Showing posts with label VMware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VMware. Show all posts

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

HyTrust enforces two-person approval for VMware security

Following up on customer feedback from U.S. intelligence agencies, VMware security systems provider HyTrust has updated its virtual security appliance so actions taken by administrators can be delayed until external approval for that action is granted.

Such precautions are increasingly necessary because today's virtual environments pose "a concentration of risk," said Eric Chiu, president and cofounder of HyTrust.

[ Security expert Roger A. Grimes offers a guided tour of the latest threats and explains what you can do to stop them in "Fight Today's Malware," InfoWorld's Shop Talk video. | Keep up with key security issues with InfoWorld's Security Adviser blog and Security Central newsletter. ]

"Servers, networking, storage used to be separate physical systems and they all had their separate configurations and experts to manage them. That has all been collapsed to a single software layer, with a single management console where any administrator can access any resource," Chiu said. "Ultimately, that creates security and compliance issues."

HyTrust announced the update to its flagship HyTrust Appliance at VMware's VMworld conference, being held this week in San Francisco. At this conference, VMware will detail its roadmap for the software defined data center (SDDC) architecture, in which servers, networking and storage can be virtualized and run in a coordinated fashion.

The HyTrust Appliance monitors and controls the employee use of virtual machines (VMs) that run on VMware's ESX and ESXi hypervisors, as well as oversees administrative use of the VMware vSphere management console. It monitors every administrative action taken on a VM, based on the roles that are assigned to each user. The appliance can block inappropriate actions, and log all user actions.

The software can be valuable in preventing the theft of a VM that contains confidential information, the willful destruction of an entire virtual data center, or the misconfiguring of a VM tenant.

The new version of the virtual appliance includes the ability to block any administrative action until approval from an outside party is granted.

One customer, a U.S. intelligence agency, had requested this feature, Chiu said. It mimics the procedures the U.S. Air Force called the two person concept, in which two managers would be required to complete an action (in the Air Force's case, to launch a nuclear strike).

With the HyTrust software, certain actions, such as deleting a VM, can be put on hold until it is approved by a second party, such as a manager or higher-ranking administrator.

HyTrust offered a limited version of this capability in prior versions, but this release offers a full range of capabilities around the process, Chiu said. It now meets the U.S. National Security Agency's requirements for implementing secondary approval. New features include a timer that could be put in place on any action, so a person can only execute an approved action within a certain period of time, such as a nightly maintenance window, Chiu said.

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 also includes a new monitoring mode, which allows an administrator to log how VMs are used before applying policies to their use. The appliance logs all activity, without enforcing any rules. The monitor-only mode can be useful for allowing an administrator to observe routine behavior, which would provide a baseline for building a set of rules to enforce proper use.


View the original article here

Tuesday, 27 August 2013

VMware sets its sights on network virtualization

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his opening keynote speech at the company's annual VMworld conference to emphasize plans to virtualize networks with the aim of achieving the success in virtualizing servers.

Networking "is the most important topic we will discuss today," Gelsinger said to the audience of VMware administrators at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in a speech that was webcast. "We're moving to a world where the network is just like the compute, where we will be able to spin up network services just like we can spin up [virtual machine] services."

[ Doing server virtualization right is not so simple. InfoWorld's expert contributors show you how to get it right in this 24-page "Server Virtualization Deep Dive" PDF guide. | Track the latest trends in virtualization in InfoWorld's Virtualization Report newsletter. ]

At the conference, the company launched NSX, its new hypervisor for network virtualization.

VMware was founded in 1998 to re-introduce the concept of software virtualization to the world of commodity x86 servers (IBM, among other companies, had long offered software virtualization for time-sharing mainframes).

By placing software, such as a server OS, on top of a hypervisor, which sits between the hardware and the hardware's OS, IT shops could move these virtual machines more easily from physical server to physical server, which entailed costs savings by consolidating servers and increased agility of operations.

VMware in fiscal year 2012 generated around $4.6 billion in revenue, and the industry has become saturated with virtual machines, both from VMware and competitors such as Microsoft. By 2010, the number of virtual machines had outnumbered the number of physical ones, Gelsinger said.

