IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - Ready for Prime Time.

In my new position I'm quickly needing to come up to speed with the concept of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). It seems that the idea of delivering services via a customer facing service catalogue and an army of scripts and interfaces behind the scenes cranking out VMs without and admin in sight has gone mainstream. I guess the writing has been on the wall as as every major IT company has been quick to create some solution (mostly acquisitions) that provide "run book" automation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Book_Automation
). Some of the popular softwares doing this are " Microsoft-Opalis, Cisco-CIA(newScale+Tidal), HP-Opsware, IBM-Maximo, VMware-Orchestrator, and BMC-Realops.
Its going to be intresting watching businesses disseminate the collage of these products and the implications of each solution on the physical hardware the vendors try to bundle them with. Even more fun is watching businesses rework long standing IT processes to allign with the new way of doing IT. Next up: IaaS meets private cloud.

New VMware 5.0 is another game changer

I've just joined the new VMware 5.0 beta under NDA. Without talking about specific features I can say that this new version is definitely another game changer in the world of x86 server virtualization. At this point I've only read the white papers, but if the product does everything they are claiming then wow! My takeaway is that the current x86 virtualization market leader has found new innovative ways to mature their product in ways that the likes of Microsoft and Citrix can't even compete. With VMware Cloud Director becoming established and 5.0 set to be released at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, I would say VMware is poised to continue revolutionizing and leading the forefront of server virtualization and cloud computing. Good job VMware!