hyper-v

OpenStack Isn’t Our Savior from Lock-In or Support Costs

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There is an attitude among some now that OpenStack is, or at least will be, our savior from vendor lock-in in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud space, as well as something that will help corporations save a lot of money in licensing fees from VMware. While I see the potential I think there’s more to the picture. To start with, OpenStack will lock you in just the same as a commercial offering, even though it’ll be “open.” If you want to move from OpenStack to another solution to another there will still be a bunch of hassle to move virtual machines and applications, just the same as if you wanted to move between VMware and Hyper-V, or to a public cloud offering. OpenStack …

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3 Reasons These VMware vTax & Licensing Rumors Are Great

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“What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.” – Mark Twain I have to say that, if they’re true, I’ve got three reasons to be happy about the VMware licensing rumors that CRN is leaking. First, you may remember from the vSphere 5 launch that I was one of the folks pointing out that due to the fact that you can pool your vRAM licensing it was likely to have little effect in the short term, and shouldn’t stop anybody from upgrading to vSphere 5. The pain would come in the medium-term for folks that practice the “fewer, bigger machines” approach to virtualization (a practice I promote). Thirteen months is definitely “medium-term” …

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VMware Engineering, Are You Fixing Anything?

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I was just reading Josh Andrews’ account of a serious bug still present in the latest releases of VMware vCenter 5.0 (5.0b): This bug has been known for a while and while U1 contained some mentions about fixing it – we now have U1b and the problem still exists…. Make sure you have a cluster with HA and/or DRS turned on…. Enable VM Storage Profiles… Now return to your cluster summary to verify HA and DRS have been turned off and all settings have been lost. This is epic bad stuff here, because if there’s one good way to mess a lot of things up it’s to disable DRS. Especially if you have a vCloud Director setup, since if you shut DRS off …

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Thoughts on the VMTN Subscription Idea

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Mike Laverick has started something of a campaign to bring back the VMTN Subscription, which was something like the Microsoft TechNet or MSDN models. I’m a TechNet subscriber and for $349 I get access to most everything Microsoft has. For testing purposes this is great. I don’t have to spend a lot of time dealing with activation timeouts, I can just test things and leave the my own test environment up and running for when I want to test new VMware Tools, or whatever. I think that’s fair, since I buy real Windows licenses for every other VM that I have (dev, test, QA, production, etc.). Right now, if you want a test environment your options are to pay for …

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Official: Revisions to VMware vSphere 5 Licensing

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It’s official, VMware is changing the vRAM licensing in response to the feedback they’ve received. And, from the sounds of it, lots of feedback. They read every single vRAM post and thread in the Communities, read all the blog posts and comments, read all the feedback that was sent to them through the sales representatives and technical account managers. As they put it to me, most of the feedback was along these lines: It was less about the conversion to vSphere 5 than future growth, and the fact that the business case for future growth was drastically different now [and quite a bit more costly] than under the vSphere 4 licensing model. The new license model “introduced additional hesitation for …

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