Ontic Oren

New research report out from EMA today that’s well worth looking into.  SearchCIO-Midmarket.com has a great article on it.

Behind these figures are management challenges that companies are only starting to recognize, let alone address, the surveys found. Only 24% of respondents to an Enterprise Management Associates Inc. survey of 627 corporate IT decision makers published last April said they thought virtualization makes security administration easier — as compared with 42% in 2006. Just 32% said software control and distribution is easier in a virtualized environment, down from 58% two years ago. And configuration management numbers plummeted from 58% to 32%.

That’s exactly one of the problems we set out to solve with RDA.  We recognize that administrators are being thrust into administrative positions that challenge them to broaden their expertise dramatically.  Managing a virtualized datacenter requires deep network, storage, server, and virtualization skills, often in very short supply.  RDA helps, by providing clear guidance and prescriptive remediation to help administrators find and fix problems in their datacenter quickly and easily.

Another favorite quote:

ndeed, everything from performance and capacity management to troubleshooting and security administration becomes more difficult in a volatile, multilayered and often heterogeneous virtualized environment, Mann said. 

And finally:

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of software tools that manage virtual and physical environments or multi-platform virtualized installations in an integrated fashion, the EMA report stated. Only 21% of management tools in use can integrate effectively with other enterprise system management tools, according to EMA’s Mann.

If this sounds like you, go check out RDA!

Over at my day job, we’re conducting a quick little survey to help us get a better handle on the configuration problems that people are running into setting up and managing a virtualized datacenter.  We are looking for feedback on the challenges that frustrate administrators in a virtualized world, and then some specifics on areas that may be of particular pain such as IP management, network configuration, etc.

The survey should take < 5 minutes, so if you’re reasonably technical, have played with or administered virtualization (citrix, vmware, microsoft, KVM, whatever), please help us out and take the survey.  Feel free to pass the link to anyone else. 

I’ll be posting the full results of the survey (barring personal information) next month, no filtering or editing.  If I get more than 50 useful results, I promise to even post the raw XLS for anyone else (competition or otherwise) to use as well.

Survey: http://bit.ly/4vhktO

Recently decided to try out VMWare ESX.

• ESX offers two management interfaces, a desktop client or a browser interface. Neither support the Mac.
• It looks like you must use the “Virtual Infrastructure Client”, a windows app, to get started using ESX
• Took me a little bit to figure out how to get ESX running inside Fusion. Virtualization.info had some good pointers. Watch out if you’re copying from the web for “smart quotes”. Curly quotes will crash VMware right quick

The results: a really silly screenshot. What, you may be asking, is that? It would be Joomla appliance from rPath running on ESX running on Fusion, with the VI client running on Windows running on Fusion. It worked amazingly well, though joomla booting was a bit slow – about 30 min.In case you’re wondering, the key lines to add/edit in the vmx file are:

scsi0.VirtualDev = "lsilogic"ethernet0.virtualdev = "e1000"monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUEmonitor_control.vt32 = TRUE