Demos, like appearances, can be deceiving. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, one of the media hits was OnLive Desktop, a service that provisions a Windows 7 desktop environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010 to the iPad over an Internet connection.

For many VMware administrators, having VMware certification is a badge of honor within the virtualization community. Being a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) says a lot about an individual's dedication to the technology and level of expertise. And as the demand for IT professionals with data center virtualization skills increases, it is essential to be able to distinguish yourself in the job market.

The world of hypervisors is complicated by the fact that there are proprietary and open source tools, each with different strengths and weaknesses.

One expert says the difference between the two is that innovation is coming out of the open source products at a quicker pace. But another expert doesn't quite believe that first to market is the key to success. He says this market is too important to be downloading open source bits frequently. With that dilemma, enterprises instead turn to commercially supported products.

In 2006, Apple's Intel-based Macs opened the door to running Windows via desktop virtualization; suddenly users could have their personal Macs and business PCs in one box. It's a big reason, I believe, that Mac market share has continued to grow faster than overall PC market share for the last five years. The shift to Intel and the accompanying ability to run Windows gave people the security blanket they needed to make the switch.

VMTurbo has upgraded its operations management suite to support the three major virtual environments and to improve its capacity-planning tool.

With the new 3.0 version of Operations Manager, the software can now manage Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware's vSphere individually or in multi-hypervisor deployments, the company says. This version adds XenServer to its capabilities.

I admit it: I never liked Microsoft's System Center server management suite. If you are one of my long-time readers, you know I mention it only sporadically, and even then without enthusiasm. It's felt like a patch job of unrelated products. But the forthcoming System Center 2012 -- now available in the form of a release candidate -- might just change my mind.

Microsoft may try to revive support for Hyper-V in OpenStack as the community considers removing the code -- which one OpenStack developer called broken and unmaintained -- from the stack.

"Microsoft is committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack," Microsoft said in a statement.

VMware's latest move to help accelerate private cloud adoption came last week with the official announcement of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0.

The skirmish between VMware and Microsoft for greater control over the virtualization and cloud markets is only going to get bigger and more intense in 2012.

Those of us with a bit of institutional memory recall a brash upstart named Network Appliance that burst onto the storage scene to challenge EMC -- itself once a brash newcomer -- and other storage royalty like IBM. But that was 20 years ago, as difficult as that seems to believe, and the company, now named NetApp, is $5 billion-plus storage leader in its own right.

To gain insight on the months ahead as they relate to IT attacks, malware, cloud security, and the impact of virtualization on security, we recently chatted with Simon Crosby, former CTO of Citrix Systems' data center and cloud business.

Red Hat has released the third version of its RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) software package, which includes improvements that would make it suitable for larger deployments, and a new console for self-provisioning.

RHEV 3.0 represents a significant step forward for the readiness of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) within the enterprise, and should be considered as a viable virtualization alternative to more widely used products from companies such as VMware and Microsoft, noted IDC cloud and virtualization analyst Gary Chen.

Virtual Desktop storage provider Altantis Computing has announced a new product that runs nonpersistent virtual desktop environments using only server memory.

Companies looking for more agile data centers are increasingly turning to public (external) or private (internal) clouds with virtualized servers, storage and networks. Getting the lowest cost and the best speed and flexibility from those systems requires assessing everything from performance to control and interoperability. And the larger your organization is, the more planning it takes to create an "enterprise grade" cloud that meets your performance, security and compliance needs.

Last week Google surprised many in the virtualization world by naming Diane Greene to its board of directors, filling the 10th seat vacated more than two years ago when Arthur Levinson resigned. In addition to the new board member position, Greene will serve on Google's audit committee.

Salesforce.com has made a series of changes to its support services that include the removal of certain features from the Standard tier, but which the company says overall will provide a better experience for customers.

The NoSQL movement has spawned a slew of alternative data stores, all of which attempt to fill voids left by traditional relational database implementations. But while it's easy to fit the various relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and so on) under a single categorical umbrella, the NoSQL world is much more diverse, and the NoSQL label is too general.

VMware has introduced a new software platform that makes it easier for service providers to wholesale their cloud-services infrastructure to other providers.

Red Hat has announced the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which can take advantage of Amazon's cloud while at the same time offering excellent performance, the company said on Tuesday.

"Essentially what we are providing is network-attached storage in the cloud," said Tom Trainer, storage product marketing manager at Red Hat.

Microsoft has entered into a broad partnership with customer-service software provider 24/7 that the companies expect will yield a superior cloud-based platform that large companies can use to better address their customers' needs.

As part of the deal, 24/7 will get access to Microsoft's TellMe speech-recognition and interactive self-service software, which will get integrated into 24/7's Predictive Experience products, such as Px Online for Web self-service customer attention, the Px Speech voice-based customer service tool and Px Mobile for mobile-device-based support.

Hewlett-Packard's LoadRunner performance validation software will become available on a hosted basis through HP partners, the company announced Tuesday.

LoadRunner software emulates hundreds or thousands of concurrent users so that businesses can test how their application will behave under heavy loads. It identifies where bottlenecks are happening so that users can correct problems that may be impacting application performance.

Amazon Web Services has cut the cost of storing data using its Simple Storage Service (S3) -- saving users with 50 TB stored on the service around 12 percent on their monthly bill, the company said on Monday.

We've all seen the PowerPoint presentations that show the business advantages of cloud computing: the ability to avoid hardware and software purchases (opex vs. capex), speed to deployment, elasticity, and so on. However, unless you're prepared to provide real numbers that define real value, that's so much fluff to those in the executive suite.

As I develop these business cases for enterprises, I've found some commonality or emerging patterns to consider. Here are my top three secrets to developing your cloud computing business case and getting it accepted.

Demos, like appearances, can be deceiving. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, one of the media hits was OnLive Desktop, a service that provisions a Windows 7 desktop environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010 to the iPad over an Internet connection.

Around this time last year, the cloud computing contract signings were coming fast and furious -- not just for commodity work like IT management or email, but for software and infrastructure closer to the core of corporate value. Not long after that, the calls started to come in to Greg Bell, the Americas service leader for information protection at KPMG.

Cloudyn is launching a hosted service on Monday that aims to monitor a company's cloud usage and recommend ways to optimize that usage in order to cut costs.

The service is available initially for Amazon Web Services customers, and Cloudyn plans to add support for Rackspace in the second quarter, and other providers after that. The service will be free until May 1, after which customers will have to pay for the optimization recommendations. Anyone can sign up for the service now.

Dell's formation of a new software group, which was announced Thursday, could be the forerunner to a string of acquisitions by the vendor, with some observers predicting a focus on systems management and cloud services provisioning.

That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise.

Finance and IT professionals, facing the need for greater computing power for everything from operational management to hedge accounting are understandably tempted by SaaS, given the cloud's relatively low startup costs and the fact they may lack the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions.

In anticipation of offering its open-source content management software as a service, Alfresco has upgraded its namesake product to work with multiple clients and to interact with a wider range of form factors, the company announced Thursday.

"Alfresco Enterprise 4.0 is the foundational element in our cloud strategy," said Todd Barr, Alfresco chief marketing officer. The company is preparing to offer the CMS (content management software) as SaaS (software as a service) by April or May this year.

Google Docs users can now get offline access to documents on their Android-based smartphones and tablets, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The upgraded app makes offline access possible for Google documents, presentations, spreadsheets, uploaded images, and file formats such as pdf, doc, xls, and ppt, according to Google.