It continues to seem like VMware is set on being their own worst enemy in the battle to dominate the enterprise virtualization market. After firing their CEO, dropping revenue expectations, and doing both just as Microsoft stepped back into the VM game with the release of Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008, it seemed like the company was intent on losing their lead all by themselves, or at least leveling out the playing field for their competition.

Yesterday, it developed that a piece of testing code was left in the company's ESX 3.5 Update 2 patch which, like its own private Y2K bug, would shut down all virtual machines on August 12, 2008. Like Y2K, the first recommended workaround provided was to set the clock back to an earlier date. And just like Y2K, the suggestion was ridiculous, likely to break all sorts of time critical services and flat out shut off Kerberos secured networks.

Fortunately, the Aussies, just the other side of the International dateline, got hit with the problem first and gave VMware almost 24 hours in which to resolve the issue before it impacted the bulk of their US customer base. A patch is out, and disaster averted. Still, the entire episode is considerably more disconcerting than bugs in other sorts of software. Virtualization, after all, is very much about putting all of ones eggs in one basket, and if the basket has been woven by stoned hippies who have missed a few loops, then enterprises are going to start thinking twice about something which is an already disconcerting concept.

We've seen the headlines before, most recently in the Russia/Estonia dispute which never escalated to armed conflict, but they're coming out again in the fighting between Russia and Georgia over the disputed South Ossetia region.

Most people I know tend to roll their eyes at these reports and consider them fantastic and overblown, a case of doomsayers and reporters looking for something shocking cooking up a whole lot of something out of almost nothing. And it's true, the extent to which any of the articles covering the conflict from the electronic angle can exaggerate is pretty much limited to denial of service attacks and website defacements, which are nothing that your average day on the Internet doesn't include plenty of examples of as it is.

But information warfare (here is a balanced analysis of this in the current conflict by the Voice of America) has always been a component of armed conflict, and perhaps we should consider that what we are seeing, while it doesn't rise to the level of your average Hollywood techno-thriller, is in fact the face of cyberwar.

Why should your average CIO care about this? Precisely because it isn't a Hollywood thriller. A nation's susceptibility to website compromise and DDOS attacks doesn't lie within the government. When's the last time you paid your credit card bill, applied for a loan, or bought a new car from a .gov site? To the extent that the nation's business is conducted on the Internet, it's done on commercial websites, run by... well, by you.

While most of the attacks coming out of Russia seem to have been against predictable and juvenile targets like the Georgian president's website, a more worrisome trend has developed consisting of attacks against Georgian media outlets. This is consistent with the concept of information warfare; what is disturbing is that, unlike drawing a Hitler mustache on the president's picture, it also may be effective. Unlike Hollywood, the bad guys can't launch nuclear missiles from a compromised server. But they can limit, distort, or deny access to information. And information is the lifeblood of the modern economy.

In other words, while it may not be glamorous, cyber-warfare may be near, and it may be effective... and it may be waged on your enterprise networks, should such a conflict come to pass between your country and another entity.

Virtual Iron announced the release yesterday of version 4.4 of its eponymous software package with a new feature called LivePower which aims to reduce power consumption in large virtual server farms with variable demand.

You may not have heard of Virtual Iron before in the virtualization market, crowded as it is with players like VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix. VI entered the market in late 2006 and according to Tim Walsh, director of corporate marketing, the company has intentionally focused on the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) market, aiming to provide a "comparable alternative to VMWare." With, according to VI, 80% of VMWare's features at 30% of the price, the company has eked out over 2000 deployments in that segment. It's difficult to make a feature to feature comparison, considering all the various options and modules VMWare can provide, but that in itself lends some advantage to Virtual Iron in the SME environment: one-stop shopping means less research and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Similar to VMWare's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMotion features in VMWare Infrastructure, Virtual Iron's LivePower module monitors CPU utilization by Virtual Machine (VM) instances and has the ability to dynamically allocate VMs across physical hardware to reduce power utilization when demand is low, by consolidating VMs on servers, or to ramp up additional servers and spread VMs across them as demand increases. The rules-based policy fits in with VI's existing policy schemes and works with Intel's out-of-band Node Manager power management policy engine.

Although LivePower may prove useful to SMEs looking to manage their power consumption (and is anyone not, with spiking energy prices?) I'm not sure the technology is quite the load-balancing boon that it could be if it measured performance based on more than simply CPU utilization. Particularly in the SME, which is less likely to have consolidated, SAN-based storage systems, server disk I/O is more commonly a performance obstacle than processor clock cycles (depending on the applications, of course).

