Processes

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1321416,00.html

Hewlett-Packard Co. has announced plans to offer container-based data centers similar to those offered by Sun Microsystems Inc., Rackable Systems, Inc. American Power Conversion and IBM.
Interest in containerized data centers stems from companies with significant data center footprints that have run out of space and/or power capacity.

“As we talk to customers, we hear more and more concerns over power and space limitations, and [the time it takes] to build out brick-and-mortar space — it is costly and can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to complete,” said Steve Cummings, the director of scalable computing infrastructure at HP.

Very cool, do check out this interesting article talking about HP’s data center container solution. I can certainly see the reasons why this might be something of interest to different user groups. It will be interesting to see the different solutions, uses and organizations that adopt these solutions, what configurations will they use?

Could the data center in a container be the ultimate virtualization platform for the enterprise or consultancy? Want your data center virtualized, we just need to plug in our container, get the virtualization disk out and press go.

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/default.aspx

Hyper-V available via Windows Update today

The update will be classified as a “recommended update”, which means it will flow down automatically according to the settings you’ve selected for your Windows Server 2008 OS. It’s also being released to Windows Server Update Services.

Taylor has a nice screen capture here. Let the fun times begin!

I was talking with a colleague during the week about Hyper-V and I’ve been reading blog postings about it, to see what the feedback is.

It does look cool, I remain as ever interested and a fan of VMWare, but it’s important to understand what’s out there, and to appreciate that you choose the virtualization tool that’s appropriate for your business, for your technical needs, whether it’s VMWare, x-VM, Hyper-V or Xen. That we can within the same department have a range of virtual platforms,

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/147748/seven_tips_for_managing_a_multiplevendor_virtualization_environment.html

Fortisphere CTO John Suit meets with a lot of companies who are trying to get a better grip on managing virtualization. In the field lately, he sees the results of the virtualization downside that IT leaders have been telling us about for months: VMs roll out awfully quickly. This speed is a blessing and a curse, since each VM you create is another one you must track, manage and secure. Unfortunately, it becomes even more complicated to keep track of VM sprawl and related worries when you start playing with more than one vendor’s virtualization technology.

The challenges around virtual server management can be just as significant in many ways, particularly if you consider management from an administration standpoint: licensing, monitoring, security patching and billing.

We also have to consider the marginal cost element, that an extra virtual machine might require additional infrastructure, understanding what we have, what systems/workload is being hosted on which hardware becomes key. Understanding workloads against capacity, thinking about pre-provisioning can be something to consider, that the capacity should grow with demand, that as blade enclosure 7 or the last few rack servers start getting used to host virtual machines, IT should be provisioning or ordering extra capacity.

As with your physical estate though, we need not only someone to manage these machines, but to manage the estate:

• What servers do we have - are they still in use, can they be decommissioned
• What systems/applications have similar workload profiles - could we host them on the same infrastructure
• Can we consolidate server roles - can we not have one large virtual/physical machine running SQL than 6 virtual machines
• What level of patches/hot fixes and layered component levels are we at - to keep everything in line with vendor requirements
• Can we make small changes to improve performance/reliability?
• Reporting on system utilization/use - does that virtual machine need that much disk space/memory/cpu? Does it justify a virtual machine or could we share load with another virtual machine - shared infrastructure

http://www.newsfactor.com/news/XenDesktop-for-Desktop-Virtualization/story.xhtml?story_id=103003D1O5Z6

For many companies, desktop management is time-consuming and expensive. Ensuring data security and regulatory compliance is complex when desktops are distributed around the globe. However, new technologies are available to help. For Citrix systems, the answer is XenDesktop.

XenDesktop is a desktop delivery solution that allows companies to virtualize Windows desktops in the data center and deliver them on-demand to office workers in any location.

According to Citrix Systems’ senior product marketing manager Calvin Hsu, desktop virtualization provides companies with an alternative to managing their desktop environment.

Check out this article about desktop virtualization. It will be interesting to see if we have more organizations adopting virtualization whether it’s a USB key type solution, or a web based Citrix solution to replace the desktop pc or for remote working instead of a laptop. The ability to free your team, to have them location independent, able to support the infrastructure on demand can be a real enabler to the way your on call, your maintenance and system support is managed.

http://www.webitpr.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=9167

As the information explosion continues to drive businesses into the virtualised world, storage virtualisation continues to deliver real world business benefits to adopters. Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe by leading provider of clustered NAS solutions for enterprises and content rich organisations, ONStor, Inc., indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in both regions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years.

While it has been widely recognised that storage virtualisation is the best way to provide a flexible, scalable and highly available storage environment, only 27% of European respondents are actually implementing storage virtualisation today as compared with 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.

In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realise operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

An interesting read, understanding that the operation conditions, the way we do business in the different regions differs is important. Check out this article illustrating the differences in the US and European markets.