Last week I posted an article on the VMware vCloud corporate blog (re-posted here). That article talks about the extensibility of the core vCloud platform to use features that are not natively exposed. While the use case is centered around vShield App, the extensibility framework really provides infinite possibilities. …

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This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. By: Massimo Re Ferre’ (Staff Systems Engineer – Global CoE) and Joe Sarabia (Sr. Consultant – Global CoE) Background In the last few years I have seen a rise of interest …

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Backup and restore (of consumer workloads) in a vCloud Director environment is a hot topic. When you deal with Pets (Vs. Cattle) it is important that you take care of your little lovely friends workloads. Part of the effort of taking care of them includes backing them up regularly and, more importantly, restoring them …

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I apologize for the catchy title (I need to drive clicks, somehow). The title of this blog post should have been "considerations on some interesting AWS (Amazon Web Services) usage data I came across". Not very catchy. A few weeks ago I saw a study done by The Big Data Group re the above. I found this …

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I keep bumping into discussions where people try to compare vCloud (Director) and OpenStack. The last one that caught my attention was an email from a colleague that went like: "We are in a competitive situation with OpenStack. Customer is currently using Amazon EC2... They are looking at moving from Amazon to …

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There has been some turmoil lately in the industry when VMware announced that wanted to join the OpenStack community. In the last few days Martin Casado (Nicira co-founder and now Chief Network Architect at VMware) was quoted in a few interviews for the plans VMware has to integrate, evolve and position the Nicira …

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vCloud Director 5.1 has introduced a fair amount of new functionalities. One of those is a change in the resource allocation models. I have tried to capture those changes from vCloud Director 1.5 to 5.1 in a couple of tables. For those of you that are new to vCloud Director it may be a good idea to get a background and …

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In the last 3 years I spent most of my time advocating that the cloud world is marching at a (very) different pace based on where you are and who you are. If you are a professor consultant working with the like of Google, Facebook and such your vision of the world may be a bit skewed compared to "the …

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At VMworld 2012 VMware showed something dubbed Distributed Storage. If you were in SF and you missed it, I strongly suggest you watch the recording of session INF-STO2192. The demo in particular is very cool. I am very excited about this for a number of reasons. This post isn't going to talk specifically about the …

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I spent a good 10 years of my IT career looking closely to hardware platforms (at IBM STG - Systems and Technology Group). After more than two years focusing purely on infrastructure software (at VMware) I thought I wanted to share where I think we are headed with the design of x86 servers. We all know x86 is eating …

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