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Eclipse: 10 Years of Excellence

Steve Jin — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:35:03 +0000

This month Eclipse turns 10 years old. Ten years ago, IBM donated the initial Eclipse Java IDE, which was then estimated $40M, to Eclipse Foundation. It has since grown to 273 open source projects and $800M portfolio today. Quite an achievement by any standard!

This news release summarizes some of the key accomplishments:

Eclipse has an estimated 65% market share in the Java IDE space and over 6 million users. Since its inception, Eclipse has driven the consolidation of what was once a highly fragmented Java tools market. It has been instrumental in the worldwide success and adoption of Java itself.

The Eclipse C/C++ IDE (CDT) has become the de facto standard developer IDE in the embedded and real-time operating system market. At least 50 companies are building their developer tool solutions based on CDT.

The Eclipse Modeling community has grown to become the largest and most innovative community at Eclipse. The vast majority of UML modeling vendors worldwide base their solutions on Eclipse.

The Eclipse Mylyn project is now the industry hub for integrating tools across the application lifecycle. There are over 70 Mylyn connectors that integrate different ALM solutions into the Eclipse developer’s desktop.

The annual Eclipse Release Train has demonstrated how open source communities can deliver in a predictable and reliable manner. For the last eight years, Eclipse has shipped a major release at the end of June, on time to the day. The 2011 release train, Indigo, included 62 project teams, 408 developers, 49 organizations, and 46 million lines of code.

The Eclipse ecosystem has millions of individuals, thousands of companies, and thousands of universities and research institutes that have grown up around the Eclipse industry platform.

I was lucky to have more than 10 years of experience with Eclipse. This may invite drill down questions if written as such on resume. :-) In 2000, I was working at Rational Software and got invited to IBM Silicon Valley Lab for a training to develop plug-ins because Rational XDE I worked on ran on Eclipse, one of the two “shells” along with Microsoft VisualStudio. BTW, after IBM bought Rational, the XDE was rebranded as Rational Software Architect (RSA).

After that, Eclipse has been my IDE of choice for Java and other programming languages as well. Before Eclipse came out, there weren’t many choices. At one time, I used an IDE called VisualCafe, and it crashed several times a day thus was basically unusable. You can understand the excitement among developers when Eclipse was released 10 years ago. Did I also mention it’s free?

Eclipse IDE rooted from IBM VisualAge, a product IBM initially OEMed from OTI which was late sold to IBM. Even if you are not familiar with OTI as a company, you may have read the book by one of its employees Erich Emma who wrote the famous Design Pattern: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. I am not saying that it’s the design patterns that led to the great product, but that OTI had a very strong engineering team. The success of Eclipse is not only good timing, but also great minds behind.

BTW, there will be many parties around the world celebrating the 10th anniversary of Eclipse. Check out here for one close to you. I noticed there would be one in an Ebay office in San Jose on Dec 8th evening.

Eclipse: 10 Years of Excellence originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Learning Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud

Steve Jin — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:49:48 +0000

Yesterday I went to Microsoft Azure DevCamp in its Silicon Valley office. Like other developer events organized by Microsoft, it featured awesome presentations with nice overviews and demos by top evangelists like James Conard, Wade Wegner, Nick Harris, etc.

As you’ve probably known, Microsoft has been betting heavily on cloud computing. Anyone who is interested in cloud computing simply cannot ignore its Windows Azure, which is a comprehensive platform for developing cloud applications. Note that, the focus is applications, not virtual machines as offered by Amazon and other IaaS providers.

I read a book about Windows Azure a little while ago, but haven’t got my hands dirty because I was still using Windows XP by then. The DevCamp event got me back to the topic again. I won’t summarize what I learnt from the presentations here, but list some key terms and technologies here: Windows Azure Compute (roles: Web, Worker, Virtual Machine), Windows Azure Storage (Blobs / Drives / Tables / Queues), SQL Azure, Service Bus, Windows Azure Connectivity, Azure Marketplace, Access Control, Caching, CDN, Traffic Manager. I hope you are not confused with these without further explanations. If you are, here is a link to the Windows Azure Home which can
help clarify everything the services, features, and prices.

