February 2014 archive

There is a ton of work that goes into maintaining my websites, I have to gather and sort through lots of links and information, organize it and publish it. In addition the annual top blog voting contest is no small effort either and involves a ton of work collecting data, building forms, processing data, updating websites, building surveys and much more. From start to finish this usually takes at least 30-40 hours of my time.

So as a small favor in return I would appreciate if you checkout the companies that sponsor my family of websites that help make all this possible and also give them a follow on Twitter.

Zerto

Follow @ZertoCorp

Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. Zerto won Best of Show at VMworld 2011, as well as 2011 Product of the Year Gold Award because our software, Zerto Virtual Replication, is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications. Zerto Disaster Recovery solutions replace traditional array-based BCDR that was not built to deal with virtual environments. Zerto recently launched a new version (3.1) of Zerto Virtual Replication that you can find out more about here.

Infinio

Follow @InfinioSystems

Infinio Accelerator lets you separate performance from capacity. For a fraction of the price of hardware-based products, Accelerator offers a software-only solution that extends the performance life of the NAS you already have. Accelerator is a virtual appliance that uses server-side caching to minimize the I/O traffic load on central storage. Infinio Accelerator won a “Best of VMworld” award, being named a Finalist in the Best New Technology category. I recently recorded a webinar for Infinio on right-sizing storage for virtual environments that you might find interesting. They also have another webinar available on 5 ways to get better performance from NAS-Backed VMs as well as a great technical video series on content-based caching.

Unitrends

Follow @Unitrends

Unitrends, a leader in enterprise-level data protection, offers the #1 all-in-one backup solution for virtual, physical and cloud. Building on over 20 years of industry firsts, Unitrends continues to lead the market. Unitrends is used by IT professionals for backup of their virtual and physical servers and for performing disaster recovery to remote locations or to private or public cloud. Unitrends not only continues to set the standard in virtual and physical server data protection, but its US-based support team boasts a 99% customer satisfaction rate, further reinforcing its reputation for quality. Unitrends recently acquired PHD Virtual, another leading backup company for VMware environments and is kicking off a fundraising effort to support the Special Olympics.

StratoGen

Follow @StratoGen

StratoGen is a leading VMware hosting provider with award winning cloud platforms in the US, UK and Asia. From single virtual machines to dedicated private clouds, StratoGen delivers a powerful yet cost effective cloud hosting solution. The StratoGen Cloud is engineered from the ground up to be extremely dynamic and resilient, allowing you to add more servers or resources instantly. StratoGen hosted VMware services include a 100% uptime service level guarantee. The StratoGen Cloud can be seamlessly integrated with any on-site VMware infrastructure you may have, offering a “single pane” management console for both your hosted and on-site resources. StratoGen offers a wide range of hosted solutions for VMware environments including Hosted Desktops, Disaster Recovery, VMware Image Hosting and VMware Hosting.

SolarWinds

Follow @solarwinds

SolarWinds mission has been to provide purpose-built products that are designed to make IT professionals jobs easier. SolarWinds was built by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today’s dynamic IT environments. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager delivers integrated VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and chargeback automation; all in one awesomely affordable product that’s easy to download, deploy, and use. SolarWinds believes you should try their software before you buy and we offer free trials that deliver full product functionality. Be sure and try out a free trial of Virtualization Manager so you can find out what you’re missing that vCenter Server can’t provide.

Turbonomic

Follow @vmturbo

VMTurbo delivers an intelligent workload management solution providing service assurance and infrastructure efficiency for cloud and virtualized environments. With an emphasis on prevention, VMTurbo delivers an intelligent and automated control plane for cloud and virtualized datacenters. It closes the loop between collecting data and controlling the environment – enabling administrators to automate management of dynamic virtualized environments to ensure service levels, while maximizing efficiency. Easy to deploy and simple to administer, VMTurbo Operations Manager assures application performance, operational efficiency and optimal resource utilization. VMTurbo recently released a new version (4.5) of their Operations Manager product and offers a free 30-day trial so you can experience first-hand a smarter approach to virtualization management.

