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.

OCS deploy now or wait for CS 14 (2010)

Since the running of our Collaboration event last month we have been to a number of meetings with clients all interested in CS 14 and the overarching question is do I deploy OCS 2007 R2 now or wait?

Ultimately it comes down to what your strategy for OCS is now and in the longer term, do you plan on integrating with your existing telephony environment is your PBX up for renewal and how far into the future do you plan?

These questions can help determine which is best. Upgrading or deploying to OCS 2007 R2 now, or waiting until the end of this year when CS 14 arrives.

 

Advantages in Upgrading Now

1. You'll get a jump on preparation. It takes time to survey and prepare.
   • You'll need an inventory of the user pool, and what they want.
   • You'll need to decide which services you want to use (VoIP or not, which servers are needed).
   • You'll need to decide what architecture to use (all local, all hosted, virtual?).
   • And you'll need to add necessary server hardware.

    

2. OCS 2007 now, CS 14 later is NOT mandatory. You don't have to upgrade again (at least not right away) if your new OCS 2007 R2 system works for you.
3. An OCS 2007 R2 system removes the need for (and cost of) third-party conferencing solutions.

Advantages in Waiting for CS 14

1. It's intended to replace the PBX. OCS 2007 R2 can replace a PBX, but it requires some add-ons (ex., media gateway). CS 14 however is intended as a full PBX replacement.
2. Fewer servers needed. 
3. Even more prep time.

Based on all this and the two questions I mentioned earlier, this is what I recommend:

If you intend to move to VoIP, plan for transitioning to CS 14.

If you're already using VoIP or don't want to use it, implement OCS 2007 R2 now.

Outlook Facebook Integration

Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the newsfeeds of millions of Facebook users into inboxes.

Last year, Microsoft launched Outlook Social Connector, a plug-in that syncs social networking feeds with your Outlook contacts, giving you immediate data on what they are doing and thinking. It started last year with LinkedIn integration.

Now Outlook completes the cycle with not only Facebook integration, but support for Windows Live Messenger as well. The company is releasing the plug-in for Outlook 2003 and 2007 users as well, bringing Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Windows Live Messenger to millions of business and personal inboxes worldwide.

Facebook and Microsoft worked together to get the launch of Facebook’s integration in Outlook Social Connector right. One of the things they immediately highlighted was the pulling of Facebook profile pictures into Outlook.

Not only does it pull Facebook profile photos so that you can associate a name to a face, but it pulls the newsfeeds of your contacts into your inbox. When you’re looking at someone’s e-mail, you’ll also get a glance at their status updates, picture uploads and wall posts, among other activities.

When you combine that with LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger, and Outlook data, you get a very detailed history of your interaction with your contacts, as well as an at-a-glance look at their activities and interests.

E-mail isn’t inherently a “social” experience (it’s not a one-to-many platform), and attempts at integrating social into the inbox have mostly fallen flat. However, social data can be incredibly useful in the business world, especially when you need to understand what your client or colleague is thinking or doing right now.

Microsoft and HP Build Windows Azure on Converged Infrastructure

HP and Microsoft have announced their intention to work together on a Microsoft Windows Azure platform appliance that will enable large enterprise customers to confidently and rapidly adopt cloud-based applications as businesses needs change and grow.

Customers will be able to manage the appliance with HP Converged Infrastructure on-premises or choose HP data center hosting services.

Enterprise customers adopting cloud services need a comprehensive approach, including application modernisation support, an optimised infrastructure platform as well as flexible sourcing options. With the new Windows Azure platform appliance, HP and Microsoft will help customers rapidly scale applications, deliver new online services and migrate Windows and .NET-based applications to the cloud. This latest collaboration extends the $250 million Infrastructure-to-Application initiatives HP and Microsoft announced in January. 

HP will deliver a Converged Infrastructure for Windows Azure, HP’s current position as a primary infrastructure provider for the Windows Azure platform, coupled with HP and Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to optimise Microsoft applications for HP’s Converged Infrastructure through extensive joint engineering and development, will allow HP to deliver an industry-leading cloud deployment experience for its customers. The Converged Infrastructure for the Windows Azure platform appliance will include:

• HP Networking, 
• HP ProLiant
• Can be deployed in HP Performance-Optimised Datacentres (PODs),
• Application modernisation, migration and integration services for Windows applications

Tomorrows IT Department

New technologies continue to emerge at an alarming rate that are shaping the data centre, and the future looks certain to be driven by enlarge the demands of the users from a consumers perspective.  In today's IT department, the roles and responsibilities are well-defined and structured. Teams are isolated into very specific verticals. Networking teams handle all aspects of the network. Storage teams handle everything to do with storage; server or systems teams, servers.

With the advent of virtualisation, converged infrastructures and cloud computing, this traditional model is no longer valid and the boundaries have become muddied. All of a sudden, you see systems teams touching networking and becoming a lot more familiar with storage. Networking teams are slowly creeping up on storage functions as HP continue to push forward with converged infrastructure.

This convergence of solutions will force IT departments to think twice about their current approach to roles, responsibilities and skills required for new recruits. No longer will we have a storage admin and a network admin and a systems admin. Rather, we will have a datacenter admin. This new role will be the converged role, one that has sole access to the datacenter and is responsible for it from networking to storage to systems.

