Latest News from Scott Lowe

How to Rebuild a Home Network Integrating Ubuntu and Mac OS X

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:31:00 EST

One of my projects over the recent holiday was to rebuild the home network. Working on a home network is a different sort of beast than working on a network for a company. There are different challenges to be addressed. After doing a fair amount of research, I settled on the use of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (”Hardy Heron”) for the server build.

VMware Announces OS for All Aspects of the Virtual Datacenter

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:30:00 EDT

The way to really view VMware Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) is not as a “datacenter OS”, because it’s not intended to provide automation of non-virtual resources. Instead, look at VDC-OS as a framework. Within this framework are sets of services that can be extended or modified in very standardized ways (via APIs and SDKs) to provide different functionality for the applications running within that framework.

Two Views of Virtualization: Does It Mean the End of the OS?

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:47:00 EDT

Does virtualization mean the end of the OS? There appear to be basically two views on how virtualization will affect the future development of operating systems and computing environments in the personal computing space. One camp believes that virtualization functionality will be present within the operating system. The other camp believes it will be outside the operating system, perhaps in the form of a hypervisor or thin virtualization layer that resides 'below' the OS and governs access to hardware.

VMware Lab Manager 3.0 Released

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:15:00 EDT

Prior to this version, physical hosts running VMware ESX had to be configured for either VirtualCenter or Lab Manager, but not both. This also meant that Lab Manager couldn’t take advantage of VMotion, VMware DRS, VMware HA, etc., as all these functions were managed by or configured by VirtualCenter. With that barrier now removed, software development environments can now utilize these functions in conjunction with Lab Manager, and there is no longer a need to segregate VMware ESX hosts into separate farms based on whether they were being managed by Lab Manager or by VirtualCenter.

Virtualization Viewpoint: Security Challenges & Solutions

Mon, 19 May 2008 05:15:00 EDT

I am curious about something - how many organizations are using a single physical host with VMs across different security zones? See, this is something that I would never recommend, and to me it seems like physically segregating your security zones into different virtualization environments solves a fair number of the concerns about the 'dynamic data centers' created by VMotion, VMware DRS, and VMware HA. Or am I overlooking a critical aspect?

Virtualization - Fibre Channel to Software iSCSI Failover Failures

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:30:00 EDT

What I had hoped to be able to publish today would be an article describing how to configure and use ESX's software iSCSI initiator as a failover path for Fibre Channel, so that if the Fibre Channel fabric completely failed VM traffic would automatically failover to software iSCSI. I thought that this would be a great, low-cost way to add another layer of redundancy to your VMware ESX environment. Unfortunately, I can't make it work.