Month: July 2015

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What will happen: if Microsoft starts offering OneDrive as ‘unlimited cloud storage’ to every user for ‘free’?

The SkyDrive inventor Microsoft currently possesses the beauty of cloud with Windows Azure and OneDrive. Where Windows Azure deals with every part of cloud IaaS, PaaS & SaaS specializing for every class of companies and developers, in other words exclusively for business players and geeks. But OneDrive the new name of SkyDrive is exclusively for consumers or end users.


According to Fortunein November 2014 “Dropbox claims 300 million users as of May. Google Drive has 240 million users as of September. Microsoft says OneDrive has ‘more than’ 250 million users.”

Currently Microsoft offers 15GB of cloud storage with every Hotmail / Windows Live / Outlook accounts but any user can buy more storage up to 1 TB at $6.99 per month including Office 365.


Imagine if Microsoft start offering actually unlimited space on OneDrive for free of cost with each Outlook / Hotmail / Windows Live account. Then world will surely start migrating only to OneDrive whether it is business or personal use. There are so many features and services such as file syncing, mobility, creating and editing documents, playing music and videos etc. that matter a lot to the user with file storage. With this Microsoft is already dealing very positively as they are providing interoperable apps across devices and Office Web Apps are really awesome to create and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets on-the-go. So, people will start backing-up their music, videos and entertainment files on OneDrive only. Even though Microsoft can implement OneDrive as an OS for future PCs and mobile / tablet devices, in which there will be no HDD or SSD you just log in and start working straight away in the cloud mode. Then imagine future will have no piracy, increased security, no bothering of data loss in case of device theft or stealing or damage.
For business also there will be a massive return on investment as they won’t be buying heavy licenses for media apps, office productivity suite and sharing among the team will be much easier then every before. Accounting will be just a matter of few clicks. That can totally convert the face of every business unit with a great transformation. So, I can’t wait to see this future where working and entertainment will be merged together for everyone.

But does this mean massive Gmail, Amazon Cloud Drive & DropBox users will migrate to Outlook and OneDrive? There is no straight answer in regard to it. But surely that can give a big diversion among all the cloud providers. Cloud Vendors will also go for OneDrive only to provide corporates the 0% downtime cloud storage.
Well, Microsoft already claims 400 Million active users / accounts, but does this actually means that there are currently 400 Million active OneDrive users too? Well, that can be an assumption. But for sure Microsoft is one of the leading consumer based cloud storage provider and this kind of offering can change the whole cloud game. Competition will be then depends only on the basis features, services and fast performance.

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Amazon Cloud Drive mobile apps are out now

Amazon is scattering themselves to challenge Microsoft, Google, DropBox and other cloud providers. Recently, Amazon launched Cloud Drive mobile apps for iOS and Android(not announcement for Windows Phone as of now). Microsoft OneDrive, GoogleDrive and DropBox are already competing in Mobile Application arena. But, with this new competitor the show will be more interesting now.

File Preview – Android
File Browser – iOS



















In this new application users can view and share files & folders, read & preview documents or PDFs and photos, play music and videos. Even though Amazon has merged their music& photospecific apps in this one to give users an absolute solution in a single pane.

Amazon Cloud Drive is quite a new player but the offerings form Amazon can bag-in the customers from other giants. Amazon Cloud Drive offers $60 (USD) per year for unlimited cloud storage, which is the cheapest unlimited storage deal. Amazon also offers $12 (USD) per year plan for unlimited photo storage and 5 GB for the rest of the files.



Now the competition to grab users will increase gradually with mobile application. But features and services wise Amazon is still not competitive. For instance, still today there is no proper file syncing client/app for Cloud Drive. As users upload their files manually via a web based drag-n-drop interface, which is a non-starter feature. Usually users want to create, upload and share anytime, anywhere.


