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This 4th and last part contains best practice No.7 ~ 10. To be notified for future posts, feel free to subscribe to this feed, and follow me at Twitter.

#7 Levarage vApp

vApp is a new addition to vSphere. It’s essentially a group of VMs that work together as a solution. You can manage them as a basic unit like a VM. It provides you higher level granularity for resource allocation and management.

This is an ideal container for your application if you have multiple virtual machines involved. They may or may not form a cluster, but are bundled together for a same goal.

The vApps are not only easily managed by the vSphere, but also imported and export as a bundle. Therefore you can easily move it without worrying what should be included while copying it.

VMware provides tools like VMware Studio using which you can create and configure vApps easily. The VMware Studio has Web based console, customization and build engine, build process automation with CLI (command line interface).

Other alternatives include:  Read more... (1417 words, estimated 5:40 mins reading time)

This 3rd part contains best practice No.4 ~ 6. To be notified for the rest, feel free to subscribe to this feed, and follow me at Twitter.

#4 Scale Applications as Needed

Most time, people think scalability is to handle more workload when needed. This is true, but not enough. A truly scalable system should scale back. This is how you will save money. This is equally important as the first case where you get more revenue by serving more traffic.

There are different ways to scale:

• Up and down. This is unique in virtualized environment in which you adjust the memory or CPU allocation and use more or less of them instantly.
• Out & in. This means you include more machines either physical or virtual into your application.

You have to think over several architecture decision points:  Read more... (1601 words, estimated 6:24 mins reading time)

This second part contains best practice No.1 ~ 3.

＃1 Move Up to Higher Level Software Stack 

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

 Isaac Newton

Modern software development is all about leverage. You don’t want to build everything from bottom up. Whatever “giant shoulders” you can leverage, you should do so. Remember the keyword here is “giant shoulders.” You got to be selective on what is “a giant” and what is not, for the best quality of your system. Your application’s quality is a function of that of the systems underneath it.

The typical “giant shoulders” includes middleware, high level programming languages, tools. By leveraging these, you should expect your applications portable, and with much less code and higher developer productivity. The portability is very important when you want to deploy your applications in federated cloud environment.

I posted a short article after the cloud demo in VMworld 2009 keynotes. It’s reposted at SpringSource blog. The article introduced “DIY PaaS” concept which you could have a higher level of development platform inside your enterprise in a similar way as would you get from vendors like Google, but without vendor lock-in.

The “DIY PaaS” does not require you to use any specific platforms, middleware or framework. You could use any existing combination of systems on top of Java, .Net, Python, PHP. For example, you could use Java with Spring framework for building your web applications or enterprise integration frameworks. The choice is really yours, not of any vendors. When making a decision, you want to consider various factors like your team’s expertise and preference, total cost of software licenses, design constraints posted by for example existing investments on particular software.

Having decided the combination of software stack, you want to pack them into virtual machine templates that can be re-used by various teams. If you have multiple combinations, you can have multiple virtual machine templates in your catalog.

In general, you want as few templates as possible. Why?

Having less VM templates means less effort to build them, to manage, to upgrade, and to test. This might not seem like a big deal but could become a big deal in a longer term when you have to maintain multiple versions of these templates at the same time.

It also means less storage. vSphere has a special technology called linked clone. The new virtual machine doesn’t fully clone the disks, but links back to the template. If you have least templates, you can have a huge saving on the disk space. High quality storage can be very expensive.

Last but not least benefit is less memory. vSphere has memory page sharing technology which keeps one copy of same page contents, and converts others as pointers to the single copy. It’s only possible when you have identical memory pages. When you have virtual machines cloned from a same templates, the chance of identical memory pages increases dramatically.