Now, the company is looking to solve the next bottleneck in IT operations, which it identifies as network provisioning.

"Increasingly, the barrier to flexibility is becoming the network. While we can spin up a VM in seconds, [network] configurations can take weeks or months in response," Gelsinger said. NSX, which acts as a unifying layer to controlling network resources such as routers and switches, aims to solve this problem. "What ESX was to server virtualization, NSX is to network virtualization," Gelsinger said.

To help explain NSX, Gelsinger brought on stage VMware chief architect for networking Martin Casado, who was one of the creators of OpenFlow, the protocol that spawned the idea of SDN (software defined networking), which is, in part, another name for network virtualization. Casado was also the CTO of OpenFlow software provider Nicira, which VMware purchased in 2012, and which provides the basis for much of NSX.

Casado said, that when first thinking about OpenFlow, he wanted to "change the network architecture in a way so that you can have the properties in networks that you have in compute, when it comes to thing like operational simplicity, software evolve-ability, programmability."

"Virtual networks look like physical networks, but they have the operational model of a VM -- you can create them dynamically, configure them programmatically, snapshot them, and move them around," Casado said. "This is really taking the virtualization operations model and bringing it to networking."

NSX is part of a larger architecture that VMware has been developing over the past few years, one that it calls the SDDC (software defined data center). With SDDC, all of an organization's infrastructure is virtualized, allowing data center administrators to easily automate operations.

During his keynote, Gelsinger also introduced a number of other technologies, in addition to NSX, that would provide additional elements to SDDC. The company has begun work on its own products to virtualize storage, for instance, with the beta introduction of the Virtual Storage Area Network, which allows an administrator create a virtual SAN out of server hard drives.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com


View the original article here

VMware sets sites on network virtualization

IDG News Service - VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his opening keynote speech at the company's annual VMworld conference to emphasize plans to virtualize networks with the aim of achieving the success in virtualizing servers.

Networking "is the most important topic we will discuss today," Gelsinger said to the audience of VMware administrators at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in a speech that was webcast. "We're moving to a world where the network is just like the compute, where we will be able to spin up network services just like we can spin up [virtual machine] services."

At the conference, the company launched NSX, its new hypervisor for network virtualization.

VMware was founded in 1998 to re-introduce the concept of software virtualization to the world of commodity x86 servers (IBM, among other companies, had long offered software virtualization for time-sharing mainframes).

By placing software, such as a server OS, on top of a hypervisor, which sits between the hardware and the hardware's OS, IT shops could move these virtual machines more easily from physical server to physical server, which entailed costs savings by consolidating servers and increased agility of operations.

VMware in fiscal year 2012 generated around US$4.6 billion in revenue, and the industry has become saturated with virtual machines, both from VMware and competitors such as Microsoft. By 2010, the number of virtual machines had outnumbered the number of physical ones, Gelsinger said.

Now, the company is looking to solve the next bottleneck in IT operations, which it identifies as network provisioning.

"Increasingly, the barrier to flexibility is becoming the network. While we can spin up a VM in seconds, [network] configurations can take weeks or months in response," Gelsinger said. NSX, which acts as a unifying layer to controlling network resources such as routers and switches, aims to solve this problem. "What ESX was to server virtualization, NSX is to network virtualization," Gelsinger said.

To help explain NSX, Gelsinger brought on stage VMware chief architect for networking Martin Casado, who was one of the creators of OpenFlow, the protocol that spawned the idea of software defined networking (SDN), which is, in part, another name for network virtualization. Casado was also the chief technology officer of OpenFlow software provider Nicira, which VMware purchased in 2012, and which provides the basis for much of NSX.

Casado said, that when first thinking about OpenFlow, he wanted to "change the network architecture in a way so that you can have the properties in networks that you have in compute, when it comes to thing like operational simplicity, software evolve-ability, programmability."

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

View the original article here

HP, Juniper to help VMware take on networks with NSX

IDG News Service - VMware's big splash in software-defined networking with its NSX network hypervisor comes with partnerships already in place to flesh out its virtual networks.

