Virtual Center can support 200 hosts and 2,000 VMs. VMware's new Lifecycle Manager offers hope to automate and track those thousands of containers.

I wrote on Sun's VDI upgrade earlier this month. Charlie Babcock interviewed Jeff Harvey from Cincinnati Bell about that company's VDI deployment...

It’s been widely reported today that the source of the recent massive credit card theft at the Hannaford and SweetBay grocery chains was a pervasively installed piece of malware.

The finding was revealed in a letter from Hannaford general counsel Emily Dickinson to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Gov. Deval Patrick's Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation.

Should we call this stage two of adoption for virtualization? Am I jumping too soon with my "1x1 makes sense" pitch?

One of the traditions of BrainShare is the Friday keynote, where Novell shows off some of the things that are in the works. This year was no exception (video here). Many of the demos were results of Novell's "hack week," where people were encouraged to contribute to any open source project, or even start a new one.

VMware's Bangalore engineering office is set to grow to 1,000+ in two years. Add in 200 or so other sales and support employees, 160 channel partners, university partnerships, and many customers across India to see the big picture.

Ubuntu's JeOS (say 'juice' if you must) weighs in at 151 MB. Want to roll your own VMware miniappliance? JeOS is a pretty good place to start.

Every P2V business case is about cost savings, right? You know the pitch; consolidation will set you (and your budget) free. PR firms are even touting virtualization as the saving grace for budget woes in the coming Dark Age, er, recession. What if I told you that IT pros up and down the food chain are looking at VM'ing to resolve server-build hassles and a list of other operational woes? What if I said those same folks are expecting costs to be neutral, or higher for P2V, but their business case is still good...

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Bluesocket regarding its forthcoming 802.11n Draft 2.0 access point. Although announced back in December 2007, the actual release date of its BSAP-1800 will be sometime in April 2008 and will be submitted to the Wi-Fi Alliance for 802.11n Draft 2.0 certification. This is actually the second access point Bluesocket has produced that incorporates MIMO technology, as its previous generation BSAP-1700 used MIMO technology to deliver increased performance to 802.11a/b/g clients.

NAC pioneer Lockdown Networks bit the dust, as pioneers often do. It shut its doors unceremoniously at 1 p.m. yesterday and put up a notice on its Web site that it would contact customers. My sources at Lockdown report all the internal servers are shut down so customers can't get software updates, patch definitions, etc.

Lockdown Networks has closed its doors and is looking for someone to buy it's IP. Is this just the beginning of the NAC market consolidation, or an isolated event?

Yesterday I read two articles that suggested Web 2.0 growth is stunted, if not actually in danger of stopping altogether.

Part of the rationale for Web services has always been that they can tunnel through firewalls, linking networks that are otherwise securely separated. Virtualization puts up similar barriers between applications within a single machine, so will crossing them require similar technology?

Who else wants Mike's job? He gets to hang out at Intel predicting the future of computing.

What happens when you take OES Linux clustering and add XEN virtualization to the mix? The combination can be quite powerful when creating high availability for services. In the traditional cluster, services are made highly available. Should it fail on one node, the cluster starts it up on another node. Or if a server needs to have maintenance done on it, the cluster services are moved to other nodes. Moving the clustered service generally means shutting it down on one node, and starting it up on another. But what if the service was an XEN virtualized OS? Instead of having to shut down a service, XEN can be told to live-migrate the virtualized OS over to a new node -- resulting in virtually no noticeable outage to any connected clients.

Expected later this year, Novell will release an update to the Open Enterprise Server 2 product. Targeted for a 4Q release with a public beta this summer, Novell plans to add support for 64-bit eDirectory, improved migration tools, and Domain Services for Windows -- a feature that was originally slated for the OES2 release, but was pulled for quality reasons.

The latest exposure of more than 4 million credit and debit card numbers may strain the validity and stability of the credit card industry's controversial security rules.

Gord Boyce, president of ForeScout Technologies, has an interesting article about using network access control to change behavior up on Enterprise Networks & Servers, asking Are Your Users Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? I find the idea intriguing because using NAC to lock down a network is onerous.

Sun's rapid move to v2.0 brings a new Virtual Desktop Connector hoping to serve as a "universal translator" for many-to-any desktop delivery.

