This past week Jeff James, Sean Deuby and I attended a Private Cloud Workshop that Microsoft held at their Redmond campus. Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President Server & Tool Business kicked off this two day event by sharing some interesting statics about the use of System Center in the enterprise as well as stating that System Center has significant advantages in managing the private cloud over all of the competing products. A couple of standout statistics that he mentioned were that Microsoft’s has made a billion dollar investment in the area of systems management and they are also in a unique position to leverage their own experiences in running Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure. This global infrastructure provides support for Hotmail, Windows Azure, Office 365, Windows InTune and more. Brad also mentioned that 76% of all organizations have Windows Server installed and that System Center was the most popular management suite worldwide and it is used by 50% of all organization with more than 500 PCs. There’s no doubt that the release of System Center 2012 marks some big changes for the product. First, the individual System Center Components can no longer be purchased separately. Instead, there will be just two System Center 2012 editions: System Center 2012 Standard Edition and System Center 2012 Datacenter edition. This makes a lot of sense when you remember that the different members of the family all provide different bits of functionality but they are all needed to manage a cloud environment. For more information on the new System Center products and licensing you can refer to Jeff James's article at: http://www.windowsitpro.com/blog/virtualization-blog-13/system-center/system-center-2012-rc-ships-showcases-revamped-licensing-branding-strategy-141929 Regarding the private cloud there’s no doubt that the biggest changes are found in the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (VMM) product. Jeff, Sean and I were discussing the fact that these changes a...
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I recently met with Michael Alvarado, SAN storage product manager, of NEC about their M100 storage array which has just been released in the United States. The M100 storage array family is an entry-level storage device that provides the performance and features of enterprise class storage devices. The M100 has a user friendly web-based GUI that makes it easy to navigate and manage storage pools and RAID levels as well as setting up replication. The new M100 storage array comes in a 2U chassis it supports 2.5” or 3.5” drives and can have up to 96 mounted drives. The M100 is designed for multi-tenancy and it allows you to mix different RAID levels in the same storage pools. It supports thin provisioning as well as the ability to perform snapshots and replicate volumes on-line with no interruption of availability. The M100 has an advanced power saving design and comes with NEC’s Phoenix automatic error correction technology. The base price for a single controller model with 8 GB Fibre channel is $4742 with 3.5” drives and $4,814 with 2.5’ drives. You can learn more about NEC’s storage products at: http://www.necam.com/Storage/. In addition, you can look for coverage of NEC’s M100 storage product in an upcoming issue of Windows IT Pro magazine....
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At this past VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas I met with NEC to discuss some of their new product releases. On the enterprise networking front NEC I met with Don Clark director of business development for ProgrammableFlow for NEC about their new ProgrammableFlow networking products. While most people don’t think about NEC as a networking company NEC is actually one of the top 3 networking vendors in the Japanese market. Their new ProgrammableFlow products are based on the OpenFlow standard which has been developed by a collection of today’s leading networking organizations led by Stanford University. NEC was the first company to bring an OpenFlow based product to market. ProgrammableFlow essentially brings virtualization to the network by enabling the organization to decouple network logic from the physical network infrastructure. NEC’s ProgrammableFlow products provide load balancing for network resiliency and multi-tenant capabilities. NEC’s ProgrammableFlow Switch lists at $25,000 and their ProgrammableFlow Controller lists for $75,000. You can find out more about NEC’s ProgrammableFlow network products at: http://www.necam.com/PFlow/...
