For any business organization to fulfill its mission, it is vitally important for data to be continually secure and available. Chief information officers, IT managers and technologists are now faced with the pressing concerns of growing demand for and reliance on access to information, along with ensuring business continuity during a disaster. As companies are increasingly dependent upon rapid access to data (and subsequently less tolerant of failure), an increased focus must be given to Disaster Recovery (DR) and having a comprehensive Business Continuity (BC) plan in place. Firms that have a thought-out, detailed strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery are in a position to keep their systems running when problems occur. Request Free!

Syndicated via RSS From: http://itknowledgehub.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Infostor

Discover how HP Insight Control server migration streamlines, simplifies and automates the process of server migration for physical and virtual environments. Request Free!

Syndicated via RSS From: http://itknowledgehub.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Infostor

By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — VMware demonstrated its new vShield Edge routing virtual firewall on the VMworld 2010 conference floor, and passersby stopped to give it a look. Most attendees were intrigued by the concept but worried about the cost and complexity of another virtual layer for networking security.

“The complexity of managing VPNs and different networks is always difficult,” said Tony Stauffer, manager of end user services for an automotive manufacturer in the Midwest. “I’ll be testing it out to see if it’s really as simple as what’s been demonstrated.”

Ed Symanzik, information technologist at Michigan State University, said his shop has a virtual stack running 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), but it’s bottlenecked by a 1 GbE edge firewall.

“If I had this, I might be able to do an end-run around that physical firewall,” he said.

But that would only be if money was no object, Symanzik said. As it is, he’s not keen on paying further VMware licensing costs to get vShield Edge.

Other users weren’t comfortable philosophically getting such a product from a virtualization vendor.

“I don’t want to commingle security with the same vendor,” said Ashraf Keval, Windows systems administrator for California’s Department of Water Resources. “I have a relationship with Trend Micro, and I want to stick with that.”

A user from an accounting firm said, “I don’t need another firewall or another point of failure.” And another user from a major credit card issuer said he will investigate host-based firewall alternatives before committing to vShield Edge.

Syndicated via RSS From: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-virtualization

By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — After the splashy, high-level announcement of VMware’s vCloud Director on Tuesday morning, reality set in at a VMworld 2010 session by Kevin Lees, VMware’s global vCloud delivery team lead. Lees detailed the lessons learned from beta deployments at a handful of enterprise and service-provider customers.

He emphasized repeatedly that users looking to deploy vCloud director should “take a stepwise, evolutionary approach.” He advised attendees to start simple by equating one back-end virtual data center with one vSphere cluster. He also recommended that ESX clusters running management utilities and the Oracle vCD database should be separated from resource pools in virtual data centers.

Lees also said careful planning is crucial for organizations looking to deploy vCloud Director at this stage. In particular, he advised users to follow a “60% rule,” particularly if they are setting up an Oracle vCD at a service provider data center.

“What we’ve found is that when you hit 60% utilization of the virtual data center, it’s better if the service provider doesn’t add any more organizations to it so there’s plenty of room for growth,” Lees said.

Organizations should ideally dedicate a “strong project manager” and possibly even a separate operations team to vCloud Director deployments. Well-defined roles and responsibilities, as well as cooperation with all levels of the IT organization, are essential, Lee said.

“This is not something that can be done from organic proof-of-concept processes — that can then just be turned into production,” he added.

Networking and security require special attention in the design phase, Lee continued.

“Design, design and most importantly, design,” he said. “Determine your templates early and get security to review it as early in the process as possible.”

Lees also provided more vCloud Director fine print to consider:

• Only one storage tier can be assigned per virtual data center.
• Currently, there isn’t a single sign-on in version 1 with existing portals.
• Be careful when configuring Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, because it cannot be reset to default values.
• A Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) utility called compat-libcom_err is required but does not automatically install in RHEL.
• Network File System “transfer storage” is required for users to upload their own virtual machines (VMs) and vApps, but Lees recommended that user self-service follow after initial deployment. At first, he said that IT should control spinning up new VMs, then “evolve into letting end users into the environment directly.”

Syndicated via RSS From: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-virtualization

By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — After Tuesday’s VMworld 2010 keynote, there were few details on how VMware would integrate Integrien’s performance analytics code into its products. The next day, Raghu Raghuram, general manager of virtualization and cloud platforms for VMware, filled in some of the blanks and hinted at where VMware might look to broaden its portfolio.

Raghuram said VMware chose the relatively unknown company because Integrien’s algorithms are able to analyze time-series data, which means the product has “broad applicability.” VMware plans to fold a version of Integrien’s dashboard into its vCenter management console and will also offer a standalone version that will have broader coverage of virtual data centers. The product has some significant overlap with AppSpeed, Raghuram admitted, but AppSpeed offers transaction-level analysis of application performance, something Integrien doesn’t do today.

Asked whether VMware still has an appetite for further acquisitions, Raghuram said the company will continue to be “opportunistic” in making small, tuck-in acquisitions. He wouldn’t get too specific but did acknowledge that “there’s plenty of room to grow” in security.

He also emphasized that VMware’s bias is toward small technology acquisitions and “approaches that are significantly different from what has been done before.” During the show, experts speculated VMware could have its eye on HyTrust Inc.

Syndicated via RSS From: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-virtualization

It’s not quite the “Poker Chip Incident” of 2008, but Microsoft made its presence known at this year’s show with a full-page ad in USA Today, which was delivered directly to hotel rooms belonging to attendees at the show.

Photo after the jump.

The ad reads, in part:

Dear VMware customers,

VMware is asking many of you to sign 3-year license agreements for your virtualization projects. But with the arrival of cloud computing, signing up for a 3-year virtualization commitment may lock you into a vendor that cannot provide you with the breadth of technology, flexibility or scale that you’ll need to vuild a complete cloud computing environment.

[...]

If you’re evaluating a new licensing agreement with VMware, talk to us first. You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain. Not only is Microsoft’s server virtualization solution approximately one-third the cost of a comparable solution from VMware, but also a recent Microsoft study of 150 large companies showed those running Microsoft virtualization spent 24% less on IT labor on an ongoing basis…Most importantly, as you build out the next generation of your IT environment, we can providee you with scalable worldwide public cloud computing services that VMware does not offer.

VMware was secure in the world it had created for itself in the Moscone Center this week, but this ad was a reminder of the wolves still outside the door.

Syndicated via RSS From: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-virtualization