Take Five With Tom Fenton

CTO Blogger Columns: Virtualization Visionaries

• By Bruce Hoard
• 07/01/2011

We highlight the near-limitless technology breadth and depth of our expert panel.

As we're currently changing the format of our CTO Blogs to fixate on how-to solutions, the time seemed right to revisit some of the sterling blasts from the past.

Take 1
Simon Rust, "The Many Faces of Desktop Virtualization" (April 14, 2011)

This blog caught fire and was one of the top traffic generators across VirtualizationReview.com during this past April. In it Simon Rust, VP of Technology at AppSense, broke down the desktop virtualization field into five technologies: OS provisioning, remote desktop services, client hypervisors, client-side hosted virtual desktops and application virtualization. After defining each of these technologies and listing several vendors offering them, Rust finished up by saying that desktop virtualization is a whole lot more than just Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and its technologies can easily run rampant if they're not controlled. "All of these technologies require a user-virtualization solution," he concluded.

Take 2
Alex Miroshnichenko, "Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks: Part 2" (Dec. 6, 2010)

Virsto Software CTO Alex Miroshnichenko took a closer look at a seemingly valid performance test involving dynamic resource scheduling in a cluster of several virtualized servers, and after discovering the cost of shared storage in the benchmark, suggested that somebody should start a WikiLeaks for storage hardware pricing. He estimated that the list price for the storage hardware was $600,000, but even if the street price was discounted by 60 percent to $360,000, it was still 15 times more expensive than the servers.

Take 3
Jason Mattox, "Don't Leave Solutions Behind When You Move to ESXi" (Aug. 6, 2010)

Former Vizioncore CTO Jason Mattox wrote a thoughtful blog about how ESX users migrating over to ESXi could move their backup and other third-party apps along with them. He said there are several questions to ask before taking action. Start by asking yourself if your present solution provides performance in ESXi that's consistent and comparable to the results you got with ESX. Then ask your vendor two questions: Can you get the results you're accustomed to by using the product in a different way? And, if the answer is no: When will a version of the product that provides similar performance with ESX be available?

Take 4
Karl Triebes, "Assessing and Alleviating Security Risks in the Cloud" (July 27, 2010)

In this blog, F5 CTO Karl Triebes maintained that cloud providers are doing their best to provide robust security, despite the many unknown variables that still exist in cloud computing environments. Two of those variables are virtualization and cloud computing management frameworks. Exploits around virtualization have been theorized, but to date, few -- if any -- hypervisor breaches in a public cloud have occurred, Triebes claimed. Still, even the possibility of a breach may pose too much risk for some organizations.

Take 5
Doug Hazelman, "Is This the Future of VDI?" (Jan. 12, 2011)

While attending the Consumer Electronics Show, Doug Hazelman, senior director of product strategy at Veeam Software -- and avowed gadget lover -- got turned on to the Motorola Atrix AG, HD multimedia dock and laptop dock, which got him to thinking about VDI. With this package, you simply slip your phone into a port on a laptop-like device (keyboard, screen, mouse). Your smartphone already has everything you need for VDI: a screen, Internet connection and numerous clients that can connect to a remote desktop.

What are your favorite CTO Blogs? Tell me at bhoard@1105media.com.