A converged network will roll in servers, storage and networking in a single rack. Connect a few cables, one person or team configures it, and it is ready to join the private cloud and create systems. Through the convergence of the IT department the age old finger pointing exercise of server teams blaming networking teams will be a thing of the past and should drive the adoption of these new technologies faster than before with less stages in the change control process.

When the unified messaging team requires a server, they will no longer go out and buy one, rack it and stack it; instead, they will request one. When the systems team needs a file server with a defined amount of storage, it will be automatically allocated.  System orchestration was a key play from many vendors last year and has become a lot less quieter this year in terms of the marketing hype surrounding these systems, but they have a very strong part to play in the IT department of the future.

Today's model works something like this: The accounting department has a need for a server, so we spec one out, deploy it and charge it back to them. In most cases, however, we just charge them for that server; we do not take into account the space that server needs, the overhead of managing that server and so many other little hidden costs.

Tomorrow's model will be about figuring out what your computing resources are costing you. It will literally be like a menu with a defined price list. You have your fixed-price menu with different profiles that cater to the different applications. High-intensity applications have a preset profile of resource requirements; low-intensity applications have a different profile. Of course, you will always have the "a la carte" choice, but that comes at a price as well.

Can you avoid this change? Possibly in the short term. Long term, technology will force the change for you, even if you don't make it. As new types of hardware make their way into the datacenter, the skill sets and focus of these teams start to blur; networking, storage and systems will no longer seem so well-defined. Your staffing and sourcing decisions will change to accommodate the new technologies. Only then will we truly transform IT into a service organization that sustains itself financially and is no longer viewed as a burden on the business but rather as an enabler of business growth.

And lets not forget chargeback – all this consolidation of IT equipment which in many organisations is often funded from a departmental budget for a point solution will now share resources with other departments; chargeback will become a de-facto tool for many IT departments.

Microsoft Self Service Portal for Microsoft VMM

Microsoft during the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC)  announced the release candidate of a new add-on for System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2, introducing the Self-Service Portal 2.0 (VMMSSP).

VMMSSP is a stand-alone product and not an upgrade for the current version of the SCVMM self-service portal. You can choose to deploy and use one or both self-service portals depending on your requirements.

VMMSSP has the following features:

• Configuration and allocation of datacenter resources: Store management and configuration information related to compute, network and storage resources as assets in the VMMSSP database.
• Customisation of virtual machine actions: Provide a simple web-based interface to extend the default virtual machine actions; for example, you can add scripts that interact with Storage Area Networks for rapid deployment of virtual machines.
• Business unit on-boarding: Standardised forms and a simple workflow for registering and approving or rejecting business units to enroll in the portal.
• Infrastructure request and change management: Standardised forms and human-driven workflow that results in reducing the time needed to provision infrastructures in your environment.
• Self-Service provisioning: Supports bulk creation of virtual machines on provisioned infrastructure through the web-based interface.Helps business units to manage their virtual machines based on delegated roles.

The portal, built on Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter or Enterprise editions and Hyper-V, is a Web-based user interface that includes separate areas for datacenter managers and business users. It gives both types of users a way to customise VM actions depending on role-based access controls. For example, IT pros can add scripts that interact with SANs to deploy VMs quickly while business users can manage their own resources using a chargeback feature.

Using VMMSSP, administrators can register business unit requirements in one central location and business unit admins can request resources available in the resource pool to host their IT services.

All in all, the tool makes the most sense for hosting providers and for private clouds for resources on demand within an organisation.

Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 2008 R2 SP1 is now available as a beta option

Just over a month ago, straight from TechEd North America, Microsoft announced SP1 for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and stated, at the time, the beta would be available before the end of July.  Well, it’s available now, from here.

What’s in there?

Dynamic Memory for one,  along with RemoteFX, which has plenty of useful background reading here.  As a recap, what are Dynamic Memory and Remote FX?

 

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V introduces a new feature, called Dynamic Memory, in the Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta releases.  It allows customers to achieve increased density when they’re consolidating physical servers into a virtual realm, providing them with predictable performance and linear scalability.  With Dynamic Memory, IT administrators are able to pool available memory on a physical host and then dynamically dole that memory out to virtual machines running on the host, based on current workload needs. 
• RemoteFX, a key feature of Remote Desktop Services (RDS) lets IT administrators deliver a rich graphics experience to end-users through virtualised desktops.  Using new protocol enhancements between Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, end users can now access virtual machines on a wide variety of target devices and still get a rich graphics experience with server-side graphics processing. 

Microsoft releases Azure Cloud Platform appliance

Microsoft has released a version of its Windows Azure cloud platform as an appliance.

 

Microsoft has run a version of its Windows Azure as a service since February, and has over 10,000 customers. Microsoft is now offering the platform software, packaged with a set of servers.

In a blog posting, Microsoft server and tools corporate vice president Robert Wahbe, explained that the appliance would provide a means for organisations to run a cloud service, either internally or for their own customers.

Microsoft are talking about a specific locked-down piece of hardware that can represent hundreds of thousands of servers.  Like an appliance, it is standardised and turn-key, so customers can deploy the Windows Azure in their data centres.

Microsoft said an appliance can be useful for organisations that wish to run their software both internally and on external Azure services, adding that the workload can be easily moved between multiple Azure locations.

According to Microsoft, Dell, Fujitsu, and Hewlett-Packard will each sell a "limited production release" of the appliance, as well as offer an Azure service for their customers. eBay intends to use the appliance for internal operations. A broader release is expected by later this year.