On Monday, as VMware formally announced NSX at VMworld, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks announced deals with the company to tie their software-defined networking (SDN) systems in with the new network hypervisor.

NSX is VMware's strongest attempt yet to take control over enterprise networks, which puts it on a collision course with Cisco Systems, a current partner, Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa said.

"They both have the same goal, which is to be the vendor that controls all infrastructure in the data center," Skorupa said. "You can't have two."

While VMware's relationship with Cisco is showing signs of strain, the partnerships it announced on Monday with HP and Juniper could be significant for its networking ambitions, he said.

VMware wants to do the same thing for networks that it has done for servers in many enterprises already. While virtualization allows workloads to move quickly from one physical server to another, the network changes required to deal with those changes typically are more complex and time-consuming. SDN is an array of new techniques to separate the control of networks from their underlying infrastructure that handles data packets.

NSX is a network hypervisor that creates virtual tunnels across an infrastructure to accommodate the mobility of virtual machines. It brings in technology VMware acquired with SDN startup Nicira last July. Though VMware already has some network virtualization capabilities with its VXLAN tunneling technology, NSX will bring significant enhancements, including better scaling and the ability to work with non-VMware hypervisors such as Microsoft HyperV and the open-source KVM, that may be used in some parts of a VMware shop, Skorupa said.

HP and VMware plan to federate NSX with HP's SDN controller, adding HP's more fine-grained control of network hardware to its capabilities. This will let them bring physical and virtual networks together to a degree that other vendors haven't been able to achieve, according to Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking.

The federation will offer benefits to users of all HP networking gear that includes the OpenFlow SDN protocol, which HP has been using since 2008. But it won't be available until the second half of next year, as HP and VMware still have work to do in developing the technology and bringing it to market, Mayer said. The partnership isn't exclusive, but work has been going on for about six months already and the companies each have contributed R&D resources to the project, she said.

So-called overlay solutions such as NSX can set up virtual tunnels across a network but don't automatically configure the switches and other gear that make up the network, Mayer said. Networks are constantly changing, with different configurations and new users contending for resources, so overlay systems can suffer from "blind spots," she said. That makes it harder to make the network deliver the level of service that an application demands.

HP's controller adds an "underlay" that has access to everything going on in the physical network. Working in conjunction with NSX, it will help to make tunnels work as they need to, Mayer said.

Also on Monday, Juniper announced an expansion of its partnership with VMware to let customers tie its infrastructure more tightly with VMware technologies. The work will include a VMware NSX Layer 2 Gateway function, for connectivity between virtualized and non-virtualized parts of a network.

The gateway function will be available for a variety of core, aggregation and access switches and edge routers in mid-2014. Other features will include hardware acceleration of VXLAN routing, also due in mid-2014, and closer integration with Juniper's virtual security technologies.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

View the original article here

HP, Juniper to help VMware take on networks with NSX

VMware's big splash in software-defined networking with its NSX network hypervisor comes with partnerships already in place to flesh out its virtual networks.

On Monday, as VMware formally announced NSX at VMworld, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks announced deals with the company to tie their software-defined networking (SDN) systems in with the new network hypervisor.

NSX is VMware's strongest attempt yet to take control over enterprise networks, which puts it on a collision course with Cisco Systems, a current partner, Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa said.

"They both have the same goal, which is to be the vendor that controls all infrastructure in the data center," Skorupa said. "You can't have two."

While VMware's relationship with Cisco is showing signs of strain, the partnerships it announced on Monday with HP and Juniper could be significant for its networking ambitions, he said.

VMware wants to do the same thing for networks that it has done for servers in many enterprises already. While virtualization allows workloads to move quickly from one physical server to another, the network changes required to deal with those changes typically are more complex and time-consuming. SDN is an array of new techniques to separate the control of networks from their underlying infrastructure that handles data packets.

NSX is a network hypervisor that creates virtual tunnels across an infrastructure to accommodate the mobility of virtual machines. It brings in technology VMware acquired with SDN startup Nicira last July. Though VMware already has some network virtualization capabilities with its VXLAN tunneling technology, NSX will bring significant enhancements, including better scaling and the ability to work with non-VMware hypervisors such as Microsoft HyperV and the open-source KVM, that may be used in some parts of a VMware shop, Skorupa said.

