Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!”

Over a year ago I was given a 4GB iPod Nano as a gift, but I never really used it for more than listening to music. In fact, it eventually came to rest docked in a small “boom box” in my kids’ room. I lost interest in the Nano partly because my Blackberry (with the [...]

GestaltIT Tech Field Day is over, and the attendees and sponsors have indicated they were extremely pleased with the event. This is not to say that everything went well the whole time. In fact, if you followed along on the social media conversation then you caught some interesting tweets and replies during the brief moments [...]

So, we should all know what VCE stands for by now, right? Let’s say it together: “VMware, Cisco, EMC.” Using a bad analogy of Adam Lambert, a contestant on American Idol last season, the three companies “came out of the data center” today and publicly announced what we already knew; they’ve been working together to [...]

Day 2 in San Jose, CA at the Cisco UCS partner Bootcamp focused around using the UCS Manager (UCSM). We dove deeper into UCSM navigation and explored the various objects found in the web browser Java interface.

During the UCS Bootcamp in San Jose, Cisco made it clear that the value proposition of UCS is the Stateless Model. Unlike traditional server deployment use of the Service Profile (I covered the Opt-In Model earlier in this series), the Stateless Model allows the physical hardware to become generic and, since the operating system and [...]

As a class and in smaller groups, I’ve participated in several discussions trying to understand UCS connectivity and communication both internally and externally to the LAN and the SAN. This post summarizes several diagrams and drawings from whiteboards, my notes, and the bootcamp manual to explain what hardware communicates with which protocol, and how redundancy [...]

Day 1 of the Cisco UCS Bootcamp partner training was mainly an introduction to the hardware, but also established the concept of UCS Server Profiles and Statelessness. Converged Network Fabric and the Cisco’s CNA (Converged Network Adapters) models were covered, and the day ended with a lab exploring the UCSM (Unified Compute System Manager).
I promised [...]

Will Chrome OS become relevant in connecting to VDI solutions? Google’s immediate traction and ultimate success with an OS relies on it’s ability to install VDI clients – not as a Microsoft desktop replacement, whether physical or virtual.

The fact that Microsoft has embraced virtualization is an understatement. The fact that Microsoft has been slow to embrace other virtualization vendor’s capabilities to run Windows operating systems as guests is equally an understatement, but what if this wasn’t the case? That is, what if Microsoft abandoned the licensing strategy of anchoring Windows to physical [...]