In addition to the release of the Azure appliance, Microsoft also announced that it has shipped the release candidate of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal, which is a Windows Server virtualisation tool pack, and has released both the beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

Microsoft expands InTune beta even further

Microsoft has expanded the beta of its Intune hosted desktop-computer management service.

Microsoft will open the service to an additional 10,000 users, as well as extend its availability to a number of additional countries beyond the U.S., including France, Germany, and Spain.

When it comes to thinking about Microsoft's cloud strategy, Windows Azure usually springs to mind. But Intune, which is more modest in scope, may provide the company with an earlier success story, if the popularity of its first beta is any indication.

Microsoft first introduced Intune in April as a beta service. Within 30 hours of its availability, all the 1,500 slots for the program were filled.

Designed for midsized organizations with limited IT help, Intune provides an Internet-accessible console from which all of an organisation's computers can be managed, even if the computers themselves reside in different offices.

Microsoft hosts the console on its own servers. From this console, an administrator can apply Windows updates and patches, monitor PCs, manage security policies, keep inventory of PCs and remotely administer an ailing PC. Microsoft will queue the updates, as well as manage all the back-end server software needed for administration duties.

The company plans to make Intune generally available in early 2011.

This second beta phase will be limited to customers and partners located in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, the U.K. and Italy.

Consumerisation and IT

For any of you that have been to our events over the past year you will know there is a theme running through most of them – consumers and their IT experience at home compared to the office.

It seems that what users want from IT and what IT is able to provide them is getting farther and farther apart.  Users want fast, easy access to their Windows desktop and business apps from any device.  They don’t particularly care about security, networking or infrastructure costs.  They just want to get their jobs done efficiently and conveniently from wherever they are.  And , they want to be able to do all of this from whatever device they want, whether it is a PC, a Mac, a smartphone or even a tablet like the new Apple iPad.

Unfortunately, while the world at large is being bombarded by a never-ending array of new, cool consumer devices like the iPhone and iPad, most IT shops are being asked to lock down access to corporate data and to reduce costs.  In a world of constant change, IT needs to be able to ensure the safety of corporate information, and minimize complexity.  In short, IT needs a secure, reliable infrastructure for delivering Windows desktops and apps, not thousands of new devices to support, a bigger attack surface for hackers, and higher costs.

Over the years, IT has traditionally won out in this battle of corporate decision making.  As a result, most of us lowly users have had to suffer with standard issue corporate PCs with limited access to IT services from anywhere outside of the corporate firewall.  Simply put, we’ve been forced to sacrifice experience for the sake of security and cost.  And for many organisations these are the two top requirements for delivering projects.

A new generation of workers is entering the workforce in droves and they are bringing with them a vast array of consumer devices from netbooks, Android phones and iPhones to iPads.  These audacious folks want to do their jobs from anywhere at any time using any device, and they are willing to plead their case to a higher authority – the executives in the organization who want the exact same thing. In a world where choice reigns, work will not be a place you go – it will be a place you take with you.  In other words, consumerisation and virtual work styles will shape the IT of the future.

Well, what if you could build one delivery infrastructure for Windows desktops and business apps that would empower people to use any device they want, keeping all of the information in the datacenter while still lowering costs.  IT wouldn’t even have to modify the infrastructure or customise their business apps for each of these new devices.  One infrastructure would service all of their requirements.  That is exactly the kind of flexibility that Citrix Receiver delivers to both IT and users.

Citrix Receiver is a universal client for the delivery of IT services.  It runs on every conceivable type of device: PC, Mac, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphone, the iPad and now the most highly-anticipated iPhone yet, the iPhone 4 . Citrix Receiver supports automatic updates so if a patch is applied, it is instantly available to every user whether they’re connecting. 

With the introduction of Citrix Receiver for iPhone 4, Citrix is once again raising the bar – delivering amazing new features such as multitasking that provide users the ability to run their apps in the background while they take a call, surf the internet or look up a contact. In addition, Citrix Receiver allows users to connect a video-out cable and project presentations right from their iPhone, giving users highly sought after new business capabilities.  Finally, we shouldn’t forget to highlight something that is good for our friends in IT.  All of the business data displayed by Citrix Receiver for the iPhone remains in the datacentre providing the ultimate in protection for sensitive business data.

VMware no plans soon for bare metal client hypervisor

VMware is arguably the goliath of server virtualisation, but its attempts to become the de facto virtualisation vendor on the desktop haven't gone quite as well.

Nearly two years after VMware announced its "vClient" initiative to give customers a range of server-hosted and client-hosted virtual desktop options, VMware has failed to deliver one of the initiative's key technologies.

Client hypervisors allow desktops to run in a virtual machine installed directly on a user's laptop, rather than in a server inside the data center. The approach allows centralised management of desktops, while potentially giving users better performance than VDI technologies that require applications to run on remote servers.

Client hypervisors may enable "bring-your-own-PC-to-work" scenarios by letting user machines host one desktop for personal applications and a separate desktop environment for work applications.

VMware's bare-metal desktop hypervisor is still under wraps, and no release date is being specified.

Gartner has speculated that developing all the necessary drivers needed by PC users is a challenge, as is persuading PC vendors to ship and support client-side hypervisors.

When asked if VMware will deliver the client hypervisor in 2010, Vmware says "we don't have a timeline."