HP and VMware plan to federate NSX with HP's SDN controller, adding HP's more fine-grained control of network hardware to its capabilities. This will let them bring physical and virtual networks together to a degree that other vendors haven't been able to achieve, according to Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking.

The federation will offer benefits to users of all HP networking gear that includes the OpenFlow SDN protocol, which HP has been using since 2008. But it won't be available until the second half of next year, as HP and VMware still have work to do in developing the technology and bringing it to market, Mayer said. The partnership isn't exclusive, but work has been going on for about six months already and the companies each have contributed R&D resources to the project, she said.

So-called overlay solutions such as NSX can set up virtual tunnels across a network but don't automatically configure the switches and other gear that make up the network, Mayer said. Networks are constantly changing, with different configurations and new users contending for resources, so overlay systems can suffer from "blind spots," she said. That makes it harder to make the network deliver the level of service that an application demands.

HP's controller adds an "underlay" that has access to everything going on in the physical network. Working in conjunction with NSX, it will help to make tunnels work as they need to, Mayer said.

Also on Monday, Juniper announced an expansion of its partnership with VMware to let customers tie its infrastructure more tightly with VMware technologies. The work will include a VMware NSX Layer 2 Gateway function, for connectivity between virtualized and non-virtualized parts of a network. The gateway function will be available for a variety of core, aggregation and access switches and edge routers in mid-2014. Other features will include hardware acceleration of VXLAN routing, also due in mid-2014, and closer integration with Juniper's virtual security technologies.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com


View the original article here

VMware sets sites on network virtualization

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his opening keynote speech at the company’s annual VMworld conference to emphasize plans to virtualize networks with the aim of achieving the success in virtualizing servers.

VMware CEO Pat GelsingerJoab JacksonVMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, on stage at VMworld 2013

Networking “is the most important topic we will discuss today,” Gelsinger said to the audience of VMware administrators at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in a speech that was webcast. “We’re moving to a world where the network is just like the compute, where we will be able to spin up network services just like we can spin up [virtual machine] services.”

At the conference, the company launched NSX, its new hypervisor for network virtualization.

VMware was founded in 1998 to re-introduce the concept of software virtualization to the world of commodity x86 servers (IBM, among other companies, had long offered software virtualization for time-sharing mainframes).

By placing software, such as a server OS, on top of a hypervisor, which sits between the hardware and the hardware’s OS, IT shops could move these virtual machines more easily from physical server to physical server, which entailed costs savings by consolidating servers and increased agility of operations.

VMware in fiscal year 2012 generated around US$4.6 billion in revenue, and the industry has become saturated with virtual machines, both from VMware and competitors such as Microsoft. By 2010, the number of virtual machines had outnumbered the number of physical ones, Gelsinger said.

Now, the company is looking to solve the next bottleneck in IT operations, which it identifies as network provisioning.

“Increasingly, the barrier to flexibility is becoming the network. While we can spin up a VM in seconds, [network] configurations can take weeks or months in response,” Gelsinger said. NSX, which acts as a unifying layer to controlling network resources such as routers and switches, aims to solve this problem. “What ESX was to server virtualization, NSX is to network virtualization,” Gelsinger said.

To help explain NSX, Gelsinger brought on stage VMware chief architect for networking Martin Casado, who was one of the creators of OpenFlow, the protocol that spawned the idea of software defined networking (SDN), which is, in part, another name for network virtualization. Casado was also the chief technology officer of OpenFlow software provider Nicira, which VMware purchased in 2012, and which provides the basis for much of NSX.

Casado said, that when first thinking about OpenFlow, he wanted to “change the network architecture in a way so that you can have the properties in networks that you have in compute, when it comes to thing like operational simplicity, software evolve-ability, programmability.”

“Virtual networks look like physical networks, but they have the operational model of a VM—you can create them dynamically, configure them programmatically, snapshot them, and move them around,” Casado said. “This is really taking the virtualization operations model and bringing it to networking.”

