virtualisation - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• A sunrise industry

  Virtual desktop infrastructure started as a grass roots initiative around 2005, when VMware noticed its customers configuring desktop operating systems and applications as virtual machines on their ESX Hosts. Someone at the company recognised the opportunity, coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and with that an industry was born.
  Today, as CIOs look for ways to reduce expenditure without risking competitiveness, VDI is increasingly popular. With the cost of managing a virtualised PC environment typically 50 to 60 percent less than managing traditional desktops, VDI appeals to any organisation – from government bodies and large enterprises to small businesses.

• How virtualisation is changing the shape of your PC

  Near the end of almost every year, dramatic reductions in the size and weight of typical business laptops and PCs spark a series of blogs and media stories about how drastically different "your computer" will be next year.
  The way it looks so far for 2011, much of the power, data and abilities of "your computer" will have less to do with the hardware on your shoulder than with the data centres and virtualisation capabilities of both internal IT organizations and external service providers.

• Top planning requirements for private cloud deployments

  Virtualisation is understood as one of the key building blocks for private clouds. As a dynamic technology that enables IT organisations to reinvent how they think about management, it has the potential to make some things easier or make all things harder. Silo buying, heterogeneity, politics, poor integrations, and immature management tools can inhibit virtualisation's full value.
  IT leadership must address these challenges in order to set the stage for private cloud deployments, which many pundits forecast as the foundation for business growth in the next decade. Based on many customer conversations, we have compiled the top eight requirements for successful deployments of private clouds. These considerations enable IT to deliver business growth and contain costs, getting more from people, processes, and technologies.

• Virtual reality puts paid to total failure

  It is now five years since we were hostage to a physical PC, thanks to VMware desktop virtual computing. Of course there is hardware on our desk but it's little more than a shell hosting the virtual PC that does the real work. That's why we ran, not walked, to grab a pre-release copy of VMware Workstation 7.
  Traditional physical computing, frankly, stinks. The operating system and applications perch precariously on hardware that fails infrequently but catastrophically.

• The five popular flavours of desktop virtualisation

  One of the big questions in technology for the last three years has been how end users will adopt desktop virtualisation. The answer, at least from some early adopters, seems to be "how won't we do it?"
  A survey released by the Enterprise Management Associates in September found that companies with desktop virtualisation projects in place or underway were almost all using more than one method of delivery, ranging from traditional terminal services to server-based applications accessed through a Web browser, according to Andi Mann, VP of research for the Boulder, Colo. consultancy.

• Jetstar CIO helps airline fly against the downturn

  The global financial crisis has been hard on may industry sectors, but arguably few are doing it as tough as the airline industry.

• Vendors ramp up cloud computing services

  IT services providers are continuing to invest in cloud computing offerings at an impressive pace – even though ongoing hype around cloud computing is leaving many customers confused as to its potential benefits, reports Ovum.

• What is next for VMware?

  Virtualised infrastructures may be "the mainframe for the 21st century," as VMware CTO Stephen Herrod said in April, but the company will move increasingly toward virtualisation and management of smaller devices during the next year or two.

• Tips for enterprise software licensing negotiations

  For any business today, purchasing enterprise software ( ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain apps) is probably unlike any other corporate activity.
  "Of all the assets that an enterprise acquires, enterprise software brings with it the most unusual, onerous and restrictive set of constraints," notes Forrester Research VP and principal analyst Ray Wang, in a brand-new report on software licensing best practices.

• Protection that matters

  For Dunedin Casino, moving to 24-hour trading made it rethink the company’s IT systems from scratch. While at Mainfreight, with its near 24-hour operation, there was little time for backup, so critical systems had to run continuously. At Onslow College, the focus was on keeping a platform that has proven its reliability.
  Though these enterprises belong to disparate industries, their ICT leaders share a common concern: Ensuring systems remain available regardless of untoward events and circumstance.

• Virtualisation wars heat up again

  The virtualisation marketing wars that heated up the summer competition among VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, then dampened and cooled with the winter weather, are heating up again.

• Data centre managers forced to do more with less

  Asia Pacific data centre managers face cost containment and staffing as lead issues, reports Symantec in its second annual data centres study.
  Symantec Malaysia managing director Suzie Tan said that the study - 2008 Asia Pacific State of the Data Centre - was conducted by US research firm Applied Research at the end of 2008 from 1,600 responses from 21 countries, with 20 to 25 percent from the Asia Pacific region.

• Do the maths correctly for cloud computing

  I'd like to address an issue I've heard raised a number of times: That cloud computing, far from saving IT organisations money, actually costs more than providing the same services in-house.
  I hear this most commonly identified as an issue with Amazon EC2, put in this way: A large instance of a Linux server (15 GB memory 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each); 1,690 GB instance storage (4 by 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition) 64-bit platform I/O Performance: High) costs $.80/hr, or $576/month). A Windows instance is even more expensive: A large instance with Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Authentication Services, and SQL Server costs $3.20/hr, or $2304/month. A like-for-like comparison for a similarly-sized Windows instance sans the additional software is $1.20/hr, or $864/month).

• 10 virtualisation vendors to watch in 2009

  The virtualization market took a sharp turn toward the nasty, practical and cheap during 2008. Microsoft finally shipped a version of Windows Server with a native hypervisor, effectively giving away the ability to create multiple virtual servers from one machine. That's the cheap. The nasty: Microsoft also pulled marketing stunts like sending guerilla marketers into VMware's biggest U.S. tradeshow bearing casino chips with an anti- VMware message. Market-dominating VMware shrugged off Microsoft's bravado and rolled out a host of higher-level management and data-assurance products and services, while it ramped up its marketing to emphasize its vision of an ambitious virtual data center operating system.
  In the IT trenches, virtualisation users, mostly unconcerned with the vendor spitefulness, will expand beyond the test, development and evaluation installations they ran in 2008, running more production applications in VMs during 2009, predicts Chris Wolf, senior analyst at The Burton Group. In addition to running virtual servers and server-consolidation projects, many IT shops are adding deeper layers of storage and network virtualisation-making it even harder to see and manage the proliferation, performance and interaction of applications, networks and VMs that are part of a virtualised infrastructure of ever-increasing complexity, Wolf says.

• Fight the power costs

  There is no single answer that solves the energy usage problem but CIOs can look at four areas where they can make a difference, says Jose Iglesias, global solutions vice president, Symantec.
  These are data protection, virtualisation, power management and data centre design.