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 things: VLANs or Virtual Switches. But this is NOT what Nicira is doing. Instead, Nicira is building a framework built on top of the OpenFlow networking specification and codebase (which is Open Source). The Nicira framework is called NOX, which can be downloaded from noxrepo.org. The goal of NOX is to make the OpenFlow specification more accessible by allowing developers to write code to an API (currently C++ and Python are supported). Nicira is also developing a suite of applications that leverage their NOX framework. One of the applications already in the suite is called Ethane and it's centered around security.

How does Nicira plan on making money?

It appears that there are two paths that Nicira may take. The first is by providing commercial support for the OpenFlow Framework/Specification, their NOX Framework, and their Application Suite. The second is by selling/licensing their application suite commercially.

How is Diane Greene Connected to all of this?

Diane is listed as an investor on the Nicari Website. This doesn't appear to be the only connection, as the core of Nicari's technology and management come from Stanford University (some from Berkley as well). Stanford is where Greene's husband and Co-Founder of VMware Mendel Rosenblum is a Professor and received his PhD from Berkley. Mr. Rosenblum created VMware's core technology at Stanford under first the simOS Project and then the Disco Project. If Mrs. Greene invested money in this venture, there is likely some very innovative technology under the hood.

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?

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 a mattress or in your car's suspension, it is a way of looking at dependencies of an application (specifically libraries, etc. in Java). Wikipedia lists the Spring Framework as a collection of modules including an IoC (Inversion of Control) based container that allows Dependency Injection. What does that mean in english (to a non-developer type)? It means that Spring manages the integration and requirements that one component of a developer's code has with other components that it depends on and that depend on it. This process used to be something that was manually done and when applications were small wasn't very difficult. As Java applications grew larger and more complex, so did their dependencies. As the applications grew, they also began to change more rapidly, users made more requests for more functionality, requiring more changes, more capabilities, and even more dependencies. From this complex mess, a solution came about in a way to abstract away this complexity.

The complexity problem that was solved through abstraction of the dependencies mirrors the complexity problem that has been found in data centers and where virtualization has become the answer. IaaS based Cloud Computing is only viable because of virtualization and the abstraction of the complexities in provisioning and managing infrastructure.

Why do developers use it?

There are a select number of IoC based frameworks and VMware is focused on Spring, which is a Java centric framework. There are several Java centric IoCs as well as several .Net based IoCs (Spring.NET is Spring's .NET based framework (although not as popular as their Java based IoC). This entry's focus is on Spring and Java based IoCs. Developers often want to integrate different components together quickly and in a uniform way and want to have reusable code. Spring is the largest and most popular Java IoC and has the largest Java enterprise developer base. This developer base translates to a large number of reusable pre-written integrations for nearly all of the popular libraries and applications that an enterprise Java developer might need or want.

Possible motivations behind VMware acquiring Spring Source

As the market progresses and matures, several things are becoming apparent. The first being that the hypervisor is becoming more commoditized. The second is that the cloud is going to become more important, however VMware has been a virtualization company and their competitors are more than virtualization companies. Look at Microsoft and their broad portfolio of Operating Systems, Applications, Technologies, and now a growing number of Cloud offerings under Azure. Microsoft doesn't make money off of Hyper-V itself and makes little money off of the basic management tools for Hyper-V, they do however make a great deal of money off of their applications and hope to make money off of Azure. In essence, Microsoft has an entire ecosystem behind them. On a different cloud approach, look at Google who arguably has a giant set of offerings in the cloud from Google Apps to their App Engine. There are millions of web developers that have created and continue to create applications that leverage Google's web services and APIs. So what has VMware been missing? The answer: An ecosystem beyond virtualization and management.