NSX is part of a larger architecture that VMware has been developing over the past few years, one that it calls the software defined data center (SDDC). With SDDC, all of an organization’s infrastructure is virtualized, allowing data center administrators to easily automate operations.

During his keynote, Gelsinger also introduced a number of other technologies, in addition to NSX, that would provide additional elements to SDDC. The company has begun work on its own products to virtualize storage, for instance, with the beta introduction of the Virtual Storage Area Network (VSAN), which allows an administrator create a virtual SAN out of server hard drives.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Joab Jackson


View the original article here

VMware adds networking, storage to its virtual data center stack

At the kick-off of its annual VMworld user conference, being held this week in San Francisco, VMware will fill in more layers of its software stack for running its envisioned software defined data center (SDDC).

“IT should be able to provision a production environment in minutes,” said Peter Wei, a VMware senior director of product marketing. “People want things very quickly, so you have to abstract the [IT infrastructure]. Otherwise it is not possible.”

Over the past few years, VMware has been expanding its core focus from virtualizing servers to a much broader task of virtualizing all the operations in a data center, using an architecture it calls SDDC. With SDDC, all of an organization’s infrastructure is virtualized, allowing data center administrators, in theory, to easily automate operations.

This year’s VMworld conference will provide more details about the products and protocols that could make SDDC a reality.

“People got the concept of SDDC, so some of the focus this year is how do we make it real,” Wei said. He noted that internal company surveys showed that 77 percent of VMware customers are thinking about expanding their virtualization strategy to storage and networking. To this end, the company is introducing new virtualization technologies for networking and storage.

Perhaps the most buzz for this year’s show is around network virtualization. At the conference, VMware will introduce products for its Network Virtualization Platform, NSX. Borrowing technology from VMware’s 2012 acquisition of Nicira, NSX virtualizes the networking layers of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) communications model.

VMware NSXVMwareVMworld’s network virtualization model, NSX

With NSX, administrators could execute and automate a wide variety of network configuration tasks, including the provisioning of switches, routers, load balancers, and virtual private networks.

“NSX is about speed, speed, speed,” Wei said. “NSX has a control plane that basically abstracts the hardware.” This abstraction allows the administrator to script actions, such as defining a new virtual local area network (VLAN), without the need to understand the protocols of each vendor’s hardware.

VMware is also extending its virtualization expertise to the storage layer. This week, the company will also introduce a beta of its Virtual Storage Area Network (VSAN), which the company unveiled at last year’s VMworld under the name of Distributed Storage.

Using VSAN software, an administrator can pool direct attached storage (DAS) hard drives across multiple servers to make one virtual SAN.

On the computing side, VMware is updating its vSphere software for managing virtual machines (VMs) to handle larger workloads. Virtual disks can now be as large as 64TB each—twice the size allowed in the previous edition. Release 5.5 of vSphere also includes a new connector for deploying Hadoop jobs, or other big data-style deployments, which can involve invoking hundreds or even thousands of virtual servers.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Joab Jackson


View the original article here

Monday, 26 August 2013

HyTrust enforces two-person approval for VMware security

Following up on customer feedback from U.S. intelligence agencies, VMware security systems provider HyTrust has updated its virtual security appliance so actions taken by administrators can be delayed until external approval for that action is granted.

Such precautions are increasingly necessary because today's virtual environments pose "a concentration of risk," said Eric Chiu, president and cofounder of HyTrust.

"Servers, networking, storage used to be separate physical systems and they all had their separate configurations and experts to manage them. That has all been collapsed to a single software layer, with a single management console where any administrator can access any resource," Chiu said. "Ultimately, that creates security and compliance issues."

HyTrust announced the update to its flagship HyTrust Appliance at VMware's VMworld conference, being held this week in San Francisco. At this conference, VMware will detail its roadmap for the software defined data center (SDDC) architecture, in which servers, networking and storage can be virtualized and run in a coordinated fashion.

