HP Storageworks P4800 SAN

The P4800 was introduced at HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas. It runs in the HP BladeSystem chassis, using 4 server blades as storage controllers and leaving 12 blades for client virtualisation software. This is a great proof point of Converged Infrastructure.

We highlighted this a few weeks back here. But we found this useful video and thought we would share it with you. Enjoy.

The Microsoft Cloud

Azure, BPOS and SPLA make up the Microsoft Cloud. Is that what the Cloud is? Quite the contrary, these three "black boxes" are a comprehensive set of offerings from the world's largest supplier of software. Microsoft's newest slogan... "The Cloud - We're all in!" At their Worldwide Partner conference this year they are proving that this is much more than a slogan. In one of the keynotes at this year's event, Kevin Turner, COO said to a packed house at the Verizon center in Washington DC, "Lead your customers to the Cloud. They are going there anyway, so lead them".

This bet isn't new for Microsoft. They started work in earnest about three years ago on the Azure platform, a cloud based data center to be used by applications developers around the world. To be sure the platform has been morphing over the past 3 years... but this week, it has begun to take on a more defined form.

Azure now includes Windows Azure, SQL Azure and even Windows Server. Many in the industry believed this Cloud platform would be just another development environment, but Microsoft has other plans. In this instance of their Cloud, they believe the world needs two approaches; complete outsourcing and private/on-premise cloud. So Azure is a development and delivery platform that can be accessed publicly, but is also now available as an 'appliance'. That's right, you can now order an Azure and have it delivered to your IT datacenter... but this is not for the faint of heart. The Azure appliance is said to be the size of a cargo ship container! Why? Because Microsoft believes if you are serious about the Cloud, you need something that will scale to thousands of end users right out of the box.

Next is Business Productivity Online Services (or Solutions) - BPOS for short. Ever heard of Google Apps? Well this is Microsoft's answer to that bundle... it includes Exchange (for Enterprise grade email), SharePoint (for file sharing), Office Communicator (for collaboration) and Dynamics (for Customer Relationship Management - CRM). But not to be outdone by Google, Microsoft now also offers Forefront, Windows Azure, Windows Server and Windows Intune as a part of the BPOS bundle. These services can only be accessed online and Microsoft is the sole service provider.

Last is the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) - All Microsoft applications can be delivered under this subscription licensing program. It is administered through the Communications Sector business at Microsoft and resold through thousands of Micrsoft SPLA service provider partners around the globe.

Is VMware's vSphere 4.1 going to drive SMB adoption?

With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware hopes to lure the elusive and price-conscious small and midsize businesses that are still, in many cases, in the early stages of trying to figure out their virtualisation strategies.

Among the long list of new features in VMware vSphere 4.1 are changes to VMware's licensing at the low end of its product line -- changes designed to appeal to the SMB market that has been complaining about high prices and missing features. While VMware has the lion's share of the enterprise virtualisation market, the SMB market is splintered among VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Parallels, and other Xen and KVM offerings. Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer have been gaining a lot of attention in the SMB market because of their free and low-cost SMB offerings that include such customer feature favorites as live migration and high availability (HA).

With vSphere 4.1, VMware answers that challenge by making its vMotion live migration feature available for the first time in the VMware vSphere Essentials Plus and Standard editions. As an added bonus, VMware has upgraded its vMotion technology to deliver a 5x increase in migration speed while supporting up to eight simultaneous migrations between two physical servers.

In an effort to entice SMB customers, the company has been running a promotional price on its entry-level Essentials license, lowering the price from $995 to $495. Evidently it helped, because VMware now says it is going to make the price cuts permanent. At a price of $495 for six CPUs, that brings the price down to $83 per processor -- a very affordable price for an SMB. The only problem is that this edition doesn't offer live migration or HA capabilities, both of which can be found in the free version of Microsoft Hyper-V R2.

Microsoft BPOS to get new features

At Microsoft's annual World Partner Event last week the star of the show had to be BPOS and the cloud.  Microsoft have announced a raft of new features that will be gracing BPOS soon.  They are:

Exchange Online:

• Voice mail with Unified Messaging
• Integrated archiving
• Retention policies and legal hold
• Transport rules
• Multi-mailbox search
• Conversation View
• MailTips
• Enhanced Web-based administration
• Role-Based Access Control
• Remote PowerShell
• Free/busy between cloud and on-premises
• Cross-premises management

• Native migration tools

 

SharePoint Online:

• Portal site templates
• Extranet access
• Anonymous Access
• Multi-Lingual UI
• Office 2010 integration
• Tagging, Rating, Tag Cloud
• Activity Feed, Social Networking, Note Board
• Improved Wikis & Blogs
• Content publishing
• Navigation controls
• Cross site-collection search
• Phonetic search
• People search
• Visio Services
• Excel Services
• Sandboxed Solutions
• Improved workflows
• Improved SharePoint Designer 2010
• Access Services

• Better controls of FQDNs

 

Office Communications Online:

• P2P A/V across firewall
• File transfer across firewall
• Presence with pictures
• Federation

• IM with Windows Live

 

Platform Updates:

• Free/Busy co-existence
• Single Sign On
• Identity federation
• Redesigned admin interface

• More administration and access control

Some fantastic additions I think you will agree and brings the world of online services much closer to their on premise counterparts.

