSphere clients.

If you aren't already familiar with the GuessMyOSToo plug-in, it is a Hyper9 created plug-in that works with VMware's VI3 and vSphere 4 client software. What it does is replace the generic VM icons in the VI3 and vSphere 4 client inventory trees with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guests. That way, you can figure out what guest operating system is running within those virtual machines with a simple quick glance of the new icons.

GuessMyOSToo is now hosted on SourceForge.net where you can do things like browse the source code and submit bug reports or suggest feature requests.

If you aren't interested in the source code, and you just want to download and use the plug-in... no problem. GuessMyOSToo binaries will still be made available on the Hyper9 download Web site.

Hopefully, making this popular VMware plug-in open source will help the VMware development community in their plug-in creation efforts. We'd all love to see new plug-ins created as they've proven themselves valuable time and time again!

If you have ideas for new plug-ins, drop us a line and let us know.

Video: Connecting with Hyper9 VEO PowerCLI

David Marshall — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:00:00 GMT

In this short screen cast, Andrew Kutz will walk you through connecting to and disconnecting from a Hyper9 VEO server using the Hyper9 VEO PowerCLI and Microsoft PowerShell.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Video: Getting VMs with the Hyper9 VEO PowerCLI

David Marshall — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Leveraging Microsoft PowerShell and the Hyper9 VEO PowerCLI, Andrew Kutz demonstrates how to get a list of virtual machines (VMs) from a Hyper9 VEO server on the command line in this screen cast.

(Please visit the site to view this media)