VMware seems to indicate that development of PCoIP, VMware's protocol for allowing remote access to workstations and servers from thin clients, is taking precedence over work on the bare-metal hypervisor.

The 2008 announcement also touted VMware's forthcoming offline desktop technology for accessing server-hosted desktops even when a client device isn't connected to the Internet. Offline Desktop has popped up in VMware View, but only as an "experimental" feature.

Building a client hypervisor is more complicated than creating server-based technology because of issues with audio, USB devices, Webcams, wireless networking and Bluetooth, Citrix has said.

While client virtualisation is an emerging part of the desktop virtualisation market, and may not gain widespread adoption for a year or two, VMware's failure to deliver a client hypervisor before its rivals could prove costly.

While VMware has become the virtualisation vendor of choice for enterprises on the server side, results in the desktop market have been mixed. According to analysts, more businesses use Citrix's desktop virtualisation technology than VMware's, but VMware has more users than Citrix when measured by deployed seats. The market is expected to grow considerably over the next few years and will be a major point of focus for both Citrix and VMware.

Are you teleworking? Is it worth it?

When proposing to telework, an employee may encounter support or resistance. Some managers believe the teleworker will be less productive. Other managers who are control-oriented become anxious if they cannot observe their employees. It takes time, a well thought out plan and policy to create a successful teleworking environment.

One financial services company asked their employees to justify why they could not telework. This made them really think about what were the disadvantages of teleworking. It turned out to be a better exercise than trying to justify teleworking.

The advantages of teleworking for the employer are many, and trying to justify why you can’t is a hard thing to do nowadays, especially since flexible working practices have been set in the UK by the government since April 2009.

Telecommuting improves employee satisfaction--79% of people want to work from home. A poll of 1,500 technology professionals revealed that 37% would take a pay cut of 10% if they could work from home. 80% of employees consider teleworking a job perk.

Telecommuting reduces attrition--The cost of replacing an employee extends far beyond the recruiting process. It includes separation costs, temporary replacement costs, and lost productivity training costs and frequently lost customers, co-workers, and corporate intelligence. Studies put the cost as high as 75% of a non-exempt person's earnings, and 150-200% of an exempt person's salary. 46% of companies that allow telecommuting say it has reduced attrition. 72% of employers say telework has a high impact on employee retention.

Telecommuting reduces unscheduled absences--Unscheduled absences cost employers £3,000/employee per year. Telecommuting programs reduce unscheduled absences by 63%.

Telecommuting increases productivity--Best Buy, British Telecom, Dow Chemical and many others show that teleworkers are 35-40% more productive. Sun Microsystems' experience suggests that employees spend 60% of the commuting time they save performing work for the company.

Telecommuting cuts down on wasted meetings--Asynchronous communications allow people to communicate more efficiently. Web-based meetings are better planned and more apt to stay on message.

Telecommuting increases collaboration--Once telework technologies are in place, employees and contractors can work together without regard to logistics. This substantially increases collaboration options.

Telecommuting expands the talent pool--Over 40% of employers are feeling the skilled labour pinch that will worsen as Boomers retire. Teleworking reduces the geographic boundaries. It provides access to disabled workers. Over 70% of employees report that the ability telecommute will be somewhat to extremely important in choosing their next job.

Telecommuting ensures continuity of operations in the event of a disaster. Three quarters of teleworkers say they could continue to work in the event of a disaster compared with just 28% continuing to work for non-teleworkers.

There are many other advantages for both the employee and the community. For example, fewer commuting drivers means less traffic, less pollution due to car exhausts, less wear on the roadways and fewer accidents. The employee has lower stress because they avoid commuting and have more personal time.

Still not convinced?  Call us and lets talk about it – 0845 260 5757.

Malware in 2010 YTD

Now that we’ve reached the middle of the year, it’s time to take a look at the McAfee malware collection. During the first half of the year, 10 million samples entered in their database. That’s certainly no decrease compared with last year.

With approximately 54,800 new samples arriving per day, the total size of their collection is almost 12 terabytes. At end of 2007, in contrast, and with only 5.8 million samples, the total size was only 1.1TB.

First, let’s look at the main malware families–at left, McAfees 2008 graph; at right, the current one. (Click to enlarge these and subsequent charts.)

From these we can see that malware developers have lost their creative spirit. Malware designers create their apps to make money, not for style. Because the old techniques still work, it is not necessary to be inventive, just repetitive. For example, it is not rare to see more than 10,000 Koobface variants in a single month.

The next 2008 graph concerned McAfees figures compared to those of AV-test.org. At that time, I McAfee only a short span, of four months, shown at left.

Two years later, we can observe another increase. Since June 2009, McAfees collection has outgrown the AV-test database by two million. At that date, McAfee started getting more samples from more sources.

Today when we quantify the malware world, the consensus is to use the number of unique files in McAfess collections distinguished by their MD5 hash (or checksum). On June 30, McAfee counted 43,337,677 unique binary files.

Perhaps we’ll reach 54 million by the end of December.