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At VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas I meet with Reza Malekzadeh, VP of Marketing and Kuyper Hoffman, Sr. Systems Engineer from Nimula to talk about the new release of Nimbula their cloud operating system. Nimbula was founded two years ago by two former Amazon executives that lead the development of Amazon’s EC2 public cloud service. With Nimbula they built on those EC2 concepts and created a cloud OS technology that delivers EC2-like services that can work either behind the firewall as a private cloud or as a public cloud service. Nimbula is targeted toward cloud providers and enterprise customers and is designed for scalability and can work with a small cluster to up to thousands of computers. Nimbula runs on multiple nodes and is designed for high availability where there is no single point of failure. Reza and Kuyper demonstrated their Nimbula Director 1.5 cloud management system which has the ability to work with geographically distributed cloud resources as well as providing an identity model that can span multiple locations. Nimbula Director 1.5 can be managed from the command line or a web-based GUI. It also provides the ability to manage multiple tenants as well as perform usage metering and chargebacks. You can learn more about Nimbula Director 1.5 and download a trial copy from: http://nimbula.com/...
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At this past VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, Jeff James and I met with Henning Volker President and CEO of Cortado to discuss the latest improvements in Cortado Corporate server 5.3. Cortado Corporate Server 5.3 enables you to integrate smartphones and tablets like the iPad into your corporate IT infrastructure. If the Corado name seems unfamiliar you might know them better as ThinPrint. In August of 2011 ThinPrint, which was known for its VDI and mobile device printing solutions, was renamed to Cortado and the focus of the company has expanded beyond printing to connecting mobile devices to all types of corporate assets including files, databases, and printing. There are two components to Cortado Corporate Server 5.3. A server application that is connected to your corporate infrastructure and an App that runs on your mobile device. Unlike other mobile management solutions Cortado isn’t implemented as simple RDP connection which isn’t optimized for running on a mobile device. Instead, Cortado is implemented as a native App giving it seamless integration with the device. Some of the new features in the Cortado Corporate Server 5.3 release include management for mobile profiles, a secure Exchange connection, remote administration, automatic data synchronization, multi-device support, printing over HTTPS and support for iOS encryption. In addition, the Cortado Corporate Server provides the administrator with granular control of end-user device rights and security. You can find more information about the Cortado Corporate Server 5.3 at: http://www.cortado.com/euen/Home.aspx...
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Client Touch - No, the iPad wasn’t enough to convince me. No, my Android phone wasn’t enough to convince me either. Windows 8 sold it. Touch is the next input medium. Call me a slow learner but the difference is in the ability to produce content. Neither the iPad or the Android provide it. Windows 8 on the tablet does -- in spades. Windows 8 on the tablet can run Office and Visual Studio and can be used to do all the the things I really need – its not just a glorified web browser. For me the iPad is dead. That said, I hope Microsoft and Samsung would get a clue and stop calling this things a slate. That is so yesterday. On a similar note, I wish Microsoft would provide a way for us journalists (I use that in the broadest sense as I am really a developer first and a journalists second) to buy these devices. I understand why they can’t give them to journalists because of conflict of interest concerns. However, I haven’t been excited about developing apps since the browser took over and can’t wait to develop some of these touch screen Metro style applications. But unfortunately I have no avenue to get one of these devices with Windows 8 on it. I would happily buy it if I could. Oh well. I guess coverage of Windows 8 and Metro from me will just have to wait. Server Real Servers Don’t Use GUIs – Wow! Microsoft has really (and I mean really) taken the server role seriously with Window Server 8. By default Windows Server 8 will install in the headless Server Core role. Multi-server management is enabled through Server Manager as well as PowerShell. This marks one of the most significant changes I’ve ever seen in Windows Server management and I know that this the right direction. For those if you (and I count myself there as well) who like GUI you can initially configure the server with the GUI and then remove it freeing yourself of all the patches that the GUI needs -- Server Core needs almost none of them. Support for Server Core also includes SQL Server which ...
