Oct 02

VMware rolls back its boarders with a flash sale of vCloud Air

In a not-too-unexpected move, VMware has announced the sale of its Public Cloud division. It is well-known that vCloud Air has been struggling. In a deal expected to close in Q2 2017 they have offloaded it to French Cloud hosting provider OVH. OVH defines itself as one of the largest cloud service providers in the world, with 1 million customers and 260,000 servers deployed, so roughly a quarter of a server per customer. I am pretty sure that Oracle, AWS, Google, and Azure are bigger, but there you go. Marketing at its best — OVH, one of the largest cloud service providers in the world.

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Oct 01

VMware ends support for 3rd Party Virtual Switches

This post on reddit appears to intimate that VMware is closing its API for virtual switches to all parties, including its long-standing networking partner Cisco. When I first read the post, I thought the move was a retrograde step by VMware and another veiled dig at its ecosystem. The post links to an official blog post on the VMware site stating that moving forward, VMware “will have a single virtual switch strategy that focuses on two sets of native virtual switch offerings – VMware vSphere® Standard Switch and vSphere Distributed Switch™ for VMware vSphere, and the Open virtual switch (OVS).”

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Sep 30

Moving home and troublesome files: issue with cross-cloud

You may or may not be aware that I have just moved house, and, me being me, I have not done it by halves. My family and I up’d sticks to the other side of the world, and we landed in Perth—not Scotland, but Australia. Call it a cross-cloud migration; this obviously was fraught with difficulties and did not go as smoothly as planned. This has got me thinking about moving home in a cloud environment, whether from site to site, region to region, or cloud provider to cloud provider. In a perfect world, this should be as simple as live migration is today between like-minded virtualization hosts: VMware to VMware, Hyper-V to Hyper-V. The unfortunate truth is that this is not the case

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Sep 28

VMX unrestricted guest errors with Workstation 14 or Fusion 10

With the new Workstation 14 and Fusion 10 there is also a new requirement for your CPU’s. This unfortunately has not been clearly communicated about by VMware. When you try to start a VM and get the error:

This host does not support virtualizing real mode. The intel “VMX unrestricted Guest” feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor.

Module ‘CPUIDEarly’ power on failed

Failed to start the virtual machine

You’re one of those lucky ones with a CPU that is too old.

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Sep 28

It’s OK – You just configure a Reverse Proxt and your good to go – Simples

We have all heard those words from the great and wise when we were starting out in our IT journey, the intimation being that it is a simple process—so simple that even a child can do it. In fact, I bet you can hear yourself saying that exact statement, maybe regarding a different service: “It’s OK—you just configure an iSCSI VMkernel port, and you’re good to go.” I know I have been guilty of saying this as an off-the-cuff comment to imply that something is simple, and it does not need my input. I’d be thinking, “You should be able to do this yourself; why are you bothering me with this?” I know you do not mean it like that. In your mind, you feel that you are empowering your staff to just get on with it. You know that they can do the work, and you do not want to belittle your colleagues, embarrassing them by aiding them in completing such a simple process.

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Sep 27

Docker has been in an acquisitivie mood again, this time pulling in Infinit

Docker, the leading vendor in the container industry, has been dipping into its pockets again, this time to acquire French file sync company Infinit. Yep, Docker, the company whose core product is a container management and deployment technology, is acquiring a consumer file sync company.

At first glance, this is an odd acquisition. Infinit is a company with a product that appears similar to Aspera, Accellion, or even good old-fashioned FTP. If you need to share your files, but email send or receive limits are getting in the way, Infinit allows you to create a Share directly to other Infinit users or a link that can be emailed to non–Infinit users to access your files directly, thereby allowing them to download them for review or further work.

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Sep 27

VMware Fusion on macOS High Sierra – System Extension Blocked

This is just a quick post about an issue you’ll see when installing VMware Fusion on macOS High Sierra.

During the install the following screen pops up.System Extension Blocked

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 26

Aquisitive Landesk bought out

The acquisitions have started early in 2017. It is only the fourth of January and we have our first major deal. The private investment firm Clearlake Capital has just shelled out a cool $1.1 billion for LANDESK.

In the past few years, LANDESK carved out a niche in the user virtualization market space, acquiring its major competitor and market leader AppSense in 2016, Xtraction Solutions in 2015, Naurtech and LetMoblie in 2014, and Shavlik from VMware in 2013.

Clearlake Capital has agreed to acquire LANDESK for a believed $1.1 billion in cash from Thoma Bravo and will be merging the company with its other UEM asset, HEAT Software USA.

The newly merged company, which is yet to be named, will be led by LANDESK CEO Steve Daly and headquartered in Utah. Current HEAT CEO and Clearlake Operating Advisor John Ferron will serve as the executive chairman of the newly merged company’s board.

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Sep 25

Amazon Web Services buries another Rival in the Cloud wars

The implacable march of Amazon Web Services toward ultimate public cloud domination has been relentless, from its inception in 2006 with a single service (S3 Storage) to the behemoth it has become today. It seems this minnow has become the biggest fish in the pond. But is it unstoppable? Has it won the public cloud wars?

That is still up for grabs. There are still some major players out there that could move. IBM Softlayer? Unlikely. Azure? Definitely. Oracle Cloud? Maybe. You will notice that Cisco is not there. This is because it has just pulled out of that market. Yes, Cisco is closing its $1 billion investment in its Intercloud product in March 2017. According to a Cisco source, it will be “moving current workloads into alternate infrastructure, including, in some cases, public clouds.” Cisco will follow in the veritable footsteps of former cloud illuminatus Rackspace, which is now effectively an AWS and Azure provider. Although VMware still has vCloud Air, now that it is on AWS play, it is effectively another AWS reseller/partner.

How this came to pass is a modern-day lesson in business ostrich syndrome, similar to what has become known as the “Kodak blindness.” Another company that displayed the same blindness is Nokia.

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Sep 24

Patent Trolls, Your time may finally be up

Patents are a valid protection against intellectual property theft. They are granted by the relevant authority on behalf of a sovereign state: for example, the US Patent Office in America, and the Patent Office in the UK. Once granted, patents assign exclusive rights to the assignee (inventor) for a limited period (usually twenty years) from the award of the patent.

This is a very strong protection of the inventor of a thing, as it prevents other, more established players from copying their ideas without licensing it. It is a valid and correct way of dealing with the protection of Ideas.

Unfortunately, over the last twenty years or so, the system has appeared to have begun falling apart and harming the very innovation that it was supposed to protect. Companies have sprung up that have a business model of buying up patents from dead companies and then suing other companies for infringements. Why do these people and companies chase these cases? Well, the rewards can be large for the victor and very damaging for the losing party.

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