I had the opportunity to speak with Kieran Moynihan, former CTO of Vallent (acquired by IBM earlier this year) and current VP and CTO of telecoms for IBM Tivoli Software. We discussed the future vision for Vallent and performance management for communication service providers.

If Cisco Systems gets its way, data centers eventually will be replaced by virtual machines running somewhere on a switch or a router. It's spent the last 2 ½ years talking about the virtual data center, and in July this year made its boldest claim yet: that in the long term, virtualization will mean the end of physical servers.

A number of analyst firms and our own surveys indicate that there's a growing trend toward data center consolidation. The drivers are many--better data management and backup, regulatory requirements, cost reduction and better information security practices.

As if it weren't enough that Microsoft is gunning for Google with Live Search, now a self-proclaimed ethics watchdog group has the company in its sights for -- get this -- hosting copyrighted movies on Google Video. We're shocked! shocked! to find out Knocked Up is available.

Running a data center is for suckers. They're expensive, hard to power and cool, and full of cranky hardware and software that require ceaseless attention.

We all know and loathe the type -- they floss twice a day, eat plenty of fiber, always remember their anniversaries, and max out their 401(k)s so they can retire at 55. When these paragons go into IT, they're inevitably the killjoys reminding the rest of us that it's not enough to have a disaster recovery plan, you have to actually test it every millennium or so.

An anecdote from the production side. We’re in the midst of a minor squabble over support for a third-party app running on a VM. Read on for the punch line ...

As we near the end of September, it's the end of the quarter for many software vendors. It's a great time to ask them to sharpen their pencils and make a deal if you're in the market for APO tools. With a lot of corporate consolidation, the spending spree for products has slowed. This has resulted in software salespeople working to meet aggressive numbers by the end of the quarter.

Dr. Eric Shaw‘s Tuesday keynote at the MIS Training Institute's IT Security World Conference 2007 is a sobering presentation about the underlying causes of and dangers in mishandling the rogue or disgruntled employee.

In a previous installment of Alan Shimel's NAC-tacular podcast series, Michelle McLean of Consentry observed that the press is often covering technology one and a half to two years before enterprises are ready to deploy. So Shimel decided to get three press folks together, myself, Matt Hines from InfoWorld, and Joel Snyder, who in addition to consulting, writes for Network World and Information Security magazine, to discuss the NAC landscape, where products are, the features that are available and those that are missing which in a more relaxed venue than stuffy old print. Of course you could hold on to this for two years and be up to speed. :) You can get the podcast on iTunes (search for StillSecure) or grab the mp3 here.

We're taking our first baby steps as gear starts to arrive for our virtualization test lab. To get things rolling, we've fired up a couple of open-source platforms while we wait for our our ESX testbed to arrive.

I met with Hugh Kelly of Canton, Massachusetts based Network Engines this week to discuss his company’s virtual appliance solution. Their business model doesn’t actually sell appliances; Network Engines offers a service to software vendors, appliance-izing solutions for other development houses. You say you already have a great security or management product but lack the in-house expertise to integrate it into a turn-key solution for ESX? You could give these folks a call...

With the upcoming release of VMware's Virtual Desktop Manager 2 (VDM) product, the customer-installable Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) draws closer to becoming a reality. VMware has yet to release pricing, nor have they published a SKU for direct customer consumption, but nonetheless, it lives in a private beta format now with a public beta to come in the next month or so. If you want to participate in the public beta, go here to get started.

The idea that a MAC address, the globally unique hardware address of a NIC, could be used in authentication is ridiculous. MAC addresses, both easily discovered and altered, don't provide any valid proof of identity other than it's intended use case—as a way for layer two devices to exchange frames between each other. Yet, we hear "MAC authentication" used to refer to white-listing hosts by MAC address. That bugs me.

For those who haven't mentally stepped through the process of building a wireless PtP or PtMP link, let me give you a heads up, literally: if your building isn't tall or the terrain doesn't lends itself to some kind of unnatural elevation, you're going to have to seriously consider building a tower.

Symantec today announced an update for Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX. I spoke with company reps last week about the product, which aims to do for ESX what other versions of cluster server do for other hardware platforms and operating systems, namely add overall manageability and high availability.

Diane Greene's keynote address at VMworld 2007 on Tuesday included the announcement of VMware's new, improved, and smaller ESX Server 3i hypervisor. Putting this in perspective, the current VMware ESX hypervisor wields a footprint of a little over 2GB - the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3 (RHEL3)-based Service Console takes up 2GB, and the Kernel hypervisor, 32MB. Not bad all things considered. But now imagine a smaller hypervisor - so small it fits on a USB key that nowadays would be considered undersized by a long shot.

I love Tetris, but I'm lucky if I can get past level 13. Check out this Tetris afficionado, who goes by the moniker Jin8. Here he's playing Tetris Grand Master, which includes invisible levels. It starts out slow at first, but by the middle and end, the pieces are dropping at lightning fast speed, which doesn't seem to phase Jin8 in the least. It's pretty amazing to watch.

Hello to all and a big thank you to Art for kicking of the Virtualization Immersion Center blog for me. To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges, Looks like I picked the wrong week to be off-line.

VMworld 2007 at San Francisco's Moscone Center is underway! This three day event is showcasing virtualization like no other event, with forward thinkers and progressive implementers sharing best practices, lessons learned, and industry predictions with 10,000 (literally) virtualization aficionados.

This year, there was a lot of action in the IT Process Automation space. It started when Opsware bought iConclude (now Process Automation System) and added the software to its network and application configuration software suite. Then BMC, buys RealOps – an iConclude competitor. BladeLogic goes public shortly after and the market responds by driving up the price on speculation that they too will be bought by one of the big players.

Testing application management applications prior to purchase is tough for many organizations. When many organizations look to purchase software tools to manage their application environment, they typically like to kick the tires of three to four vendors in their environment.

Welcome to the Application Performance Optimization Immersion Center. The goal of this site is to cover relevant information on effectively managing and automating applications and operations environments. We will conduct product reviews, evaluate new technologies that drive data center efficiencies, conduct interviews with leaders in data center operations and help you evaluate trends in the market.

I forget who told me that conventional wisdom is often neither, but I would do well to remember it. I have been heads down testing NAC products for the last few weeks and in between having vendor system engineers (the people how travel to site for installation and troubleshooting) in the lab helping with set-up, I have been picking their brains on what they see in deployments. When you land on a NAC vendor, be sure to add to your list of questions, if they don’t ask you, what switch models and software versions have you tested your product with.

Watching this Star Wars/Simpsons mashup, it's hard to believe that it wasn't done by the actual Simpsons animation team. In fact it was created by a very talented animator named Rich Cando. You can find more of Rich's work at richcando.com