Results tagged “private cloud”

Wondering what CA has in store for virtual servers and private clouds running vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V hardware?

CA today announced that it is streamlining the management of VMware vSphere 4 platform on Cisco Nexus 1000V infrastructures by adding support for both in the company's Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager offerings. Under the management platform, administrators get a unified view of affected hardware and virtual servers; a system that prioritizes and traces events to their root cause resulting in fewer alarms; and real-time monitoring and automation capabilities.

CA's object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter(TM) Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

The consolidation of physical and virtual management is inevitable. Expect the lines to blur even further.

Source

Well, that didn't take long.

VMware made a splash last week by outlining its private cloud vision. Today, Microsoft got in on the act.

During the Microsoft Management Summit this week, Microsoft reiterated the role of cloud computing and virtualization in the OS maker's future. Microsoft showcased its Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises service to jumpstart the private cloud ambitions of IT organizations. Another service, Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters, blends cloud computing and Hyper-V server virtualization for managed services providers.

Both indicate that Microsoft is laying the groundwork just before its Azure push starts in earnest. This could get interesting!

Other highlights include the announcement of a second beta for Microsoft's federated identity technology codenamed Geneva, the upcoming beta of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2, and System Center Online Desktop Manager, which will soon be released to private testers.

While there is still a lot of work to be done in getting businesses to change their one-app-per-box ways, VMware is already looking at the horizon and chasing clouds.

VMware unveiled vSphere 4, which the company is billing as the first cloud OS for private clouds. vSphere nearly promises the holy grail of data center operations, a vast, centrally managed and easily configurable pool of IT resources -- computing power, storage and networking -- that organizations can dynamically parcel out as business needs arise and change.

Easier said than done.

Several popular online services today rely on a cloud computing model, but generally their distributed infrastructures manage a handful of purpose-built, customer-facing and internal apps and storage with a smattering of authentication and security. Handling a veritable universe of disparate business applications is another matter entirely.

VMware says it's got it covered. According to the announcement today:

VMware vSphere 4 delivers significant performance and scalability improvements over the previous generation VMware Infrastructure 3 to enable even the most resource intensive applications, such as large databases and Microsoft Exchange, to be deployed on internal clouds. With these performance and scalability improvements, VMware vSphere 4 will enable the 100 percent virtualized internal cloud.

VMware vSphere 4 delivers more powerful virtual machines with up to:

• 2x the number of virtual processors per virtual machine (from 4 to 8)


• 2.5x more virtual NICs per virtual machine (from 4 to 10)


• 4x more memory per virtual machine (from 64 GB to 255GB)


• 3x increase in network throughput (from 9 Gb/s to 30Gb/s)


• 3x increase in the maximum recorded I/O operations per second (to over 300,000)


• New maximum recorded number of transactions per second - 8,900 which is 5x the total payment traffic of the VISA network worldwide4

In case you're wondering, vSphere 4 can handle up to 32 physical servers with up to 2,048 cores; address 32 TB of RAM; communicate over 8,000 network ports; and manage 1,280 virtual machines. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of power, and you'll need it to achieve the consolidation scenarios VMware envisions, which according to the company, can yield about a "30 percent increase in consolidation ratios" over VMware Infrastructure 3.

Data centers can enjoy further efficiencies of up to 20 percent reduction in power and cooling costs with VMware Distributed Power Management and 50 percent storage savings by reducing unused storage overhead with VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning, according to company estimates.

But one of the most intriguing aspects of the whole announcement is that the company already has plans to have vSphere link individual data centers for geographically distributed private clouds. "Over time, VMware will support dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling 'private' cloud environments that span multiple datacenters and/or cloud providers."

Starting price is a cool $166 per processor, but data centers will be forking over at least $795 per processor for vSphere 4 Standard. General availability for VMware vSphere 4 is expected sometime before the current quarter ends (Q2 2009).

Interesting developments. Let's see how Microsoft Azure and other enterprise cloud OS hopefuls respond.

Source: Press Release