VMware co-founder Ed Bugnion, now at Cisco, is making sure the network adapts to the age of virtualization.

By Eric Gray

Most enterprise virtualization deployments make use of a robust shared storage infrastructure.  A high-performance SAN allows multiple hypervisors to access virtual machine disks and is the foundation for amazing virtualization benefits such as VMware vMotion and HA.  There are other benefits, too.

Mitel has integrated its telephony products with VMware to offer virtualised voice.

By Scott Lowe

VMware, Cisco, and EMC made their official announcement of the VCE Coalition and the joint venture Acadia this morning. You can read one of the press releases here via MarketWire.

Acadia is interesting, but it really isn’t the meat of the announcement, in my opinion. The real substance of the matter is the nature of the coalition. There are many interesting questions/thoughts circling in my head right at the moment [..]

vSphere 4.0 introduces a new para-virtualized network device - VMXNET3.  We recently published a paper demonstrating its performance characteristics, compared to that of enhanced VMXNET2 (the previous generation of high performance virtual network device from VMware).Some highlights of this paper are:(1) Throughput gains of up to 92% for 10G TCP/IPv4 Rx workloads with large socket buffer, which greatly improves bulk data transfer performance in a data center environment.

As security controls are virtualized (e.g. firewalls, IPS, web application firewalls and so on), one of the more significant concerns is performance and throughput. II remember a demonstration about a year ago where an IPS running in a VM virtual appliance easily consumed 2 out of 8 cores in a multicore system. A 25% overhead for security controls didn’t make sense. That was then. Hardware advances continue. Within the next year, 64 core systems will be common. Now 2 out of 64 cores is a different story. 3% overhead? That I’ll take.

VMWare's VMsafe program is bringing more security options to the world of server virtualization.

By Greg Ness (Infoblox)

Virtualization and cloud computing have generated plenty of buzz because of their potential to reshape the economics of information and technology.  Yet most of that potential is still “cooped up” in the VLAN, driving impressive gains in server management, yet within strict confines.

There are a number of gotchas that can occur if you don't set up vShield Zones correctly, but you can avoid them with these pointers.