Wednesday, March 12, 2008 6:46 PM/EST
VMware and Citrix XenServer cordially traded shots at the annual N-Square dinner hosted by the Internet Research Group on March 11 at Ming's Restaurant in Palo Alto. (The "Happy Family" was delicious, and it was a nice place for a group meeting.) IRG (Internet Research Group) principal Peter Christy started off the main event of the evening by forbidding marketing-speak and introducing Nand Mulchandani, a senior director at VMware and Simon Crosby the CTO of XenSource at Citrix. Both Mulchandani and Crosby agreed that customers who were facing security problems most often did so because they incorrectly implemented virtualization, or improperly configured the virtual infrastructure once it was in place. Crosby made the case that open was better than proprietary because the code base is open to examination by the most paranoid minds including the National Security Agency. Further that the NSA contributes innovative advances in virtualization security along with...
Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:38 PM/EST
My colleague Michael Vizard covered Cisco's announcement of the ASR 1000 at CeBIT. I'm anxious to get a look at Cisco's new ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router with Cisco IOS XE. The platform is supposed to be able to offer high availability for IPsec VPN, firewall services, NetFlow event logging, and DDoS detection and mitigation without stopping. Like I said, very interesting and I'm looking forward to getting a look at the device. In the meantime, poking around on Cisco's site yielded this gem for IT managers: a significant change in Cisco's maintenance policy for IOS XE. In the Cisco IOS XE Software End-of-Life Strategy document Cisco will start releasing IOS XE software every four months instead of waiting for a feature queue to fill as is the case for IOS. The good news is that this means network managers will be able to schedule maintenance on a predictable...
Monday, March 03, 2008 6:02 PM/EST
Aside from VKernel, I'm not seeing a lot of choice for IT managers who want to enable chargeback for virtual infrastructure costs. However, I met today with virtual test lab management toolmaker Surgient and got a little more insight into some ways IT managers might think about chargeback. Erik Josowitz, a VP at Surgient, suggested that quantifying RAM and time might be a good way to measure the amount of resources a VM is using, and therefore could be a good way to charge departments for virtual computing resources. Other resources to measure could be VLAN, IP address and MAC address consumed. I suggested network bandwidth, but agreed with Erik that the incremental use cost for bandwidth was so small as to be negligible when compared to the other metrics he suggested. What is clear is that VM infrastructure is paying for itself through hardware consolidation and power reductions. It's...