Veeam

Follow @veeam

Veeam is Modern Data Protection that is built for Virtualization and the Cloud. Their customers understand that virtual environments bring unique challenges. That’s why more than 73,000 customers chose Veeam to protect over 4 million VMs. Our powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solutions help solve virtualization challenges – making Veeam the perfect fit for the modern datacenter. Veeam Backup & Replication delivers innovative VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, recovery and replication. This #1 VM Backup solution helps organizations meet RPOs and RTOs, save time, eliminate risk and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs. Veeam has won 55 awards including Product of the Year for 2013 that serve to validate their success in the virtualization industry. Be sure and download their free tool for VMware and Hyper-V backup and also check out the Veeam Community podcast.

Information security breaches are in the news a lot these days, but for many companies security doesn’t get the attention it deserves, until something bad happens. Let’s face it, implementing better security in a data center is a pain in the ass and inconveniences everyone from administrators to end users. Better security doesn’t make anyone’s job easier and as a result everyone tends to be resistant to it. But the reality is that unless you want to end up in the newspaper headlines you have to do it, and not just make a half-ass effort at it, you need to do it right and you also need to stay vigilant at it. Security isn’t something you do once and you’re done, it’s an ongoing job that requires discipline, time and effort to do.

Implementing virtualization makes security a more difficult job, not only do you have to secure the physical side of your data center but you also have to secure the virtual side. In a traditional non-virtualized environment implementing security was much simpler, adding virtualization to the mix makes it much more difficult and complicated as there are many more attack vectors that you need to protect. You would probably notice someone carrying a physical server out of your data center, but in a virtual environment whole servers can leave your data center in someones pocket, without them even entering your data center.

I did an article a while back for Tech Target, “How To Steal a VM in 3 Easy Steps” that described a simple scenario on how someone could make copy a VM and carry it home with them on a flash drive. From there they could easily power it on in their own environment and access the OS,  applications and data on it. To prevent this you need to start by following security best practices for virtualization and make sure you understand where the weak points are in your virtual environment and secure them properly.

The ESXi hypervisor has good built-in security but it’s easy to change settings to make administration easier that results in weakening it and opening up attack points into your virtual environment. VMware has just updated their Security of the vSphere Hypervisor white paper which provides a good overview of the security things that you need to know in vSphere, definitely give this a read. There are also a number of very good 3rd party virtualization security products from vendors like Catbird and HyTrust that can help provide an additional layer of security and monitoring to improve the security of your virtual environment. Also check out some of the security resources below:

• Security of the VMware vSphere Hypervisor – Good high-level overview of how ESXi security architecture and controls address common concerns in the security community regarding virtualization
• VMware Security Hardening Guides – Step by step guides specific to each vSphere version that provide prescriptive guidance for customers on how to deploy and operate VMware products in a secure manner
• vSphere 5.5 Security – Official documentation from VMware for vSphere 5.5 that covers securing all areas of a vSphere environment
• Security Compliance in a Virtual World – RSA Security Brief with contributing authors from VMware (Stephen Herrod/Charu Chaubal) that covers the challenges of security compliance in virtual environments
• Virtualization Security and Best Practices – PowerPoint presentation from Rob Randall at VMware, it’s a bit old but the concepts still apply today
• PCI DSS Virtualization Guidelines – Provides supplemental security guidance on the use of virtualization technologies in cardholder data environments
• VMware Solution Guide for Payment Card Industry (PCI) – VMware specific security guidelines to address PCI Compliance standards
• Verizon Enterprise 2013 Data Breach Report – Great report that shows where and how most corporate data breaches occur and what types of victims are typically targeted
• Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground – Great book into the mindset and methods of cyber-criminals

I limit the number of sponsors that advertise on vSphere-land and have one advertising slot currently open. Most of my sponsors are long term repeat sponsors so I don’t often have open slots but I currently have one due to one of my long time sponsors ending blog sponsorship’s after they were acquired. Their loss is your gain, I have one slot open if any companies are interested in sponsoring the vSphere-land family of websites. For more information and rates please see this page and contact me at esiebert7625 at yahoo.com.

