Tech Talk

One of the biggest hurdles for virtualization adoption in the small business area has been the need for expensive, shared storage.  The Virtual Storage Appliance is looking to change that.  By utilizing the relatively cheap, attached storage in host systems and pooling those into a storage array, vendors are looking to extend the goodness of [...]

VMware is a lucky technology company.  Few companies, short of Apple, seem to have as fierce and vibrant a community as the one that surrounds VMware.  VMworld 2012 was a remarkable time to spend with members of that community, in the realm of influencers and evangelists.  No question, I was around a lot of very [...]

Many backup vendors support vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform.  But now, HP’s Data Protector platform supports the extended vCloud layer directly with integration against VMware’s vCloud Director.  Workloads in highly virtualized datacenter are much more dynamic than traditional IT and the addition of vCloud Director to an environment only accellerates the ebb and flow of [...]

This morning, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger introduced a new bundled product offering – the vCloud Suite.  The solution marries vSphere with vCloud Director, networking and security  to create a fully automated, software-defined datacenter.  The announcement is directly related to needing to change how existing infrastructure is managed to allow it become more agile and save [...]

Today at VMworld, VMware announced the availability of version 5.1 of its infrastructure products.  New CEO Pat Gelsinger likened the release schedule of VMware’s infrastructure product to the Intel tick-tock release of a major every two years and minor revision on the year in between each major, but for a minor (tock) release, version 5.1 [...]

Paul Martiz is about to take the stage this morning for his last time as CEO of VMware to address an eager audience of attendees for VMworld.  VMware is expected to announce changes to licensing models and possibly to product bundles as reported last week from CRN.  I’ll be live blogging updates beginning in about [...]

I’m on the ground now in San Francisco for VMworld 2012.  This will be an extremely busy week packed with sessions, meetings, keynotes and social meet-ups.  This year seems a little different already than years past that I have attended.  There is a lot less official pre-event news but a lot more rumors and speculation.  That [...]

VMware announced today vCenter Protect Essentials, based on the Shavlik NetChk Protect product that it acquired earlier this year.  The newly rebranded product is good news for companies who currently leverage the built-in Update Manager technology in vSphere 4 and earlier version for patch management.  Previously, these customers would be looking at the hefty-priced upgrade [...]

After having a month to reflect on the organized chaos that was VMworld 2011, one message still stands out to me most of anything we heard during that week. VMware conveyed loud and clear that apps, and more specifically the frameworks and middleware to enable cloud apps, are the big area of innovation for the [...]

The way that I see it, VMware is up for a political fight in many of its customers’ IT departments.  Two things have become evident to me this week at VMworld 2011 – first, moving to the cloud is going to involve rewriting a lot of our applications and two, this is going to to be as [...]