I went back today for the hands-on labs, but couldn’t get my laptop’s wireless adapter work. Therefore I copied the courseware, and got a card with free trial account lasting for 5 days. I think that will keep me busy for a week.

As I checked the site, anyone can sign up a free trial, which allows you to run a Small Windows Azure instance with a 1GB SQL Azure database for free for the first 90 days of your trial. The Get Started page has pretty much all you need to, well, get started.

Last but not the least, Windows Azure does not limit its support only to Microsoft .NET. It also supports other popular stacks like Java, PHP.

Learning Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

My Next Adventure

Steve Jin — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:46:04 +0000

After leaving VMware and taking a short break at home last week, I am excited to be part of VCE solution engineering team as an architect at its Santa Clara office. For those who are not familiar VCE, it’s a joint venture of EMC, Cisco, VMware and Intel. My formal title is consultant software engineer which, according to my recruiter, is the top engineer rank in the company.

I believe many have read the tweet from my colleague Rob and many re-tweets afterwards regarding my joining VCE. I would like to take this opportunity to confirm this, and thank all my friends who congratulated me on that. More to that, I will explain why I decided on VCE.

Like other good engineers in the Silicon Valley, I got multiple offers (Even this week I still got emails and LinkedIn inquires with opportunities). Not all the offers were equal, but I’d chosen the VCE offer for several reasons.

First, VCE is a unique company with unique vision and great talents. Its bundled and validated hardware platform vBlock resonated very well with customers. I see a great growth potential of the company, and growth opportunities for me.

Second, I consider the turnkey hardware only the first step. Upon receiving vBlock, customers need to configure system, provision software, run and sometimes develop applications. I don’t think the turnkey philosophy should stop at the hardware level, but continue to the software as well. You can in fact find solutions like Vblock FastPath Desktop Virtualization Platform today, and more in the future.

That represents a lot of technical challenges for me, not to mention the rare learning opportunities of full IT stacks from hardware, application, to the cloud. We can find many companies specialized in one or two components in one layer in the stack, but only a few with full IT stacks. The other two I can think of are IBM and recently Oracle with Sun acquisition. Did I miss anyone?

Third, given the challenges mentioned above I can fully leverage my current expertise in software and VMware, further deepen my domain knowledge, and expand influence in the community. It’s therefore a very natural and smooth transition for me.

After joining the company, I have met and talked to many colleagues, attended several meetings, read several design specs. I will continue these in the coming weeks. Along the way, I will blog what I learned (no confidential info of course). Stay tuned…

My Next Adventure originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Moving on

Steve Jin — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 04:00:06 +0000

Today is my last day at VMware.

Looking back, it’s been almost four and half years since I joined VMware in June 2007. At that time, VMware was still part of EMC, and two months later it went IPO (to be exact, spin off). Together with many of my colleagues I watched the historical moment for the company on a very early summer morning. I still remember there were quite a few sleeping tents inside the new offices.

Over the years at VMware, I have been working on various projects like helping partners with vSphere Client Plugin, vSphere SDK, SRM Array Adapter, Clustering, porting orginal cloudfoundry.com from EC2 to vSphere and vCloud for VMworld keynotes, developing VMware Workbench, code2cloud.com demo, migration manager, HealthAnalyzer, etc., presenting at different conferences like TechExchange, VMworld. I am pretty sure I have missed some in the list.

In my spare time, I created the VI Java API open source project and led the community through several major releases. Today it’s the de facto Java API in the community. It had been the highest voted fling at VMware Labs and is stil the highest votes/views ratio today.

I also wrote the book VMware VI and vSphere SDK which is rated five stars at Amazon. It’s a long and stressful, but rewarding if done, journey to write a book. Besides the public comments, here is one from my colleague:

”I just saw a copy of your book, ‘VMware VI and vSphere SDK.’ Please accept my congratulations on a very well written book. In the years that I have been directly or indirectly associated with the API program, this is the first time that anyone has been able to capture the essence of the SDK so simply and succinctly. Chapter 3 and 4 (Hello VI and Using the Property Collector) were written very clearly and simply. This should be required reading for anyone associated with the API.”

