David Marshall post on his InfoWorld blog regarding VMware’s lifecycle management announcements from VMworld Europe. David questions the fragmented approach taken by VMware and quote’s VMlogix’s Ravi Gururaj and Surgient regarding how we compete at this level with VMware.
Archive for the ‘vmware’ Category
Management tools are needed
March 17, 2008
18 Million Reasons
February 26, 2008
On Microsoft’s Startup Zone, Yi-Jian Ngo has a good post on why its important for both vendors and customers to focus on heterogeneous virtualization support in technology areas such as virtual lab management.
New VMware Stage Manager tackles application lifecycle management
January 22, 2008
Article from SearchServerVirtualization.com regarding VMware’s recently announced Stage Manager product. The product claims to cover the application lifecycle to help promote applications into and from production. My question is how is this different from Lab Manager?
Confusing to Lab Manager customers? For most enterprise applications, the environment employed outside of production is the test environment. Why would a customer use both VMware Lab Manager and VMware Stage Manager? Stage Manager seems the stronger of the two, and certainly closer to what we do at Surgient with our lab management platform and VQMS. Is this the death of VMware Lab Manager? How will VMware deal with confused customers, especially Lab Manager customers?
VMware only? Then there is the question of a tool that is meant to support enterprise apps but only supports VMware virtualization. Most enterprise data centers are heterogeneous environments, and the majority of applications are not yet deployed in virtualized containers. The shortcomings of Stage Manager seem to be its presupposition that the world be 100% virtualized in the short-term. Most customers we speak to are nowhere near that as a decision or a reality.
What do you think?
New VMware Stage Manager tackles application lifecycle management
Virtualization trends in 2007 and industry predictions for 2008
December 31, 2007
At virtualization.info, Alessandro Perilli presents a very nice wrap-up of what was predicted for 2007 versus what really came to pass. One of his comments is that analysts were wrong to suggest that automation of virtual environments would play a strong role in managing virtual resources in 2007. While he’s right that it was not “key” in 07 and certainly he is correct that most virtual resources are not managed in an automated fashion, I really disagree with the overall characterization of automation as unimportant. Certainly much of the buzz currently around virtualization is centered on the automation of virtualization (be it site recovery, orchestration or virtual lab management). Beyond that I believe that automation is a buying impetus as well. I guess we’ll see in 2008!
virtualization.info: Virtualization trends in 2007 and industry predictions for 2008
Virtual Labs and Education
December 20, 2007I posted this article yesterday on ZDnet’s education IT site:
Virtual labs and education by ZDNet’s ejosowitz@surgient.com –
Yesterday, I asked for people to share their thoughts via a guest blog on virtualization in Ed Tech. Guest blogger Erik Josowitz provided us with the following (thanks, Erik). Feel free to talk back or submit your own guest blog with some specific experiences or implementation details.
Virtualization is great tool but, like any Swiss-Army knife, success with it depends on the task at hand. One of the places that people get into trouble with virtualization is when they try to use out-of-the-box virtual infrastructure with non-technical audiences. Virtualization is a great solution but often is not a complete solution.
In education we’ve frequently seen challenges that look like appropriate places to implement a virtualization solution, only to find that the end-result is not fully usable by the intended audience. One example is providing hands-on lab environments to support application training. Success in the workforce today depends on high-level application skills and there is no better way for students to attain those skills than through hands-on use of the software applications.
Many educational institutions provide computer lab environments to help support their student population and provide access to necessary software applications. Many of these lab environments have become the source of IT management problems as they become virus-ridden, get subverted as distribution sites for pirated software or music, or just plain have the normal IT management issues associated with a shared resource in a public environment.
For many institutions their student population brings with them their own PCs which solves one problem but creates another. The lab issues diminish but the problems of providing secure access to software (and software licenses) often takes its place.
The answer, we’ve found, is virtual lab management – using virtualization to deliver secure computing environments as a shared resource. Virtual labs allow administrators to serve up a clean and unchangeable environment for each student – in the lab or on their own PC – on-demand. This makes it easy to provide access to applications that students either can’t afford individually or that their home PCs cannot support. It makes it simple to track and monitor lab usage and to control the use of resources so that systems are not subverted into file servers. Virtual lab management sits on top of virtualization (from Microsoft or VMware) and tells it what to deliver and to who. It makes it easy for non-technical users to select the types of applications they need from a menu and to gain access to those environments without needing to understand virtualization, networking, hosts systems or anything about how it gets delivered. Best of all, virtual labs make it easy to manage capacity. By scheduling time in the lab environment the shared resource is managed for maximum utilization. If more capacity is needed it is simple to add additional resources to the system. The end-users simply see an increase in availability.
Virtualization may not be a panacea for educational institutions, but for a subset of problems, a centralized virtual lab may enable technology administrators to focus their time and attention on enabling learning rather than administering systems.
Surgient’s Future After a Strong Third Quarter
December 3, 2007David Marshall interviews me in his InfoWorld Virtualization Report blog, regarding Surgient’s recent announcement of a strong third quarter for virtual lab management applicaitons.
Electric Cloud, VMware Team Up
November 7, 2007VMware and Electric Cloud announce intent to connect Electric Cloud Commander build-management to VMware Lab Manager. This would allow developers to leverage the virtual lab environment across the development cycle.
Dr. Dobb’s | Electric Cloud, VMware Team Up | November 7, 2007
VMWorld 2007 – The Big Bang of Virtualization
September 14, 2007Just got back from VMworld 2007 in San Francisco and what an amazing time it was. 10,000+ people gathered to discuss virtualization from every point of view. Strangely absent this year was much talk about Workstation. It was there but all the focus was on server virtualization. What this meant for development and testing was Virtual Lab Management. No real news around VMware Lab Manager, but it was a strong presence in the VMware exhibit and a very well attended part of the sessions. Both Surgient VQMS and VMlogix Lab Manager were also exhibited at the show. This was the largest show of its kind that I’ve seen in many years. It almost felt like the 2000-bubble again! I’m certain that VMware’s IPO only served to increase the drumbeat around them and drove further attendance at the show. If we saw you at our booth at VMworld, thank you for stopping by. If not, we look forward to meeting you next year!
Is it Virtual or is it Real?
August 18, 2007
Theresa Lanowitz, analyst and founder of voke, inc, discusses the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix and other sweeping changes occurring in and around virtualization. She specifically calls out virtual lab management as an area offering more specific value around the broad virtualization plays occurring.
Rough Type: VMware, Xen and the hardware business
August 15, 2007Nick Carr (Why IT Doesn’t Matter) comments on the feeding frenzy around virtualization infrastructure vendors and notes (accurately) the long-term impact of consolidation. I think it was Paul Saffo, though, that said “never mistake a clear view for a short distance.” I agree with Carr’s analysis but think it will be some time before we reach that level of saturation. What do you think?
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: VMware, Xen and the hardware business