These new mobile apps are also limited as there is no editing, no new upload and no way to move files. Users can still upload and sync photos from their Amazon photo-specific app, but edit, create and sync document is the most widely used feature for other competitors which is still no possible with mobile or tablets now for Amazon.
So with new updates for the Amazon Cloud Drive app there are possibility to introduce editing, syncing and creating of documents, spreadsheets and other productivity files. But Cloud Drive app can be a long lasting solider for Amazon as mobility gives flexibility to take on thing just under your thumb.
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With virtualization, software licensing is really complicated

Many a times licensing of software are overlooked in virtualization infrastructure. Virtualization actually complicate the licensing, accordingly CIOs and System Administrators should have some strategy or exercise to make sure that the organization has redeem the correct software licensing.

There are varieties of issues that can make licensing difficult in virtualized environment. One of the most common licensing issues is buying or purchasing several different license types in order to remain compliant. Few of the required license types are:
  • Hypervisor licenses, 
  • Management Server licenses, 
  • Managed server licenses, 
  • Guest OS Server licenses, 
  • Guest OS Client licenses, 
  • Application licenses, 
  • Application client licenses, etc.

A complicated licensing issue occurs when a Guest OS VM created on a host and immediately migrated to another host. In the same ways, new VMs can be created on a whim by anyone who has permissions. So, how CIOs and System Admins can keep up with the licensing requirements?

All the software vendors have their own unique way of licensing requirements. So it is CIO’s duty to make sure that you adhere to requirements of the software rather than following the set of guidelines. There are a few general strategies too that usually work.


Always pay attention socket-specific license requirements. It is common now that maximum of the hypervisor vendors base their licensing requirements as per-physical socket for hypervisor and management server.

If an Operating System vendor requires licensing for every user who accesses the server, that requirement doesn’t usually go away just because the server is running on virtual hardware. Whereas, vendors provide choices to purchase the client access licensing on either a per-user or per-device basis. Previously, companies use to purchase licensing on per-device basis, as that was a little less expensive. But today, with every user using multiple devices having user based licensing is a cost effective option.

If VMs are running free open source OS, otherwise the Guest OS on your VM must be licensed. Guest OS licensing policies vary widely so it is important to check with the vendor to examine the specific requirements.

Windows Server 2012 R2 licensing applies only to the host not on the VM. This host-level license applies to the VMs running on the host. For example: if an organization is running Windows Server 2012 R2 on VMware. Company obviously licenses the VMware Hypervisor, but company also has to purchase Windows Server License. This license will apply to the Windows VMs running on the VMware server. If a VM is migrated to a different VMware server, then the destination Windows Server licensed will apply to the VM. In other words, Windows Server VMs do not take their licensing with them while migrating from one host to another.

Virtualization management servers typically require licenses for each server that is being managed. For example if a company plan to use Microsoft System Center VMM (Virtual Machine Manager), then company will need a licenses for each host server they are planning to manage.

Mostly licensing is complicated in virtualized environments. CIOs should review the licensing periodically and make sure to check the requirements for library servers to ensure if there are any licenses required for software installed within an image that is used to create new VMs.

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How to identify capacity bottlenecks in Virtualization environment

Virtualization capacity management is an activity for IT Admins that helps right-size, optimize & plan future resources in your virtual environment. Shortage of any resource can affect the VM performance & creates bottlenecks too.

Admins always recieve the demand for creating & adding new VMs for variety of applications & different users. So, admins have to fight with capacity or resource limitations of the IT infrastructure. Capacity planning plays a big role to over come this situation because admins always want to know:

  • How many more VMs they can add to the physical host? 
  • How much more VM workload can this current host support? 
  • How much memory is free in virtual environment? 
  • How much time taken by CPU to process a request?
In other words, they want to predict when will they run out resources like CPU, memory, disk i/o etc. which leads to capacity bottlenecks. Reasons for these bottlenecks are:
  • VM Sprawl, 
  • Enabling high-availability without accounting for failover, 
  • Changes in workload, 
  • Utilization growth in current resources, 
  • Removing hosts from cluster, 
  • VM reservation increases