Virtualization Round Up 20090824

On the final march to VMworld 2009, this will be the last roundup until after Labor Day.

VMware Specific Links

• First, some VMWorld 2009 Stuff
  • VMworld 2009 Unofficial Party List
  • Thanks to Chad Sakac, here’s an AWESOME peek behind the scenes of getting hardware ready for VMworld 2009
• After more conversations last week with clients about their private cloud plans (including bursting out to external cloud providers), I wanted to share the list of VMware Ready vCloud Service Providers.  I expect this list to grow post VMworld…
• A recent patch was released for vCenter Server 4.0 which fixes an issue where HA Cluster failover might not work if the servers were configured with certain IPs.  Full details are available in the Knowledge Base Article.
• Some more SpringSource centric posts
  • SpringSource announced Cloud Foundry, their Enterprise Java Cloud.  The VMware price tag for SpringSource is looking a bit more reasonable all of a sudden.
  • VMware’s SpringSource Acquisition: More Than Meets the Eye?
  • With SpringSource Buy, VMware Constructs Cloud Platform
• When a client asked me about running Documentum eRoom solution in a VM recently I found this great article about how EMC is doing that and Saved $1.5 Million in the process.
• The Vroom blog has a great posting about VMware Fault Tolerance Performance including a link to a FT architecture and performance whitepaper.
• Scott Drummonds recent community post Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4’s Scheduler helps to answer the common question of how man vCPUs to give a VM (as well as a few other questions…).

General Virtualization Links

• With 1 In 3 Developers Working On Private Cloud Apps, almost 50% of developers expect to be working on cloud applications within a year and think that Java is the best language for developing in the cloud.
• When talking about cloud applications, the business model of these applications can come into discussion (with the Free usually being mentioned at some point).  That’s why I found this simple formula to gauge a freemium model’s success so interesting.
• Security Showdown: Cloud Computing vs. On-Premise IT is an interesting podcast discussion actually discusses the private cloud between the lines.
• EMC’s Chuck Hollis talks about how he’s seeing more enterprises wanting to get going now on private clouds by building A Starter Private Cloud For IT.
• After seeing a few pallets of UCS systems being delivered to a client of mine last week, I found Steve Chamber’s post about The stars are aligning: VMware, Cisco and ESG rather timely and right on target with regards to the higher level value UCS delivers to the CIO’s office. “Make IT simple stupid” is a mantra that we should all live by.