Big Changes in vSphere architecture

The next version of vSphere will not have:

• the Console Operating System (COS)
  VMware published a warning recommending its customers to transition to the ESXi architecture.
• the Converter plug-in for vCenter
  VMware recommends customers to look for the stand-along Converter product
• the Guided Consolidation module for vCenter
  VMware recommends customers to look for the Virtualisation Assessment, the P2V Migration Jumpstart or the P2V Accelerator services.
  The company doesn’t mention the new CapacityIQ product, but it’s clear that it will be the solution of choice for capacity planning and management.
• the Update Manager (VUM) module for vCenter
  VUM will continue to exist inside vSphere but only to centrally update the VMware Tools. Scanning and remediation of patches will not be available anymore.
  This may mean that either VMware terminated its OEM agreement with Shavlik, or that the company is preparing to release a stand alone product.
• the Consolidated Backup (VCB)
  VMware already provides the vStorage API for ISVs that want to offer out-of-band disaster recovery capabilities on top of vSphere.
• the VMI para-virtualisation interface
  VMware recommends to switch the Linux guest operating systems that are using a VMI-enabled kernel back the default kernel.
• the Web Access for ESX
  VMware simply recommends to use the vSphere Client in place of the web management console.
• Linux guest operating systems customisation for Ubuntu and Debian
  While VMware will continue to offer guest OS customisation for Red Hat RHEL and Novell SLES distributions, Ubuntu and Debian Linux will not be supported anymore.

Thanks to virtualization.info for the detail.

VMware vSphere 4.1

A big day for VMware today with the latest release of their flagship virtualisation product – vSphere.

VMware vSphere 4.1 improves on VMware vSphere 4.0 and has the following major new enhancements and features:

vCompute

• Memory Compression—Reclaim application performance by up to 30 percent by reducing memory contention as a bottleneck
• DRS Host Affinity—Set granular policies for virtual machine movement (for example, restricting a virtual machine to a specific host due to licensing impact)

vStorage

• Storage I/O Control—Set storage quality-of-service priorities for each virtual machine to guarantee access to storage resources
• Performance Reporting—Deliver key storage performance statistics regardless of storage protocol
• Array Integration—Leverage new protocol interfaces between VMware and storage arrays for faster performance for vSphere operations such as Storage vMotion events and virtual machine provisioning.

vNetwork

• Network I/O Control—Set network quality-of-service priorities per flow type for guaranteed access to network resources.

Scalability

• “Cloud Scale”*—Fully virtualise the datacenter and scale at least twice as large than ever before
• Virtual machines per cluster: 3,000 (more than a 200 percent increase)
• Hosts per vCenter Server instance: 1,000 (more than a 300 percent increase)
• Virtual machines per vCenter Server instance: 10,000 powered on (more than a 300 percent increase), 15.000 registered

*All scale numbers above show the new 4.1 metric, as well as the increase from the vSphere 4.0 release (4.0 numbers are above in the same pillar).

A complete list of all new features can be found here.

Doe’s Cloud Backup equal Cloud Archiving?

Despite its mainstream acceptance, Software-as-a-Service is still a very new field.  And when it comes to data protection in the cloud, there are still many terms that are not yet well-understood by all. For this reason, “online archiving” and “online backup” are often believed to be the same, although they are – in fact – quite different from each other.

Online backup is great for automating the disaster recovery process. Instead of manually backing up to tape at the end of every day, the entire process is automated to run in the background.

Another great benefit of online backup is that it can help you improve your “restore point objectives”.  Instead of backing up every 24 hours, you can now back up every few minutes. This minimizes the amount of data you could possibly lose from a disk failure.

The only problem with this approach comes when you’re trying to back up extremely large amounts of data.  Not only does this cause longer backup windows, but it can also negatively affect emergency recovery times.

And backups aren’t the only problem. Excessive data storage can also cause a burden on IT systems by needlessly using up server resources.

For smaller organisations, the term “data archiving” is probably not used very often.  But as you company grows, and your data storage requirements become more sophisticated, you will probably need to start streamlining your servers by moving seldom-used files somewhere else to free up space.

This is why many companies will set up archiving policies that take inactive or older data off of the primary servers and store it in an alternate location.  This way, server resources are freed up, and backup/recovery times are shortened.

Here’s another way to think about it:

• A backup is something that happens very often… because files are constantly changing.  This could be once a day, or many times per hour.  Also, backups keep many different versions of the files in case one of the more recent copies becomes corrupted.
• Archiving is something that happens only once.  You only need a single snapshot of the file, because this file never changes.  A good example of an archival file would be a scanned contract or an old e-mail.  Neither of these two files will ever change again.

Another important feature that differentiates the two is that backup data is usually much more critical than archival data.  That’s why backups need to be performed within the shortest possible window of time, and also retrieved quickly when needed.  The best way to accomplish this would be to maximize the amount of data that you archive… while minimizing the volume of data that needs to be backed up.

As you can see, online archiving and online backup are completely different, and not interchangeable at all. But they complement each other well, and knowing how to use both together can help you reduce your IT costs while improving the disaster recovery process for your organisation.

NetBackup 7 for VMware – Wow!

In NetBackup 7, the combination of virtualisation protection and deduplication offers some amazing technical benefits for businesses. In a way, there are 2-for-1 savings. After years of backing up physical servers to tape, how can NetBackup 7 make such extraordinary claims and how could it apply to my business?

First, NetBackup 7 for VMware integrates with VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection (aka VADP). In other words, if you were waiting for a drastic improvement over VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), this is it. By definition, using VADP with NetBackup 7 will reduce VM backup times in half! Why? Because VADP allows NetBackup to read the VM snapshot directly from the source. With VCB, NetBackup had to wait for VMware to copy the entire VM snapshot to a staging area before the backup began. No more!