There are several techniques to keep the least number of virtual machine templates:  Read more... (1735 words, estimated 6:56 mins reading time)

Overview

With more data centers running on purely virtualized systems, more applications are therefore running on top of virtualized environment than ever before. These virtualized systems are interconnected with each other and become a cloud platform. Virtualization is the pre-requisite and starting point of the cloud computing at the IaaS level.  Read more... (568 words, estimated 2:16 mins reading time)

A high profile open source developer Salvatore Sanfilippo (@antirez) joined VMware engineering team today. He is the project owner of Redis. Welcome Salvatore!

As Derek Collision (@derekcollison) described it at a VMware Console Blog,

Redis is a high performance and scalable advanced key-value store where values can be data structures such as lists, sets, and hashmaps, as well as strings and blobs. Redis supports atomic operations on these data structures, allowing extremely high performance with consistent state to many client applications.  Read more... (269 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

As I quoted VMware CMO Rick Jackson in my previous blog, cloud computing is a journey. You may wonder, “If so, what are the phases for that journey?”

A great question! Understanding the phases helps us to better plan our journey and have a smooth transition from phase to phase.

In this blog, I will introduce 3 phases one by one: 100% virtualization, private cloud, and federated cloud. I will go over each of them and discuss the challenges in each.  Read more... (646 words, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)

While asked how each Spring products are used in the market at the end of today’s training, the instructor showed us a nice website as a reference. Here is the diagram showing the numbers of jobs requiring skills of Spring and EJB. A great answer even though not a direct answer.

Strictly speaking, the jobs are not products, but well reflect what products are in use. So this is a good index on market shares of different products. If you have your products too easy to use, this index works against you.  Read more... (267 words, 4 images, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

I came across a blog “5 things VMware must do to fend off Microsoft.” The author Jon Brodkin listed the following musts: cut prices, improve Security, win the desktop war, simplify management, don’t overhype the cloud. Here is a response to the article by Steve Kaplan.

Because I am working on cloud related projects, especially I am the creator of the vSphere Java API that manages the “cloud operating system,” I am curious to know whether VMware is overhyping the cloud computing.

Instead of expressing my opinions, I decided to do a simple research using Google and Wikipedia. To my surprise, the “cloud computing” page does not include VMware in “Cloud computing logical diagram.” The companies listed are Microsoft, Google, Saleforce, Amazon, Yahoo, Rackspace, Zoho. Well, that is good for me to do the next step.

Then, I used Google to search each company’s name and “cloud computing.” I wasn’t testing the performance, but to see how many web pages are there including these keywords. Strictly speaking, the number of hits is not an index of hyping cloud computing, but you can get a good sense on how much marketing effort each company invest into “cloud computing.”

To save you time, I captured the screenshots of each search, and list the most important parts we are interested as follows.  Read more... (265 words, 2 images, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

RSA just had its annual conference at San Francisco this past week. Intel, VMware and RSA demoed how to build up layers of trust in data centers in the conference.  Read more... (199 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)

Several folks asked me about how to use vSphere(VI) Java API to connect to a VM running on vSphere. The quick answer is vSphere Java API is not designed for this. You will need VMware Remote Console, browser plug-in, remote desktop/VNC, SSH client etc. However, it can help you to get the information required by the console or plug-in. Tal Altman from CISCO suggested that it be a topic for doublecloud.org. Here it is.

There are 3 ways to connect to the VM from your client side outside the vSphere and Web Access which have built-in support for console access.

1. Using VMware Remote Console which is a standalone application
2. Using browser plug-in to either IE or Firefox (Note: this is NOT supported by VMware. Please don’t call the company tech support for this.)
3. Using Remote Desktop, VNC or SSH

The first two connect to the ESX host, and work even there is no guest OS installed on the VM. The last one assumes you have guest OS installed, and have IP network and server components in place already.

Note that these 3 ways work for the VMs in the public cloud as well if the related ports are open in your firewall. It is, however, not the case for most enterprises, therefore I particularly say it’s for VMs in private cloud. If you don’t have firewall issue, feel free to give it a try with public cloud as well.

Let’s go over one by one in details and see how vSphere Java API helps.  Read more... (1112 words, 2 images, estimated 4:27 mins reading time)