In the Monday BrainShare keynote (the video of the keynote is here) Novell talked about its new strategic plan, under the code name Fassa. Dr. Jeff Jaffe talked about how Novell wants to drive innovation in enterprise computing, helping companies become "agile" and able to adapt to today's ever-changing business needs. Novell won't be able to execute on this vision without help from the open source community and its partners.

BMC is taking a second shot at server configuration management with the purchase of BladeLogic for $800 million. If you recall, BMC purchased Marimba in 2004, but the market never really embraced the technology. This recent move is a counterpunch to HP's acquisition of Opsware last year. BladeLogic frequently competed against Opsware in the server configuration management and data center automation market.

Novell's BrainShare is just days away. A time when the Novell faithful flock to Salt Lake City to see what Novell has been up to in the past year -- and to see what future promises are made. This year the focus will again be on Linux from the desktop to the enterprise data center. Virtualization, identity management, and security also are slated as big topics -- based on the number of class sessions listed in their session catalog.

I spoke with Kidaro CEO Kevin Brown for about 90 seconds yesterday afternoon; the conversation was cut short due to an emergency conflict on my end. Kevin and I hope to reconnect via phone next week while he is in Israel. I suspect he and his will be a bit busy for the foreseeable future, what with that recent Microsoft acquisition...

I've been digging into I/O virtualization lately and ended up speaking with some folks who want to virtualize everything. Everything. Data I/O. Network. Entire physical servers. Liquid Computing is hoping to be the next major disruption in the force.

I've spent the better part of the last week reconfiguring gear in the virtualization test lab, getting reacquainted with machine specs and idiosyncrasies. We have a variety of servers connected to a Dell, nee EqualLogic, iSCSI SAN. Half of our HP servers and one Xserve also have 2 Gb Fibre Channel HBAs, unused since we lost our FC SAN. Remember when those 2 Gb FC connections seemed zippy? 4 Gb HBAs have been on the market for a couple years, and a number of recent 8 Gb FC solutions are being touted as a remedy for I/O constraints in virtualized environments.

We have spent a great deal of time on production application performance management (APM), but there is an entire market that focuses on pre-production performance testing. Our testing focused on production support teams, not development.

Novell's Richard Whitehead and I sat down to a lively discussion on the trials and tribulations of VM management. Whitehead was good enough to remind me of Novell's open source chops on SUSE and Xen...

To understand it as Cisco tells the story, you might presume that its "Enhanced Power over Ethernet" was designed on the drawing boards many moons ago. For those not familiar with "Enhanced PoE," it's Cisco's nomenclature for the ability of some of its switches to provide power beyond the IEEE 803.3af standard of 15.4 W.

At first blush it would seem as though the enterprise Wi-Fi vendor community has become a trend-follower and gone green, focused on saving power at every turn. But the potential power demands of dual-radio 802.11n Draft 2.0 access points have sent engineers back to the drawing board. The current PoE (Power over Ethernet) standard, IEEE 803.af, only delivers 12.95 W at the end of a 100-meter Cat5E cable, but without optimization, power consumption can easily be in the upper teens.

Much like America, Europe is faced with a bit of a crisis -- interest in IT-related jobs is waning among students. Computer and engineering majors are dwindling, placing the future of IT in jeopardy on both sides of the pond. However, the European Union's Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding has a solution: Mars -- I mean -- IT needs women!

I missed Intel's 10GbE and IOV news. Read on for why you shouldn't make the same mistake.

When Cisco and Juniper first said they were opening their router OSes, I thought that they'd be about as open as the iPhone. With Cisco's launch of IOS XE, I realize I was wrong: The iPhone is much more open.

Way on the other side of our little blue planet, folks in New Zealand are reeling from the recent arrest of 18-year old Owen Thorn Walker, who masterminded a group of programmers that infected more than a million computers around the world.

So you liked trekking to Cannes for VMworld? Pony up for autumn in the U.K. to attend the vendor-independent "Virtualization Congress."

VMworld Europe offered a bunch o' news. I/O is big. IOV is getting bigger. VMware and others came out strong on systems management and security tools. I guess they have been listening to their customers.