Second, NetBackup 7 for VMware integrates with the vSphere 4 Change-Block-Tracking capability. This allows NetBackup 7 to only backup the new or modified blocks within a VMDK, aka incremental backup. (Recall that VCB did not support incremental backups.) Moreover, NetBackup 7 supports the unique option to perform file-level recovery from an incremental backup. So, backing up fewer blocks means shorter backup windows, without limiting your recovery options.

NetBackup 7 introduces integrated deduplicated storage in the NetBackup media server. The NetBackup PureDisk deduplication engine is now integrated and available as a new type of backup destination. Any/all NetBackup clients can immediately leverage this capability, including NetBackup for VMware. In evaluations, we’ve seen deduplication rates from 50% to 90% in VM backups.

And finally, NetBackup 7 for VMware offers an unheard-of advantage: global deduplication across physical and virtual machines! This means that no matter how many copies of the same file are distributed between physical and virtual Windows servers (e.g. explorer.exe), effectively only 1 copy of that file is stored in the NetBackup deduplicated backup destination. 

The storage savings apply to both physical and virtual servers!

Storage Systems are underutilised but often being beefed up!

A recent survey of 1,165 IT managers found that the average company doesn't utilise 28 percent of storage capacity but nonetheless plans to increase storage capacity by 34 percent over the next year.

The survey, performed by International Data Group's B2B publications business, found that the storage capacity at the companies of respondents will grow by an average of 58 percent over the next one to three years and by 93 percent over the next 3 to 5 years.

The survey separated respondents into two groups: Those managing IT in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees; and those at SMBs (small and mid-sized businesses) with fewer than 1,000 employees.

The enterprise survey found that 58 percent of respondents work at a company with a storage budget of over $100,000, while the SMB IT managers indicated they spend less than $100,000 annually on storage needs.

The survey found that overall, companies spend an average of 23 percent of their annual storage budget on operating costs and maintenance. The enterprise users said their companies spend about 29 percent of their annual storage budgets on maintenance and operating costs, while SMBs spend 19 percent.

Overall, the managers indicated that their top challenges are infrastructure complexity (28 percent), security concerns (27 percent), inadequate skills or training (25 percent), difficulty proving ROI (21 percent) and deciding which storage areas to virtualise (21 percent).

When asked if they are currently taking or planning to take actions to monitor storage utilisation rates or consolidate their storage onto fewer systems, most indicated they did. Eighty-eight percent of enterprise IT managers, and 73 percent of SMB officials, indicated they've chosen to monitor storage utilisation rates.

Meanwhile, 65 percent of all respondents said they plan to consolidate storage operations by using fewer, more homogeneous systems over the next year.

The survey also found that enterprise IT managers are far more likely than SMBs to increase the level of data centre automation as a means of improving storage efficiency -- by 79 percent versus 56 percent.

HP hardens the security across physical and virtual environments

HP has announced new high-performance security solutions designed to prevent network breaches in a Converged Infrastructure by delivering comprehensive data protection across both physical and virtual environments.

The new offerings bring enhanced security to HP FlexFabric, the company’s high-performance, flexible and secure data centre networking fabric for a Converged Infrastructure.

As organisations move to more virtualised and converged infrastructures, the importance of security is increased. Virtualised environments and their applications are subject to the same threats that impact traditional data centres. While many virtual machines (VM) are hosted on a single server, one security breach can have a disastrous impact. As a result, when organisations accelerate the migration of production workloads and mission-critical assets to a virtualised environment, security requirements must become a strategic element of these plans.

The HP TippingPoint Secure Virtualisation Framework (SVF) is a suite of products designed to help prevent network threats from impacting virtualised environments. The TippingPoint Virtual Controller (vController), the first product introduced under the SVF, extends TippingPoint security protection from physical to virtual networks by routing it through an HP TippingPoint N-Platform Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) appliance. The vController prevents security attacks by inspecting all VM traffic as it moves through the network – either between VMs or from VMs to traditional servers. Additional vController benefits include:

• Increased network security by extending HP’s automated threat-prevention capabilities to virtual environments.
• Reduced deployment complexity by enabling customers to extend the same processes, tools and expertise used in securing their physical environments to their virtual infrastructures.
• Simplified management of network security by providing single-pane-of-glass management, visibility and control across both physical and virtual networks.

vController provides an added layer of security by preventing malicious traffic from damaging VMs, which also could cause problems. Combined, vController and HP ProLiant G7 servers provide clients with increased security and availability to help ensure business continuity.

Businesses continue to be bombarded with security attacks that use every possible method for stealing data and compromising a network. To maximise protection and reduce business risk for its clients, HP also is introducing two new HP TippingPoint S-series solutions that further extend network security from local area networks to the core of the data centre for both physical and virtual domains.

HP handles dedupe, EVA Clusters and VDI storage

HP has launched data deduplication software that it intends to use on primary as well as backup storage, a clustered EVA midrange Fibre Channel SAN and an iSCSI SAN built on its BladeSystem platform for virtual desktops.

HP StoreOnce, EVA Cluster and P4800 BladeSystem were among products HP rolled out during the opening day of HP TechForum 2010. HP executives focused mostly on the deduplication application.  HP's executive vice president of enterprise servers, storage and networking, called StoreOnce "the most significant storage announcement we've made in at least five years."