Where VMware may be heading

So where does this leave VMware? VMware needs to put together a strategy that creates a full ecosystem and that is what they are attempting to do. In acquiring Spring Source they have gotten a large active community of Enterprise Java Developers. They also gained a significant amount of mindshare around leading Java projects including Spring's CloudFoundry (which was a Spring Acquisition), Spring's Groovy and Grails (which Spring Acquired from G2One), and Hyperic's instrumentation and monitoring (yet another acquisition). With this broad user base and now VMware's acquisition of Zimbra, it is becoming obvious that VMware wants to be a premier player in the Java Developer and Cloud ecosystem (by cloud ecosystem this means Cloud Computing from the perspective of all three platforms SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). This would allow them to compete head to head with the likes of Microsoft and Google on both a platform and technology level as well as a cloud and application level. There are many questions that remain unanswered as to if all this is going to successfully come together and if so, how long will it take. The key will be to keep the development community happy and growing as this will likely prove to be the greatest long term potential for VMware to continue its growth.

For Reference:

Additional IoC Containers (For those interested in additional IoCs):

• Guice (by Google)
• Butterfly
• PicoContainer

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 broad range of topics, and therefore this Cloud API entry covers a broad range of available APIs.

The Cloud APIs are broken up into two Primary types, each having three sub-types. Think of a 2 row by 3 column grid (I will be updating this post and likely the Wikipedia article with a table of this sort, attempting to begin classifying of each Cloud API as time permits). The rows consist of Cloud Provider Cloud APIs and Cross Platform Cloud APIs, while the columns consist of Infrastructure (think IaaS), Services (think PaaS), and Applications (think SaaS). These categories (or combinations of them in specific cases) should allow for the classification of all current Cloud APIs and provide for a common understanding in the industry.

Please view or review the Wikipedia entry for Cloud APIs (which can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_APIs). Everyone is encouraged to go and take a look, edit carefully, and contribute thoughtfully to this effort as the more information that is put in, the more the community will get back out.

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 intense applications are good examples of hard to move applications.  Non-web enabled video intense enterprise applications are becoming fewer today than compared to even 5 years ago, however they are still out there and the Cloud can only host the backend for applications of this sort, the rendering side has to be done locally. It is important to note that companies like Citrix have developed technologies that allow applications like this to render intense video remotely, but in the overall public Cloud there just isn't much traction for this (although there is a great deal of traction within the walls of the enterprise).  There are many applications that don't require this level of intense video, which is what is being focused on here. Business applications commonly have low rendering requirements, but have all sorts of other complex architectural requirements. Let's look at a few of these requirements and how the Cloud can help solve them.

The Scaling Story

Many successful business application implementations end up growing in the number of users and uses rapidly over time. This usually causes scalability issues and a great number of headaches for architects and administrators. In a Cloud based environment, it is trivial to throw a few additional resources at an application either on a temporary or permanent basis. This isn't so easy in a traditional environment giving the Cloud a distinct advantage in its flexibility and associated costs. By being able to leverage resources outside of the walls of the datacenter for specific needs on demand, a business application's response time SLA can be kept far easier than before.

Data Storage

Many SANs today are on a constant churn of storage space, changing partitions, hot and cold LUNs (for those unfamiliar with LUNs, think of specific chunks of space on the SAN), and a complex infrastructure to manage and secure. This is the reality of storage in data centers today. In a cloud storage scenario, these issues are left up to the cloud provider and the track record of cloud based storage is pretty good and steadily improving. Because of the ability to create storage grids under the covers, storage cloud providers can lower their costs, increase their storage space utilization, and easily add additional storage ahead of space and performance demands.

Databases

Commonly databases require complex and redundant systems with many systems either over utilized or underutilized. Most medium to large organizations use DBAs (DataBase Administrators) to managed and maintain their databases. Properly implementing and managing a database is not an easy task and with constant updates, patches, and performance tuning required, it is expensive. The cloud can provide a great alternative to running a database in house, the only drawback is your data doesn't reside on premise. For some companies, having their data locally is a must or in some cases required by law. Most companies have several databases that could be moved into the cloud without risking catastrophic loss or legal action.

