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Archive for the ‘cloud computing’ Category

What a week in Las Vegas at VMware Partner Exchange 2010! For all those that complained just 4 months ago that VMworld 2009 was disappointing because the announcements were few and far between, all I can say is, based on what I watched, experienced, and touched this week at PEX 2010, VMware should grab your attention again soon! Unfortunately, so much of what was discussed falls under the VMware Partner NDA that I’ll have to ask VM /ETC readers to wait for the technology to become public. We’ll have plenty to discuss when it does.

For now I’ll quickly wrap up my week and drop some hints about VMware’s future direction based on my understanding about what I saw during the PTAB meetings, the Keynotes, and the Hands On and Self Paced Labs. I’m also linking to some reactions from others to support my impressions.

The official VMware News Release for Partner Exchange can be found at this link:

VMware Partner Exchange 2010 Kicks Off With Record-breaking 2,600+ Attendees, 55 Sponsors and 45 Countries Represented

PTAB: Cloud Infrastructure and Virtual Desktops

I knew what was on the Partner Technical Advisory Board meeting agenda before I arrived, but I have to admit I was still pleasantly surprised. In short, the two day meeting was split by topics. We talked about virtual servers on Day 1 and virtual desktops on Day 2.

The server discussions included everything from possible future enhancements to the vStorage API to details about Project Redwood architecture. Discussions included a mix of vSphere roadmap possibilities and potential directions of VMware in the private and hosted cloud. VMware is serious about Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Software as a Service, and the slides presented to the PTAB committee revealed a considerable strategy to make it happen. I’ll just say it is a lot clearer to me where exactly Zimbra and SpringSource fit into VMware’s future plans.

Switching to the second day and to the topic of virtual desktops,

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some links, thoughts, and general information surrounding some of the announcements that caught my attention during the VMware Partner Exchange 2010 conference. This is by no means and inclusive list of every press release and announcement made during the conference. To be honest, I wouldn’t doubt that I missed something more significant than the handful of news listed here. Let me know if I did!

The VMware Express

I personally toured the 18 wheeler on Monday evening before the Conference Kickoff Reception. I would recommend VM /ETC readers catch this VMware View demo center on wheels when it rolls through your town.

• VMware View Hits The Road

“The VMware Express  is a datacenter and demo environment on wheels and it will be crossing the U.S. and Canada over the next year letting you, our customers get hands on with the latest and greatest technologies in your own back yard.”

NetApp’s Vaughn Stewart has a nice post about the VMware Express with great photos from inside the truck. There is also another half dozen blog posts in the form of

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!”

YouTube Guinness Brilliant Six Pack Commercial

It’s obvious now that Cloud Computing is no longer just a concept. Amazon EC2 has been around for a while, vCloud Express was announced late last year, Microsoft is moving full steam ahead with Azure, and new internal cloud infrastructure and storage solutions are appearing on the scene weekly. CTOs and IT Directors are starting to see legitimate solutions for offloading some or all of their development and production workload and infrastructure to alternatives in The Cloud.

Put yourself at the helm of one of the Original Equipment Manufacturer’s (OEMs) that have made their money selling server, switch and storage hardware in the private data center to date. Faced with the future possibility that companies will have an option to run applications and services on infrastructure they don’t buy, build, or maintain, what would be your strategy for generating reoccuring business in the future?

I bring it up because of all the cloud architecture announcements. EMC announced a coalition with Cisco and VMware, NetApp has a Secure Multi Tennancy alliance with Cisco and VMware, and HP has announced an Integrated Infrastructure partnership with Microsoft. The storage OEMs are the first out the gate with the snap together infrastrucure for the cloud, but I imagine other hardware partnerships are not too far behind. VMware and Cisco UCS may already be the first with Microsoft and HP? Microsoft and VMware conveniently can run on top if it all.

Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!”

It’s brilliant because Read the rest of this entry »

VMware is purchasing Zimbra, a messaging and collaboration software company, from Yahoo!. Already one of the most popular virtual appliances available for download in VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, Zimbra will now be optimized for VMware vSphere and probably be offered as a standard service in VMware hosted cloud offerings such as vCloud Express. Eventually I would expect to see Zimbra imported and exported as a vApp for the federated, private vSphere cloud environment. As for now, Zimbra is running more than 55 million mailboxes for both SMB customers as well as in hosted environments that arguably have instantly become VMware customers.

There is no doubt that VMware will provide support, enable high availability, ensure live backup and DR site fail over, as well as  develop scale, automation, monitoring and management capabilities for virtualized Zimbra. The fact that VMware is acquiring a large percentage of SMB mail accounts could mean that virtualizing those servers (if they are not already) will provide the first shining, every day business application in the cloud examples.

VMware CTO Steve Herod explains on his personal blog that purchasing Zimbra is part of VMware’s strategy to simplify IT:

“VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas.”

Other reports I’ve read seem to suggest that Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood. Read the rest of this entry »

So, we should all know what VCE stands for by now, right? Let’s say it together: “VMware, Cisco, EMC.” Using a bad analogy of Adam Lambert, a contestant on American Idol last season, the three companies “came out of the data center” today and publicly announced what we already knew; they’ve been working together to build the most integrated cross technology cloud infrastructure solution known to mankind. They are so integrated they’ve cross trained each other’s support staff so that anyone of the three partners can be a single “choke point” for those customers that implement vBlock Architecture. They call their union a “Computing Environment Coalition.” At the same time, EMC is promising that VMware can continue to “play the field” with technology partners that want to hook up. Hey, if you love somebody let them go. if they come back then it was meant to be!

Confused? Me too. Time will clear the fog and, as promised, reveal the vBlock based Cloud.

VCE vBlock is big, bad, and designed for scale like VMworld 2009 Infrastructure (without being told as much, my bet is that what we saw at the bottom of the stairs in the Moscone Center was a vBlock test drive). Apparently, VMworld’s spotlight on vCloud Express provider Terremark was another hidden VCE vBlock showcase from Vmworld. It all was happening in plain sight. If we only knew then what we know now. 

My thoughts (or this rant) can best be described as “now what!?”. I’ve spent the last 5 years figuring out how to design customized, application specific, performance optimized, and product feature specific virtual infrastructure designs for the enterprise data center. This is because I’ve listened to everybody explain that a “cookie cutter” infrastructure is not adequate for their solutions. Change this setting for feature A, provision these LUNs for feature B, add these VLANs for feature C, etc., etc. Now, VMware, Cisco, and EMC have figured out all the tough stuff and come up with a “connect the dots” data center reference architecture to make it easy to move to the Cloud? Really? I mean, I know we’ve been told this had to happen in order for the Cloud to work, but REALLY?!! Oh well, the only constant is change.

Ok, I feel a little better. Anybody else care to vent?

Here’s some more random links and quoted information to help others with similar change anxiety issues as me. Read the rest of this entry »

When vCloud Express was announced along with the vCloud API at VMworld 2009 in September I decided to sign up and try building VMware virtual machines (VMs) in the Cloud for myself. Being able to provision infrastructure as a service (Iaas) virtually with only a credit card has a certain useful appeal to me, and I wanted to see firsthand exactly what can be done and how much it costs.

This post summarizes my experience and touches on Terremark’s various options for building VMware Cloud VMs. I also quickly describe/illustrate the difference in charges for Linux versus Windows Cloud servers. This post contains a lot of screen shots, and at the end I’ll offer some opinions on the usefulness of vCloud Express and where this service might make sense for IT shops.

Getting started

Creating an account is simple. Just go to http://vcloudexpress.terremark.com/ and register for an account. Read the rest of this entry »