StoreOnce is inline deduplication that is now available on the new HP D2D4312 backup appliance, and will replace the deduplication HP has sold on its smallerD2D disk backup devices for the past two years. StoreOnce has some code from the previous dedupe product, HP execs said, but will be able to scale to support primary data on application servers and HP's X9000 scale-out NAS over the next year. They also said StoreOnce will run on HP Data Protector backup software within a year.

HP's new EVA midrange system will be integrated with the StorageWorks SAN Virtualisation Services Platform (SVSP). SVSP allows clustering of two to six EVA arrays into one storage pool up to 2 PB.

HP is also introducing thin provisioning to the EVA, but the EVA hardware hasn't changed with this release.

The P4800 BladeSystem SAN uses SAN/iQ iSCSI software that HP acquired from LeftHand Networks in 2008. HP re-christened its LeftHand platform the P4000 family earlier this year. HP's other LeftHand-based systems run on ProLiant servers. The BladeSystem used for the P4800 is part of the vendor's common networking architecture running across servers and storage.

The P4800 scales to 63 TB of capacity with four storage blades connected to 140 disk drives. Because the system is integrated into a BladeSystem enclosure, the P4800 does not require external storage switches and cabling.

The P4800 is tuned for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) based on VMware View and Microsoft Hyper-V with Citrix XenDesktop. HP said the P4800 is designed to alleviate boot storms and log-on events that can occur with large VDI implementations. He added that HP plans other versions of the P4000 family built on BladeSystems geared for specific applications besides server virtualisation.

Thanks to SearchStorage.com for the details.

Brocade and HP data centre offerings

Brocade has unveiled data centre products available from OEM HP that are designed to support next-generation Fibre Channel rollouts anchored to optimsing application performance and scaling virtual machines.

The products include a Fibre Channel mezzanine host bus adapter card for HP's BladeSystem c-Class servers; a virtualization SAN starter kit that bundles storage arrays, Host bus adapters (HBA) and storage-area network (SAN) switches for pre-integrated deployment; and a 64-port 8Gbps Fibre Channel module for HP/Brocade SAN switches that boosts FibreChannel port density.

The mezzanine card is an 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBA for HP's BladeSystem c-Class servers. It connects the HP blade servers to the data center Fibre Channel switching fabric at 8Gbps, and supports Brocade's Server Application Optimisation technology for increasing application performance and VM scalability.

The HBA also provides storage connections for all HP ProLiant server blades, and is compatible with Brocade's 8Gbps SAN switch and HP's Virtual Connect Fibre Channel modules.

The SAN starter kit is called the HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA) Virtualisation kit. It bundles together an 8Gbps Fibre Channel storage array, six 8Gbps HP StorageWorks B-series HBAs, two 8Gbps HP StrageWorks B-series Fibre Channel switches, and two Brocade-based software licenses per switch.

Virtualisation assists companies to think about their approach to IT

Virtualisation made its way into the mainstream data centre with a strong cost-reduction value proposition centred around a straightforward tactic: server consolidation.

Now, on the back of the success these projects achieved, virtualisation is gaining a more strategic role in the IT landscape. As virtualisation initiatives delivered tangible bottom line benefits–in some instances up to 60% reduction in capital costs companies looked to virtualise more. With expanded use, virtualisation becomes more than an operational tactic; it becomes the foundation for a new approach to IT. An approach where IT services are freed from the complexity of the hardware infrastructure that delivers them. Through virtualisation, companies are finally achieving “IT-as-a-service,” or cloud computing.

“Cloud” is a term that means many things to many people, but when viewed as an approach to computing that leverages the pooling of on-demand compute power delivered as a service, cloud computing really describes a new model for IT. And, an evolution to this computing approach is underway in thousands of data centres around the world. Our customers are on a journey that for many began with a single virtualised server.

The IT organisation is virtualising what it owns servers used for file and print or test and development–and the benefits are cost reduction through server consolidation, space and power savings.

Customers enter into the second phase of the journey–the “Business Production” phase–when they virtualise their first business application, such as a database, ERP system or enterprise e-mail. At this phase, the value proposition shifts and companies are virtualising to achieve better quality of service (performance, reliability) or business continuity. Often, this shift is sudden and dramatic. At this point, the organisation takes cost savings from consolidation for granted, and the focus has moved to faster provisioning, better capacity management, reliability and management automation for business applications. At this phase in the journey, IT is no longer the only stakeholder interested in virtualisation. Because business-critical applications are involved, leadership from across lines of business are taking seats at the virtualisation table.

While progressing through the first two stages of the journey, companies have used virtualisation to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and increase service levels. The final stage of the journey is about business agility. We call this phase “IT-as-a-Service.” Typically, customers in this phase have more than 50% of their data center virtualised. Virtualisation has become the norm–it’s just part of what IT does. And the result is that these companies have automated more processes, can deploy new services faster than ever before and are getting extremely high levels of utilisation.

In this phase, resources can be allocated on demand where and when needed. IT is nimble. This model for the data center–made possible by virtualisation and automation–could be described as a Private Cloud.

Throughout the journey, IT has delivered value, improved its credibility and evolved its relationship with the business. When our customers ask us, “How do I get to this new model of computing?” we tell them to keep doing what they are doing. Virtualise more, progress along the journey. Virtualisation is the way forward.

Cloud Computing – Don’t dismiss it just do your homework

Every so often there comes a wave of technology that promises to deliver the silver bullet of IT, currently we have Cloud, VDI, Converged Infrastructure and Unified Communications very much on the agenda of most CIO’s board reports.

