Cameron Sturdevant

[WP_IMAGE] Today marks my first “what am I working on” post, a feature that will appear every Thursday. I’m currently working on a “first look” review of Citrix XenServer 6 beta 2, known as ‘Project Boston.’ I’ve had the code up and running for a week at the San Francisco lab. The code is available […]

In the midst of VMware’s announcement of vSphere 5 and the hailstorm of concern over licensing changes, it’s easy to overlook competitors including Citrix. The latest version of Citrix XenServer 6 beta 2–known as Project Boston–adds a new Self-Service Manager and other improvements that streamline product operations. I’m working on a review of the beta […]

[WP_IMAGE] I’m especially interested in how endpoint anti-virus and Internet security tools impact virtual desktop and server systems. So I spent most of today with Kaspersky Labs at their North American Reviewers workshop here in San Francisco. Kaspersky’s Senior Anti-Virus Researcher, Roel Schouwenberg, kicked off the day talking about the current threat landscape, as seen […]

[WP_IMAGE] I’m fresh off a ‘desert island’ vacation: no connected anything. So while I knew that VMware was announcing vSphere 5 and a host of cloud infrastructure components on July 12, today is the first day I’ve actually looked at the contents of the revamped products. Looking at the technology announcements–as opposed to the licensing […]

[WP_IMAGE] I just wrapped up a review of WhatsUp Gold version 15. What a trip down memory. I reviewed WhatsUp Gold version 6 in 2001 and version 8 in 2003. This latest version does a good job of integrating physical and virtual infrastructure performance. It also carries forward some of my love-to-hate features, including Ipswitch’s […]

Ipswitch has updated the WhatsUp Gold user interface and VMware integration capabilities, making version 15 of the venerable tool for network and system monitoring and reporting well worth considering for use in small and midsize IT organizations. The new ribbon interface should ease administrative access to WhatsUp Gold’s myriad monitoring tools while also neatly presenting […]

Home A veiw of the eWEEK Labs Nebula cluster shows our virtual infrastructure. Devices Drilling down in a list view, you see details of the physical and virtual systems in our VMware infrasturcture. Device Status A detailed view of a virtual machine shows that it was briefly unavailable (far right) but that the system is […]

[WP_IMAGE] I’m moderating a sponsored webcast tomorrow, June 30 entitled “Smarter Computing: Managed in the Cloud – Virtualization Without Limits.” Not withstanding the somewhat breathless title, I think the core proposition of the webcast is the next step in cloud computing. You can join us at 12:00 p.m. Eastern / 9:00 a.m. Pacific. For several […]

Estimate SolarWinds Virtualization Manager uses performance data and cost templates to estimate what it would cost to run VMware virtual infrastructure on Amazon Web Services EC2 platform. Dashboard The dashboard view can be configured with a wide variety of widgets including some shown here that track VMware cluster capacity. Configure The configuration summary shows that […]

[WP_IMAGE] SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 4.0 I just finished testing the SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 4.0 but that won’t be the end of my look at the virtualization management landscape. Next up, I’ll be looking at Ipswitch Inc.’s WhatsUp Gold version 15, as well as the new versions of WhatsUp Gold’s plug-ins, Flow Monitor and WhatsVirtual. Although […]

The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 4.0 is a VMware-only management tool that monitors compute, network and storage resource use to predict capacity limits, answers “what-if” resource planning questions and estimates what it would cost to run your virtual infrastructure on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud service. SolarWinds picked up Virtualization Manager when it acquired Hyper9 in January. […]

[WP_IMAGE] The Open Data Center Alliance Input/Output Controls is a short document that references one of the big problems raised by increased virtual machine density in a cloud environment: I/O contention. The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) uses the Input/Output Controls (I/O) usage model to weigh in on the side of work being done my […]