VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘cloud computing’

Although my busy VMware Partner Exchange 2010 schedule included various meetings, break out sessions, company dinners, conference parties, and vendor receptions, a daily dose of social networking was found in between it all. Oh yeah, Las Vegas was a part of the equation as well. Here’s a quick list of my extra curricular conference highlights:

• It “cost me” $140 to learn how to play Craps at the Tropicana, but I had a blast with my Softchoice co-workers while rolling some dice! At some point I was actually up $35, but that was a fleeting moment in time. I’m sure many others can tell similar stories with much larger amounts of cash than me.
• I can now personally guide anyone using all means of transport between the Mandalay Bay, Excaliber, The Luxor, New York, New York, and Tropicana casinos. My legs are tired, but I have some great memories scattered at various points now on that end of the Vegas strip!
• Like the Thirsty Bear was during VMworld 2009, The Nine Fine Irishmen seemed to be a common stop for me during PEX2010.

I’ve created a photo collage of some of the good times, and for those that are curious about the #PEX3WORD goings on last week I’ve got a summary report at the end of the post.

Photo Collage

Here’s a collage of images from my week captured with my cell phone camera. Popular Twitter names pictured in various images are vseanclark, vmdoug, theronconrey, djroberts, asweemer, sakacc (really small in front of the tailgate party big screen), herrod (on stage during keynote), stockberger, and bknudtson.

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 »

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 »

SQL Server 2008 R2: Virtualization for Databases is a post by Brent Ozar that I had to read slowly and multiple times. Not because it was hard to understand or read, but because the idea it provoked for me gave me the sensation of riding “The Merry Mixer” at the annual traveling amusement park. Ozar’s post explains that SQL Server 2008 R2 introduces the concept of a SQL Server Utility which groups multiple SQL servers as a pool of resources. Ozar explains:

“Looking ahead, Microsoft wants us to start thinking of databases as being less connected to physical servers, and to think of our physical servers as a resource pool.  Imagine if databases were self-contained packages that could be moved from server to server – just like virtual servers can be moved from host to host today.”

The SQL Utility will be managed by a Control Point Server that will collect and monitor configuration and performance data. This server will also facilitate moving SQL databases between Utility members. Apparently this migration of SQL databases will be able to happen live.

SQL 2008 R2 is planned to be released in the first half of 2010.

When I considered how virtual infrastructure (VI) could be impacted by this new technology is when I got a little motion sickness. What if Read the rest of this entry »

The fact that Microsoft has embraced virtualization is an understatement. The fact that Microsoft has been slow to embrace other virtualization vendor’s capabilities to run Windows operating systems as guests is equally an understatement, but what if this wasn’t the case? That is, what if Microsoft abandoned the licensing strategy of anchoring Windows to physical hardware? What if the folks at Redmond recognized virtual hardware and virtual machines (VMs) as equals to physical devices when assigning licenses? Taking it a step forward, what if specialized versions of the various Windows operating systems and applications were specifically developed for VMs along with special licensing? Maybe it will never happen, but there have been a few signs recently that give one hope for the possibility.

Like crop circles, the following are some posts that caused me to wonder “what if?”. Read the rest of this entry »