One of the areas gaining massive hype is Cloud, which although new in marketing terms has been around for many many moons.It's clearly an overheated space right now, and many organisations are moving into cloud computing because of the hype, not for business and technology requirements and that will give cloud bad press long term as its the wrong approach.

The trouble is that most of what is said about cloud computing today comes from marketing departments and not thought leaders.

That said, there is true value within cloud computing. You just have to understand what's truly innovative and unique about it. 

Cloud computing is the ability to use core infrastructure services, such as storage and compute power, over the Internet as true components of architecture in highly scalable and elastic ways. Storage and compute is nothing new, but the the model for consuming those types of services is new and innovative. Thus, the value is the concept of using these architectural components from an outside source, and paying for only the services you use.

A core value of cloud computing is speed to deployment, or the ability to get applications, storage, and compute services up and running quickly in support of the business. That leads to the value of agility, or the ability to adjust your IT quickly to support changes in the business. Another core value is the ability to shift capital away from IT and use it for more important things, such as running the core business.

When the hype finally clears, we'll begin the see the true value of the cloud, which is plenty and should be on your agenda for any new IT project providing its right for your business model.

HP and VMware Unveil Integrated Storage, Desktop and Connectivity Solutions

HP and VMware have announced integrated storage, desktop and connectivity solutions to help organisations further accelerate deployment, achieve high availability and lower costs.

These offerings will help customers deploy virtualisation solutions in a Converged Infrastructure framework and transform their data centres to enable cloud computing.

“Disaster recovery is important for any business, but when your ‘business’ is saving lives, as it is for Denver Health, disaster recovery takes on a new level of importance,” said David Boone, operations and planning manager, Denver Health. “By pairing HP storage with a VMware High Availability cluster, we have full recovery capabilities for our data center, so if one site were to go offline due to a disaster, the other site would remain available automatically. We look forward to new storage virtualisation solutions from HP and VMware that will help us continue to provide the best care for our patients.”

Affordable Virtual SAN Appliance for SMBs
To give organisations affordable, easy-to-deploy infrastructure virtualisation, HP and VMware have combined VMware vSphere™ Essentials Plus with the HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA). The HP P4000 is the only software SAN certified as VMware Ready™. The new integrated product complements “always-on” IT from VMware for small and medium businesses (SMBs) with highly available storage from HP. It provides backup and recovery with shared storage capabilities to help SMBs start on the path to cloud-based IT services.

Enterprise-class scalability, performance and high availability Midsize customers can now consolidate up to 600 percent more virtualised storage, reduce complexity, improve capacity utilisation and lower management costs with the new HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) Cluster verified to work with VMware vSphere.(1) Customers can achieve enterprise-class scalability, performance and high availability for delivering IT as a service. The cluster is an integrated solution consisting of multiple EVAs designed to eliminate disparate “islands” of storage. The EVA Cluster enables customers to manage a single resource pool of capacity of up to two petabytes (PB) and nearly 2,000 drives.

Virtual desktop reference architecture
Customers can reduce risk, deliver predictable results and speed deployment for large-scale virtual desktop environments with a Converged Infrastructure reference architecture for VMware View™ featuring the new HP P4800 BladeSystem SAN. This modular server, storage and networking architecture for the enterprise scales to thousands of virtual desktops. The reference architecture delivers three times the productivity for IT administrators, supports 1,600 users at 50 percent less cost and requires 60 percent less space than traditional client virtualisation implementations.(2)

Simplify and Scale Infrastructure Virtualisation
Customers can reduce network complexity and costs, simplify data centre infrastructure while increasing virtualisation efficiency with HP Virtual Connect certified to work with VMware vSphere. The new HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module is optimised for virtualisation networking. It provides scalability for up to four times more virtual machines per blade, eliminates 95 percent of network access equipment and reduces power and cooling costs by 40 percent with the new HP ProLiant G7 servers.(3)

Faster time to value
HP provides cloud consulting solutions on HP and VMware technologies to help customers build their own private cloud solutions and deploy management, disaster recovery and business continuity, as well as desktop virtualisation across their infrastructures.

Hyper-V Clustering Limits Increased

A  bit late on this post but time has not been available at the moment, however I thought this would be useful reading for you.

As hardware increases in scale, and new capabilities, such as Dynamic Memory, are introduced into Hyper-V R2 SP1, more and more customers are going to start to encroach on the supported limits of Hyper-V cluster nodes.  As of May 2010, those supported limits stood at 64 VMs per cluster node, up to a total of 15+1 nodes, giving a total of 960 VMs.  This contrasts considerably with the 384 VMs per non-clustered host, yet will still be more than enough headroom for most customers, however, in a recent announcement at TechEd 2010, Microsoft decided to increase the limits on the cluster nodes.  The increase is actually pretty considerable too, helping customers to scale to much greater levels, especially on smaller clusters, assuming they have resource in their underlying hardware!

So, in a nutshell, Microsoft now support 1000 VMs per cluster, providing you don’t exceed the 384 VMs per node limit, which which will still be enforced.

Naturally many of you will be looking at this announcement and think, I am not going to hit those numbers but perhaps an area where you’re more likely to hit this limit, is when virtualising desktops, rather than servers.  In most organisations, the number of desktops typically outweighs the number of servers, so hitting the previous limits was much more achievable, so this gives the organisation who happened to be creeping closer, a bit of breathing room.