Application Whitelisting

The concept of application whitelisting (AWL) is straight forward – You have a finite list of trusted applications and only those are allowed to run.

As a security technology it has enjoyed a wider market adoption in recent times. It is capturing the enterprise server and desktop market in a big way. Traditional security technologies are not able to combat today’s breed of threats like advanced persistent threats (APTs) & botnets, and there is universal acknowledgement that AWL can provide thorough security. But the usual inhibition is – end user productivity should not be compromised by a stringent security system.

Many CISO’s would gladly embrace AWL as the security standard if it:

1. Provides highest-level of security
2. Reduces IT’s administrative burden
3. Does not lower end user productivity

There are several AWL vendors in the market today, and they cover requirement 1 in varying degrees. The new entrants in this space provide partial whitelisting (just a list of exes), but thorough whitelisting is only when the entire system stack is whitelisted – i.e. drivers, scripts, libraries, exes and browser components.

Furthermore, only mature vendors cover requirements 2 & 3, providing security with flexibility – and win the CISO’s signoff.

McAfee covers them by using its multi-faceted trust model. New “good” applications are allowed even though they don’t feature in the whitelist, because they satisfy the trust criterion.

But AWL technologies still need to evolve. No vendor has created an ideal trust model, because there will always be “good” apps which are neither in the whitelist nor will they satisfy the trust criteria.

McAfee is in a unique position to evolve in that direction, it can combine whitelisting, blacklisting and its Global Threat Intelligence to identify and keep away both the known-bad and the unknown-bad, yet allow the unknown-good. Once that happens, AWL technology will become a security solution not just for enterprises but also in the consumer world.

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Defined

Now that the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available as a public beta, Microsoft has made it clear what their dynamic memory feature is all about.

With Hyper-V Dynamic Memory there are two values: Start-up RAM and Maximum RAM:

Start-up RAM is the initial/startup amount of memory assigned to a virtual machine. When a virtual machine is started this is the amount of memory the virtual machine will be allocated.

The Maximum RAM setting is the maximum amount of memory that the guest operating system can grow to, up to 64 GB of memory. Based on the settings above.

The Memory Buffer property specifies the amount of memory available in a virtual machine for file cache purposes (e.g. SuperFetch) or as free memory. The range of values are from 5 to 95. A target memory buffer is specified in percentages of free memory and is based on current runtime memory usage. A target memory buffer percentage of 20% means that in a VM where 1 GB is used, 250 MB will be ‘free’ (or available) ideally for a total amount of 1.25 GB in the virtual machine. By default, Hyper-V Dynamic Memory uses a default buffer allocation of 20%. If you find this percentage is too conservative or not conservative enough, you can adjust this setting on the fly while the virtual machine is running without downtime.

Memory Priority: By default, all virtual machines are created equal in terms of memory prioritisation. However, it’s very likely you’ll want to prioritise memory allocation based on workload. For example, I can see a scenario where one would give domain controllers greater memory priority than a departmental print server. Memory Priority is a per virtual machine setting which indicates the relative priority of the virtual machine’s memory needs measured against the needs of other virtual machines. The default is set to ‘medium’. If you find that you need to adjust this setting, you can adjust this setting on the fly while the virtual machine is running without downtime.

Thanks to Alessandro Perilli for the details.

VMware vSphere License Model Changes

Along with the release of vSphere 4.1 VMware has announced a new per-VM licensing model that will take effect starting September 1, 2010:

VMware vCenter, AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager will be sold in VM packs on a per VM basis starting on September 1, 2010. VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager are already licensed on both a per VM and physical server model. Per VM licensing for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ will take effect in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The minimum number of virtual machine licenses in a licensing pack is 25.

vCenter will continue to be priced per-Server. 

Under the old model, you had to buy these products on a per-processor basis. That’s the way licensing on physical servers has traditionally worked, but it’s not always the best way to do things in the virtual world.

This change by VMware recognises the problems that per-processor licensing can cause for customers.

In theory, per-VM licensing gives customers more flexibility. But in practice, it can be complicated. You know how many processors you have on a system, and that’s a fixed number. But the number of VMs on one host — let alone throughout your entire infrastructure — is regularly in flux. How do you plan your purchasing around that? And how do you make sure you don’t violate your licensing terms?

You estimate your needs for the next year and buy licenses to meet those needs. Over the course of those 12 months, vCenter Server calculates the average number of concurrently powered-on VMs running the software. And if you end up needing more licenses to cover what you used, you just reconcile with VMware at the end of the year.