Network / Connectivity

Some companies pay out high dollars for fast and reliable connectivity either from one location to another, whether that be an office to another office or from one datacenter to another. This scenario may or may not include internet connectivity. All of these network connections are pricey to implement and maintain, mostly due to the cost of the networking equipment and the network administration required to manage them. Performance and reliability for internet based applications can be very important to companies that rely on the web as a primary channel for revenue. Moving to a cloud provider can in many cases offer greater response times and availability than attempting to run a server either locally or co-located in a local hosting facility, all while not having to give up administrative control over the server (whether it be physical or virtual).

Centralization

By centralizing applications in the cloud, management applications can potentially become more uniform (this depends on what management application(s) are being used. The ability to spin up additional instances to provide better performance, greater concurrency, or redundancy for brief or long periods of time is a prime benefit to the centralization of the cloud. Other benefits of centralizing include the ability in some cases to replicate tiers in other geographic locations and to be able to control tiers through one centralized security policy.

Conclusion

Applications that are running in the cloud have many distinct advantages especially as resources become scarce - (whether they are compute or personnel). Small to medium sized businesses can benefit from offerings in the cloud for mission critical applications more rapidly than enterprises, primarily due to the great expense that most enterprises have already invested toward building out data centers of their own and potentially privacy and regulatory requirements. There are however pockets within enterprises which have specific projects or needs which can easily (and in a non-disruptive way) leverage the cloud and its benefits without necessarily violating IT standards. For small and medium sized businesses, the classic example of an easily accepted need is that of cloud application provider Salesforce.com which has been highly successful and offers a feature rich solution completely in the cloud, giving sales groups easy collaboration, lead generation management, contacts management, etc.  Salesforce has been so successful with their sales application, that they branched into other applications such as support.

Depending on what the needs are and what current applications are out there to meet those needs, the Cloud can be a powerful and cost effective tool to leverage no matter the size of the organization.

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 in creating an abstraction from specific cloud implementations so that a developer can create an application that will work on many different clouds while making a single API call.

What relevance does this have to a Virtualization Administrator? Today, probably not very much, but in the future, a great deal. Cloud APIs make it possible for developers and even applications themselves to generically interact with the infrastructure without having to interact with the infrastructure owner or administrator directly. This automation has many advantages in the speed at which applications can be developed and deployed because of the elimination of many manual processes and ties to specific operating systems and infrastructure specifics. This means that Virtualization Administrators will eventually be more of Infrastructure Security and Maintenance and less of Application Implementation and Support.

Each of the four Cloud APIs were briefly examined along with source code check-ins and whatever documentation was available. The tables below are not guaranteed to be perfect or error free, however they do provide a good idea as to which API provides what capability in addition to providing guidance as to where each is headed and how quickly it may get there.

(Click Image to Enlarge)

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:

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? 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 model that we are in essence moving back toward because of the efficiencies that it gave us. Out of the Mainframe Era, came the Mini Era. Mini Computers were smaller and less expensive than Mainframes and gave us a more practical approach to compute ownership for businesses and Universities. The PC Revolution hit following this and people became interested in doing more with their workstation than simply using it as a terminal to run applications on the Mainframe or Mini.

Enter the Client/Server Era, as more people had PCs placed on their desktop and more applications were written for Windows, people became interested in networking these machines together. Enter the Client/Server model from Large Enterprises to Small Businesses, companies were wiring their resources together to leverage PCs and have them jointly use File Servers, Printers, and the like.

The Internet had already been around a long time at this point and many University/Government Computers had been linked to the Internet. Now some companies were providing businesses and consumers with the ability to dial-up and use the Internet. As broadband became more popular and more companies began to leverage the Internet as a resource as well, the web became relevant and companies began to need a web presence. Around this time, a group of providers started to offer desktop applications as a service.