In case you hadn’t heard, VMware has become the soup nazi at their annual Partner Exchange (PEX) conference telling both Veeam and Nutanix and probably more I’m sure, thanks but no thanks, we don’t want you at our partner conference. While it’s understandable that VMware would not want vendor’s like Microsoft, Oracle & Citrix at their conference, they’ve started excluding more vendors that have any type of conflict of interest with VMware products.

VMware walks a fine line these days as they compete with just about any vendor that makes software products for the data center and they also compete with most hardware vendors as well. When it comes to hardware VMware prefers you to buy dumb hardware and let their software layer handle the intelligence of the hardware. The reality of it is, VMware really competes with almost every hardware and software and even cloud vendor out there, some more so than others but the way it is, it’s VMware versus all comers for world domination in the data center.

This wasn’t always the case, a long time ago in a data center far far away, server virtualization was in its infancy and VMware was a little known company that was selling a disruptive technology that would go against the grain of the traditional data center. Back then VMware sold very few products, basically a hypervisor (ESX) and a server to manage it (VirtualCenter). As server virtualization took off and started to become more popular a huge 3rd party ecosystem grew as vendors sprung up to fulfill the needs caused by this new and unconventional shift in the data center.

There were needs in almost every area including security, backup & recovery, management, automation, monitoring and much more. These 3rd party products complemented VMware’s hypervisor and made it stronger and just like Apple and their dominance with 3rd party apps, was a combination that was hard to beat. Then as virtualization took off VMware started branching out, making acquisitions to expand their line-up to fill in the gaps that 3rd party products used to fulfill for them.

If you look at the sponsor list for PEX this year and take out the big five that VMware can’t afford to exclude, the rest looks almost like a line-up for a minor league baseball team. It’s a shame that VMware would start shutting the door as they have many great loyal partners that have helped carry them over the years. I know PEX is a different type of conference and you have both partners and re-sellers there but if VMware is tightening down on who can be at PEX, are they going to start doing the same thing at VMworld?

It’s a shame that Veeam won’t be at PEX this year, they are one of the companies that rode the coat tails of virtualization and have become a huge success as a result. While it’s VMware’s conference and they have every right to pick and choose who can be there, it’s definitely a sign that VMware has gotten to the point that they really don’t need to rely on their partners as much as they have in the past.

It’s time to do the annual top blog voting, last year we had over 1,300 votes that shaped the top 50 list that is published on my vLaunchPad. Just like last year in addition to the traditional top 50 voting I’m opening it up to allow voting in specific categories as well to help distinguish certain types of blogs. To do this I have created a survey to allow you to nominate your blog or website for one of the categories that I have defined if your blog fits one or more of the categories, if it does not then don’t nominate it as all blogs on the vLaunchpad will automatically be included in the general top blog voting.

This survey is not the general voting poll for the top VMware/virtualization blogs, this survey is only to nominate your blog for certain categories if it fits. Once the nominations are collected I will open the polls for voting for the top blogs where voters will be able to rate their top 10 blogs and also vote in each of the categories.

You should only nominate your own blog/website, these nominations will be used to populate the category choices when voting opens. If your blog doesn’t fit one of these categories then do not nominate it, all blogs on the vLaunchpad will automatically be included in the general top blog voting. If your blog is not currently listed on the vLaunchPad use this form to let me know. The categories that can be voted on are:

• Best Storage Blog (Must have good percentage of posts be Storage related)
• Best Networking Blog (Must have good percentage of  be Networking related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have good percentage of  posts be Cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have good percentage of  posts be VDI/EUC related)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have good percentage of  posts be Scripting related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best podcast (Audio or video podcasts)
• Best official VMware Blog (Blogs part of VMware’s website)
  
• Best Videos used in a Blog (Must have produced a good percentage of videos)
  
• Best New Blog (Blog started in 2013)
  
• Best Independent Blogger (Can’t work for VMware or a hardware/software vendor)
  

So head on over to the survey and nominate your blog or website, the survey will be open until 2/12. Once it closes I will use the nominations to build the survey for the top blog voting which will begin shortly afterwards.