Monday Morning VM Updates - Veterans Day Edition

It has been a busy seven days on my end, leading to a dearth of blog postings: Interop/Vegas prep, a number of production issues, and a couple of in-depth interviews. Read on for more. First of all, wishing a pleasant (observed) Veterans Day to all my fellow vets. That said:

I've been (happily) tagged to ride herd on the Virtualization track for Interop Vegas at the end of April. The call for papers is out, and we're shaping up our workshops, panel discussions, presentations, and other goodness over the next few weeks. Have something to say to the world about your slice of virtualization? New product, personal success story, or rant? Drop me a note and we'll talk.

I had a great meeting with John Bryce and some of his folks from Mosso. A couple of years ago they created a full-service hosting shop under Rackspace. Like many folks in that business, they were running 1x1 Wintel for the most part and quickly became victims of their own success. To the tune of 200-odd servers with lots o' management overhead in a very short time. They also were hampered by limited flexibility to meet rapidly changing customer/production demand due to their 1x1 dependence. In response, Mosso made the jump to production ESX which they had been running in (wait for it...) their test environments.

ESX yielded short-term joy followed by more production and management headaches. VM management toolset required. I'll be posting more on this later this week, but the short of it is that Mosso has found happiness partnering with Hyperic to sanely manage 180+ servers hosting 2-3 VMs each, running PHP, IIS, SQL, Apache or other platforms as customers require to keep 30K+ sites up and lively. Bryce and crew seem mighty happy.

Speaking of VM management ... how 'bout those compliance issues? Are you 100% certain that your VMs (and/or your dedicated servers, for that matter) are up to snuff with SOX, eSox, HIPPA, etc? Really? 100% sure? My chat with the folks at Configuresoft reminded me of why I left the Fortune 100 world. More on that to come, too... needless to say, Configuresoft is doing a brisk domestic and international business helping folks feel better about their IT compliance in this crazy, mixed-up world. Does it still count toward good karma if you charge customers? I think it does.And that test lab...

Gear is racked and humming. ESX, OpenVZ, XenEnterprise are running and in the midst of getting shiny. VirtualIron is still on the to-do list, as is building an Open-BSD-based firewall to keep the entire VM rack safe and sound from my production shop. Other projects in the works:

As always, stay tuned.