The Application Service Providers (ASPs) as they were called began to offer applications using remote access technologies such as Citrix Metaframe (now XenApp) and Microsoft Terminal Services. These technologies worked reasonably well, but weren't adopted for a number of reasons. These reasons included ownership of data, concerns over SLAs, and Licensing/Costs. As the ASPs were in decline, there was a fledgling company introducing a technology that they had been working on for PCs to allow them to run other operating systems in software. That company was VMware and the product was VMware workstation. Interestingly, VMware wasn't the first company to provide virtualization capability, that honor goes to a company once known as Connectix (they created VPC, the Connectix QuickCam which was sold to Logitech). Connectix created VPC a software package for Macintosh computers to allow them to run Microsoft Windows in a Virtual Machine, which ultimately allowed Windows and OS/2 Computers to run Microsoft Windows in a Virtual Machine as well.

Another thread of the story is around Service Oriented Architectures (SoA). The idea of exposing resources as web services making them more easily and uniformly accessible has been around for a while, but building the components, tools, and an infrastructure to support it has been tougher. VMware's push of Virtualization into the Enterprise allowed Applications to be coupled with Operating Systems and become highly portable. This was the push that was needed to make the idea of the Cloud actually function the way it was envisioned. SOAs were now something that could be built and torn down dynamically providing the last component technically to create an efficient cloud model.

Enter Amazon EC2, the first commercial grade public cloud. Why does Amazon have this distinction? There were other companies doing Cloud Computing before Amazon (Salesforce.com on the SaaS side and ProTier/Surgient on the Dynamic Infrastructure Provisioning Side), however none of them brought the web community (including Developers and Admins that needed resources) into the picture the way Amazon did. Amazon promoted an architecture and services, while creating a realistic model for charging for its Cloud Resources (a granular consumption model).

Today, there are many Public Cloud providers and companies offering solutions to create and manage Private Clouds. Public Cloud providers include:

• Amazon AWS and EC2
• Google Web Apps and App Engine
• Microsoft Azure
• RackSpace

Private Cloud Enabling software providers include:

• VMware
• Citrix
• Microsoft
• Surgient

The Cloud is the old reinvented as new based on all of the technological advancements from the proliferation of Virtualization and broadband Internet to the ubiquity of Web Services in a Web 2.0 based Applications. What makes the Cloud likely to be a permanent reality? Companies continue to shift from seeing Servers and IT as a strategic resource to viewing them as another type of facilities based service (this harkens back to Utility Computing). Another important note is that Cloud moves towards the vision that IBM mentioned several years ago (but at the time wasn't practical to implement and still has some significant hurdles, but moves closer and close), that being Autonomic Computing. The idea behind Autonomic Computing was (or for that matter, still is) that systems will become self-healing and will be able to fix, tune, and adjust themselves. This is where things will head, it is just a matter of how long till we get there. What isn't being said, but many are thinking is that this sounds a lot like HAL9000 or Skynet from (The Terminator Movies). Let me put those fears to rest, there is little doubt that there will still be a human somewhere in the loop checking policies or providing approvals and checks.

These are exciting times for the Cloud Computing space and what is happening in that space. Cloud Computing will be the hot place for Application and Infrastructure for the next 5 years at least.

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 can be Launched from the VMware GO interface), Patch Scanning and patching to one or more Guest OSs and ESXi Itself, and Reporting rounds out the capabilities (very rudimentary patch and configuration reporting, but it is free). Many questions remain as to what finally tipped the scales for VMware to pull the trigger at this time (Amazingly just days after the news of the Zimbra acquisition hit).

This move may be an attempt by VMware to begin experimenting with ways of creating Hybrid Cloud environments in a future iteration of VMware GO (Interesting to note that GO was apparently created in partnership with VMware Partner Shavlik). How would this work and how does GO work today? The video embedded below is an Overview of How VMware GO works.

Where do you think VMware will take GO from here? Leave your comments...

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!

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.

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.

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

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. 

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.

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.