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VMworld Europe in a Blog Post

March 4, 2009 1 Comment

Not all of us were lucky enough to fly to France to attend VMworld Europe. If you were like me and didn’t get to make it check out Duncan Epping’s post VMworld 2009 Europe Linkage, he has a collage of 76 links to all the key blogger coverage of the event.

And Don’t forget that VMworld 2009 in San Francisco is just 6 months away…here before you know it! Talk to your boss and start your planning now. Even with all belt tightening that the current economy is forcing everyone to do this year, missing VMworld can be a penny wise but pound foolish decision. (and I’m hoping to have one of my customers present this year…)

VMware Announces vCenter Server Heartbeat

March 2, 2009 Leave a Comment

One of the announcments that came out of VMworld Europe 2009 last week (one which surprising didn’t seem to get much attention that I’m aware of) was that of vCenter Server Heartbeat. One of the common issues that my clients have been frustreated with was the lack true monitoring and automatic redundancy for the vCenter. A Virtual Infrastructure’s operation relies on vCenter and in the past the recommended solution from VMware was to run vCenter virtualized in a High Availability pair. This worked fine if all vCenter components lived on the same VM. Once you break those components up across multiple VMs for increased performance and flexability, you need a solution that is application aware. This is exactly waht vCenter Server Heartbeat can deliver. From the press release:

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat monitors the vCenter Server connectivity and components, including the license server and VMware vCenter Update Manager, and can restart the entire vCenter Server on the passive server. This can help ensure a consistent, reliable operation of VMware vCenter Server if it is threatened by unplanned or planned downtime, and it provides a broad range of protection against operator errors, operating system or hardware failure, or external events.

vCenter heart beat it built ontop of Neverfail’s application availability technology and should be available in March.

Virtualization Kills Corporate Owned Laptop

February 17, 2009 Leave a Comment

Today I had yet another of my customers indicate that they are trying to figure out how to get rid of the corporate owned laptop. Last fall I had a similar discussion with a customer about employee owned laptops. At that time it was a conversation with an IT knowledge worker who would have rather been given the choice of which laptop he could use versus be forced upon a single brand. This time it was from an IT executive who would rather reduce his corporate desktop support costs by getting ride of the physical computers all together.

By providing a yearly or bi-yearly stipend and a set of minimum system requirements, let the employee buy the laptop of their choice. The company provides the business desktop as a virtual desktop that runs back in the data center and the employee accesses it from their own computer. Lower or no hardware support costs, data is secure in the corporate data center, easier centralized backups, and longer refresh cycles as the virtual desktop’s computing power can be dynamically expanded when needed and the servers can run for 4-5 years versus the company paying the expense of the refreshing laptop hardware every 2-3 years.

I think this company could get there eventually. Though it won’t be for all laptops in the organization, but a larger enough number of them to make the savings turn into real dollars.