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At the recent Windows Server Workshop at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington Jeff Woolsey, Principle Program Manager Lead for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud division presented the new features in the next version of their Hyper-V virtualization platform. In the introduction to the workshop Jeffery Snover, Distinguished Engineer and the Lead Architect for the Windows Server Division made the bold statement that with Microsoft it’s the third release is where Microsoft really gets it right and with regard to what Microsoft demonstrated in the next version of Hyper-V this is definitely true. The upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release that’s included in the next version of Windows Server has closed the technology gap with VMware’s vSphere. Hyper-V 3.0 Scalability The days when Hyper-V lagged behind VMware in terms of scalability are a thing of the past. The new Hyper-V 3.0 meets or exceeds all of the scalability marks that were previously VMware-only territory. Hyper-V 3.0 hosts support up to 160 logical processors (where a logical processor is either a core or a hyperthread) and up to 2 TB RAM. On the VM guest side, Hyper-V 3.0 guests will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM. More subtle changes include support for guest NUMA where the guest VM has processor and memory affinity with the Hyper-V host resources. NUMA support is important for ensuring scalability increases as the number of available host processors increase. Multiple Concurrent Live Migration and Live Storage Migration Perhaps more important than the sheer scalability enhancements are the changes in Live Migration and the introduction of Storage Live Migration. Live Migration was introduced in Hyper-V 2.0 which came out with Windows Server 2008 R2. While it filled an important hole in the Hyper-V feature set it wasn’t up to par with the VMotion capability provided in vSphere. Live Migration was limited to a single Live Migration at a time while ESX Server wa...
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The most interesting meeting I had at this past VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas was with Hoofar Razavi, Director of Product Management Mobile Solutions for VMware. I had known that VMware had been working a mobile device virtualization solution for the past couple of years. However, I didn’t know that the availability of this technology is imminent. Hoofar explained that VMware had successfully implemented a mobile device hypervisor which currently supports Google’s Android OS. This is very near to the Holy Grail for most IT professionals who need to lug around at least two different mobile phones where one phone is for work and the other is personal. Hoofar explained that the basic phone needs of the IT Pro are in essentially in conflict. IT needs to secure their phones and provide the ability to wipe the phone if it’s lost. However you don’t want IT to be able to wipe your personal data and Apps so today many IT Pros use multiple devices. Being able to have both work settings and personal settings in the same phone lets you use a single device without losing any functionality. VMware’s mobile hypervisor essentially allows an Android phone to have two completely separate and independent partitions: a work side and a personal side. Hoofar demoed the technology for me on a Samsung mobile phone running Android. Touching a standard App icon immediately switched the phone from its work side to its personal side and back again. The switching was instantaneous. Each side had its own personalization settings and applications. Both sides were continuously available all of the time. Hoofar pointed out that one important difference between this device and a standard mobile phone was the integrated notification bar. The virtual phone’s notification bar shows event for both partitions and uses different colors to differentiate between the events that occur in each of the partitions. Responding to a notification immediately switches the phone to the appropriate partition and App. The...
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VMware’s position as the leading enterprise virtualization platform has been secured for many years. However, their position in the SMB market is not nearly so well entrenched. In the SMB market price and complexity have been hurdles that VMware has had trouble getting over. Timothy Stephan, Senior Director of Product Marketing met with me during VMworld 2011 to explain how VMware’s vSphere 5 release takes aim at SMB organizations. With the vSphere 5 release VMware brings three different offerings into the SMB virtualization market. vSphere Essentials - vSphere Essentials is the low-end starter product and it lists for $495. It’s based on the ESXi hypervisor and can be used on up to three hosts with a maximum of 2 CPUs per host and 192 GB of vRAM. It’s designed to support about 20-40 workloads. vSphere Essentials Plus – vSphere Essentials Plus picks up where Essentials leaves off and adds enterprise features like high availability, data protection and vMotion. Essentials Plus is for SMBs that need enhanced business continuity. Essentials Plus lists for $4000. VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0 – Perhaps the most interesting addition to the VMware line-up is the new VMware vSphere Storage Appliance. While its name suggests a hardware solution the VMware Storage Appliance is a software solution that you install on industry standard servers. The VMware Storage Appliance brings the availability features like VMotion to the SMB without requiring a SAN by creating a shared storage pool from each server’s DAS. The vSphere Storage Appliance starts at $7,245....
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