Back in the old days when data center performance was largely a factor of the type and quantity of hardware available, resource management was a fairly straightforward matter. Not to say it was easy, but improvements to server, storage or networking, as

Ubuntu and Dell have come up with a scheme to make it easier for Amazon EC2 customers to shift workloads to and from the cloud -- by shipping Dell servers preloaded with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud software, or UEC.

Budgeting is critical to virtualization success. To get the best cost savings and enjoy the benefits of virtualization, plan your budget for the hypervisor, hardware and more.

Cloud computing will kill capacity planning as CIOs know it and utilization risk will move to cloud providers, says CIO.com's Bernard Golden. Here's his take on what IT and airlines will soon have in common -- plus three strategies for avoiding trouble.

The UK-based Cannon Technologies makes racks and enclosures and has expanded into the modular data center market with the T4 ­Modular Data Center.

Don't just implement storage and leave it alone. It's critical to monitor storage performance with tools such as Iometer. Compare resource metrics and run storage reporting tests.

Storage management is tricky, especially in a virtual infrastructure. You can reap virtualization cost savings with thin provisioning, a reduced port count and deduplication.

If you know how your load-balancing service calculates the ins and outs of virtual server load balancing, you can tune clusters to better meet your organization's needs.

KVM virtualization is an immature platform, but major Linux vendors support it. This KVM virtualization tutorial covers the hypervisor's architecture and KVM management tools.

A blade enclosure can help unlock the advantages of blade servers for virtualization, especially when it comes to virtual server load balancing and live migration.