Nonetheless, Virtual Iron are comfortable in their niche and seem confident they are delivering the feature set their target audience is looking for. Asked if VMWare's recent move to offer ESXi for free or Microsoft's Hyper-V release were threats of any sort, Walsh emphatically denied it. Mentioning Microsoft's upcoming $300 million Hyper-V marketing campaign, Walsh indicated that Virtual Iron was "looking forward to it," although Microsoft might ultimately be the most likely competitor for VI among SMEs if they ever manage to put together a rival management platform. Until then, VI is well positioned to hold the middle ground in the virtualization wars.

Every silver lining's got a touch of grey - The Grateful Dead

Yesterday's Gmail outage, affecting both individual and Apps corporate customers, has the blogosphere all abuzz yet again over the unreliability of cloud computing. This coming only weeks after Amazon's latest Simple Storage Service (S3) outage, many are linking the two and drawning some grand conclusions about cloud computing as a whole. You can't trust it yet! You need off-line synchronization! Better make a back-up plan, this isn't ready for prime-time yet! It's fortunate that S3 didn't go out at the same time; people wouldn't have had Twitter available to complain to one another about Gmail.

All these histrionics are typical reactions to any failure, but they all themselves fail to look at the real issue and ask the most pertinent question: What solution can provide the service in question at the highest availability for the lowest cost?

Forbes has published a rather dense (and by dense, I mean packed with information, rather than mentally deficient) article by Kenneth Brill examining the explosion in data center construction and the associated cost increases from electrical consumption and cooling requirements.

The increase in energy consumption, despite the recent advances in "green" technologies, aren't exactly news, nor is the fact that many IT departments launch these initiatives with a less than complete understanding of total end-to-end costs for construction and operation. Brill does a good job of examining the reasons behind these disconnects; on the other hand, it's not clear to me why I'm reading this article today rather than a few years ago, before the terrain shifted beneath the corporate data processing world.

It isn't clear from the article whether the data center construction boom Brill cites is being driven primarily by enterprises building out their internal operations capacity, or by the ground swell in new, consolidated cloud computing service providers. If the former, then Brill's warnings and recommendations make a great deal of sense... but one would expect to see some discussion, at least, of the trend toward outsourcing services, whether it be overblown in his perspective or under-utilized. If the latter, then the arguments around efficiency, hidden costs, and the like seem to be overplayed... after all, the entire intent is to increase utilization and efficiency by consolidating the capacity for many businesses into a unified operation which can be run closer to capacity, and the cost factors are part of the cloud provider's business model, not an afterthought likely to be disregarded by an IT department with other irons in the fire.

I am genuinely curious, however, what the number breakdown looks like between individual enterprise data center projects and cloud provider driven projects. I suspect that much of the recent growth (certainly all of the individual projects which I am aware of) has been driven by businesses ramping up to provide services to other businesses, and that seems to me to require a different sort of contemplation altogether, something accounting for the difficulties in predicting total utilization, technical problems balancing such uneven loads, and the possible effects of so much capacity coming available on the broader market in such short order. But I'm no economist nor a particularly deep thinker, so you'll have to hope someone who is picks up on the idea and writes such an article... let me know if you see one.

Speaking of Enterprise 2.0, it seems that the CIA is well on board with the trend. I don't know if the director filled out the recent McKinsey survey or not. But the organization seems to be ahead of the pack when it comes to wiki implementations

The intelligence community reportedly suffered a considerable shake-up in the wake of 9/11 and the tools and techniques for information sharing within the various agencies were among the factors identified by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks as contributing to the failure to prevent the attacks. Accordingly, organizational changes were made to reduce the difficulty of secure information sharing. That was difficult enough to accomplish in the face of determined opposition from the old guard operators, but the technical changes are even longer in coming.

A series of articles in CIO magazine has been chronicling the agency's progression in technology adoption, providing an unusually candid look behind the scenes. One of the more interesting systems they have described is the "Intellipedia," a wiki product accessible to 40,000 users in the intelligence community which serves all the traditional purposes of a wiki, only instead of contributing and reviewing articles about Paris Hilton, staffers presumably surf the net gleaning details about Osama Bin Laden's latest styles and trends.

One advantage the CIA has over commercial enterprise in the adoption of such new technology is the relative youth of its workforce: half the agency's staff are new, spurred in by the combined impetus of 9/11 and a renewed focus on intelligence funding. While convincing existing staff to adopt newfangled widgets like wikis can be a chore, new staff coming in can be trained on just about anything-and younger users are more comfortable with Web 2.0 concepts and tools.

Unfortunately, it's even more difficult to determine the results of such projects in the classified world than in the enterprise... leaks don't just get you fired, but can result in jail time. But according to the CIO, Al Tarasiuk, things are working well, and the tech transition is helping keep us safer.