My good friend at Microsoft, Giorgio Malusardi, noticed my post "Enterprise Virtualization in a Box" which was essentially an example of how to create a BladeCenter-contained VMware-enabled data center in a box (including servers, storage and networking). Giorgio challenged me with the task to create …

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VMworld 2009 Europe is coming (last week of February). I was planning to go and I have just found out that they have also accepted one of the two topics I submitted for the break-out sessions. The title of the session that got selected is: Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors? This …

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In this post I am going to talk about a specific piece of hardware technology that is intercepting a specific virtualization industry trend. This piece of technology is called BladeCenter S. Those of you that have been reading my blog know I don't usually talk about IBM specific stuff (I work for IBM) but this time I …

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Early in 2007 I wrote a post whose title was "Will Microsoft Sunset VMware?". You can read it here. The closing of that post was: > This analysis is as of April 2007. I am sure many things can and will change and I might be proven wrong. Let's see what happens. I went through it this morning and I have to …

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I have been working in IT for about 17 years now, 14 of which at IBM. Since the first day I was immediately exposed to the concept of a centralized IT where everything is fully controlled, fully secured, fully automated and easy to manage within the data center boundaries; on the other hand whatever sits outside of the …

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I think he did but, relax Paul, I am not going to sue you... ;-) Joking aside I was sitting at the VMworld 2008 Keynote in Las Vegas back on Monday last week and I was somewhat surprised (perhaps even pleased) to see Paul touching on many innovative concepts I have been talking about last year at VMworld 2007 in my …

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So finally it happened. Hypervisors are (essentially) free. I remember the very first engagement I had with VMware technologies some 8 years ago; that was the 1.1 (beta) time frame: we did a Proof of Concept and closed the deal with a very satisfied customer... While they were very happy about the achievements they …

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Virtualization is a disruptive technology and we all know that. With this post I want to share with you some scenarios about how server (and storage) virtualization can drastically change the landscape for "small IT shops" (aka SMB's) in the context of High-Availability and Disaster/Recovery. Up until today …

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Lately, there have been many discussions on the Internet and on various forums regarding the implementation of HA clustering technologies (namely and primarily Microsoft Cluster Server) within virtual machine environments (namely and primarily VMware infrastructures). Many customers are still treating virtual machines …

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In the last few months I have been struggling to understand what is so different, in terms of mass adoption, between virtualizing server workloads and virtualizing desktop workloads (also known as "VDI" or "Virtual Desktop Infrastructure"). I have been exposed to this phenomenon of x86 …

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