ReadWriteCloud

Server-side virtualization is a modern-day fact of life. Today's data centers pool their processing, storage and even network resources to create macrocosmic virtual-machine entities that transcend the boundaries of hardware. We call that "the cloud."

With Windows 8, Microsoft extends its server-class hypervisor platform to the desktop. And no, it's not just a play for enthusiasts and testers: There's a solid reason for Hyper-V to become the backbone of future Windows versions.

Remember the days when you needed to add a graphics card in your PC to support higher resolution displays? That is the idea behind a new add-in card from Teradici that is used to boost the performance of VDI implementations. One of the issues with VDI is that having multiple virtual machines come online at the same time (such as around 9 am, when everyone is coming to work and turning on their computers) can bog down a server. Not any longer.

In a simultaneous announcement at the RSA security conference in San Francisco and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday afternoon, VMware Chief Technology Officer Dr. Stephen Herrod made two extraordinary revelations. One is that his company is working on a technology that would give businesses with "BYOD" policies for their employees a way to deploy virtual phones on virtual devices. This would maintain business assets on devices that employees purchase for themselves and use as their work phones.

"The idea is actually pretty simple," explained Dr. Herrod to attendees of the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA. "You have your phone that you go out and buy, and you go to an app store and download a level 2 hypervisor that's going to be in place there. Then when you show up at work, what you're able to do is, rather than get a work-issued phone, you're going to get a work-issued virtual phone."

Ever since human beings landed on the moon, the state of technology in government appeared to be on a downward slope. Never mind that it was really the U.S. Government that facilitated the original Internet; in public sector offices, the state of computing started lagging behind the private sector ever since IBM mass-produced the microcomputer.

That slope may have bottomed out two years ago, with the urgent need to cut costs, reform practices and save jobs leading to an extraordinarily rapid adoption by federal and state governments of private cloud infrastructure. Now a government IT survey commissioned by MeriTalk, and funded by Microsoft and NetApp, reveals the extent of progress: Among just the agencies whose IT managers were surveyed, federal, state and local governments report saving a total of about $15 billion from their fiscal year 2011 budgets.

Back last summer, Virsto announced the beta support of vSphere for what it is now calling its storage hypervisor. That has now been released, along with a second version of its HyperV product. Both Virsto products automatically thin provision your storage repositories, and also make your storage vastly scalable and easier to replicate, backup and clone.

We continue our series of cartoons from Cloudville, that mythical but somewhat familiar place where the laws of IT don't quite seem to apply. This week we take another look at cloud security, and it reminds me of Doc Searls buzzword generator that you can find here if you want even more humor in your life.

We continue our series of cartoons from Cloudville, that mythical but somewhat familiar place where the laws of IT don't quite seem to apply. This week we look at cloud security, and what I liked about this 'toon is exactly what having ironclad security really plays out as. Be careful of what you wish for.

The evolution of VMware's disaster recovery guidance for customers is taking it in a direction that is actually less focused on the disaster itself, and more on business continuity. That's changing the very economics of disaster recovery (DR) software itself, according to VMware infrastructure product manager Gaetan Castelein.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Castelein said that DR used to be a common process mainly for big enterprises. But as businesses everywhere are learning that disaster avoidance processes cut down on costs, the subsequent cost of implementing DR comes down as well - and that brings more businesses into the mix.

The evolution of VMware's disaster recovery guidance for customers is taking it in a direction that is actually less focused on the disaster itself, and more on business continuity. That's changing the very economics of disaster recovery (DR) software, according to VMware infrastructure product manager Gaetan Castelein.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, Castelein said that DR used to be a common process mainly for big enterprises. But as businesses everywhere are learning that disaster avoidance processes cut down on costs, the subsequent cost of implementing DR comes down as well, and that brings more businesses into the mix.

Yesterday, during their rollout conference for WebLogic Server 12c, engineers from Oracle introduced developers to a concept they called Virtual Assembly Builder. Their idea was this: When you take a Java application, with all its myriad underpinnings and dependencies, and move it into a virtualized environment such as a cloud, certain libraries that the app needed when running on a physical server will need to be substituted with VM-aware components for optimum performance. The philosophy there is, you want the virtual machine to closely approximate the characteristics of the physical one, including how it works and how it's managed.

When I ran that concept past a pair of VMware marketing managers this afternoon, they could not have disagreed any more pointedly with Oracle's basic philosophy. During a demonstration of VMware technologies including vFabric, they explained why products like AppInsight, released last month, present a more simplified dashboard for administrators of applications deployed through cloud-based IaaS services.