The HyTrust Appliance monitors and controls the employee use of virtual machines (VMs) that run on VMware's ESX and ESXi hypervisors, as well as oversees administrative use of the VMware vSphere management console. It monitors every administrative action taken on a VM, based on the roles that are assigned to each user. The appliance can block inappropriate actions, and log all user actions.

The software can be valuable in preventing the theft of a VM that contains confidential information, the willful destruction of an entire virtual data center, or the misconfiguring of a VM tenant.

The new version of the virtual appliance includes the ability to block any administrative action until approval from an outside party is granted.

One customer, a U.S. intelligence agency, had requested this feature, Chiu said. It mimics the procedures the U.S. Air Force called the two person concept, in which two managers would be required to complete an action (in the Air Force's case, to launch a nuclear strike).

With the HyTrust software, certain actions, such as deleting a VM, can be put on hold until it is approved by a second party, such as a manager or higher-ranking administrator.

HyTrust offered a limited version of this capability in prior versions, but this release offers a full range of capabilities around the process, Chiu said. It now meets the U.S. National Security Agency's requirements for implementing secondary approval. New features include a timer that could be put in place on any action, so a person can only execute an approved action within a certain period of time, such as a nightly maintenance window, Chiu said.

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 also includes a new monitoring mode, which allows an administrator to log how VMs are used before applying policies to their use. The appliance logs all activity, without enforcing any rules. The monitor-only mode can be useful for allowing an administrator to observe routine behavior, which would provide a baseline for building a set of rules to enforce proper use.

The new software can also send out e-mail alerts whenever some unwanted activity takes place."You can specify any kind of alert you care about," Chiu said. For instance, an administrator can set up an alert for whenever anyone deletes more than 10 VMs.

Typically, administrators rely on SIEM (Security Information Event Management) systems for getting such system alerts, but that software tends not to work well for virtualized environments, Chiu said.

"Trying to configure a SIEM to report on what is happening in a virtual environment is difficult. Our customers told us 'We want that to come from you'," Chiu said.

Drawing from a new security hardening guide for vSphere released by VMware, HyTrust Appliance now has three times as many server configuration security checks and remediation operations than it had before. It can also now work with Intel's Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT), so "you can determine whether your hardware platform is trusted, before you move your workload into that environment," Chiu said.

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 is now available. The HyTrust Appliance Enterprise Edition costs US$1,050 per CPU socket for each ESX or EXSi host, as well per $30,000 per appliance. The company also offers a downloadable community edition for no cost, which manages up to three hosts.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Joab Jackson


View the original article here

Thursday, 22 August 2013

Rackspace hosts VMware management with new dedicated server

The introduction of Rackspace’s hosted Dedicated VMware vCenter Server will allow IT staff to control their VMware environments from a data center run by the vendor.

As enterprises move IT infrastructure out of their own data centers, vendors are offering a growing list of alternatives that in Rackspace’s world includes hybrid clouds, which combine public and private clouds, and dedicated hosting. The latest addition to the latter offering is Dedicated VMware vCenter Server, which allows IT departments to retain full control with the tools they are used to without having to bother with the underlying infrastructure.

“Many of our customers have large VMware installations in-house today, and they have made significant investments in that and don’t want to throw it away,” said Andrew Wing, senior product manager at Rackspace.

For companies that want to stick with VMware, but don’t want to expand their data centers or have data centers at all, Rackspace already offers managed virtualization based on VMware vSphere 5.1. The addition of vCenter builds on that. From a single console, administrators can control virtual servers running in-house and in Rackspace’s data centers. It is also possible to mix vCenter servers that run in an enterprise’s own data center and ones that are hosted by Rackspace.

Until now, Rackspace’s hosted VMware platform used a shared vCenter model, which only offered limited management capabilities, according to Wing.

Rackspace will at first charge a yet undecided monthly fee per hypervisor that is managed by the hosted vCenter server and in the next phase move to a model where enterprises pay for what they use.

“It is just a question of getting our billing systems set up to make that a reality,” Wing said.

Today, enterprises are using Rackspace’s managed virtualization to run things like e-commerce platforms and Web content management systems. But Rackspace is hoping to attract more central IT functions, including ERP and CRM systems, according to Wing.


View the original article here