After my book got published, I got more time so I took on blogging to evangelize vSphere API and cloud computing in general. DoubleCloud.org has now ac more than 300 in depth articles on vSphere and cloud computing. It’s ranked as top 50 blog on cloud computing by Cloud Journal, and top 50 must read IT blogs by BizTech Magazine.

Looking forward, I think I will need more challenges and broader perspectives both for my ever lasting technical curiosity and my career development. So I decided to take a short break and explore new opportunities.

It’s indeed a tough decision to leave a great company like VMware where so many extraordinary talents keep innovating every day. All I wish is the contineous success of VMware and my colleagues there.

Next week I will be jobless, and probably have more time to think and blog with my new super fast desktop…

Moving on originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

VMworld 2011 Las Vegas: Day Two

Steve Jin — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:59:15 +0000

Today is day two of VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. VMware CTO Steve Herrod got on stage with his technology deep dives into various products and new projects around the cloud story – “your cloud, own it.” Again this is based on my note and memory, and has not reviewed by anyone. Mistakes are all mine.

He started out by emphasizing the shift of infrastructure focus of IT to people focus in the new era. Unlike yesterday’s keynote, he used white boarding animations all across his slides, which is pretty fun. While I was taking note with my camera, I found I had to take more pictures than otherwise because the eraser constantly removed existing content on same slides.

The order of Steve’s presentation was different this time. Instead covering vSphere first, he first did end user computing which was categorized as post PC era with multiple devices, universal access, and high expectation. In this part, he touted out three themes: simplify, manage and connect, under which covered View 5, project ThinApp Factory, Project Octopus (dropbox like file sharing for enterprises), project Horizon (single sign on for SaaS), project App Blast, virtual phone, etc.

The virtual phone partnered with LG is particularly appealing, amplified by a live show in which a new hire of an insurance company installed his company mobile phone into his personal physical phone with one click, and then did his work remotely and collaboratively with call center. The company mobile phone is isolated from his personal phone and managed by company IT.

Steve Herrod moved onto vSphere 5 as the foundation of all. He listed all the industry firsts of vSphere over the last 10 years. It’s amazing to see the innovation path. For SMB, he particularly talked about VMware GO and vSpere storage appliance. For enterprises, he discussed auto deploy feature for ESXi. As one of the key features, vSphere support jumbo VMs which could have 32 vCPUs, 1TB GB memory, and 1,000,000 IOPS per host.

Steve moved onto 3 guarantees in vSphere: performance with storage I/O control and network I/O control; availability guarantee with SRM 5.0 which supports more use cases beyond disaster recovery, for example, moving workloads between datacenters; and security with vShield Endpoint, vShield App, and vShield Edge. He discussed VXLAN technology which separates ID from location and has been submitted to ITEF for standardization.

After the hypervisor, Steve continued with management with a focus on automation with reversed order of alert and respond. For that, he mentioned 3 steps: monitor, correlate, and remediate, followed by two sneak previews and conclusion. Because previews were marked as VMworld only, so I skipped them here.

After the keynote, I went out to check out the SolutionExchange. There are many more vendors this year with many new and cool products and technologies. I just could not check out all of them. Noticeably there are several more storage startups because of two important trends: virtualization and SSD. I will blog more after the event.

During the lunch hours, we had devops meet up in the community lounge with the many of my colleagues and developers/system administrators who are interested in VMware SDK/APIs/CLIs for integration and automation.

In the afternoon, I attended the #cloudtalk tweet up in VMware booth theatre. It’s pretty cool to see many twitters whom I hadn’t met before. Same case in the VMware press party hosted by Pearson education which owns Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall.

VMworld 2011 Las Vegas: Day Two originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

VMworld 2011 Las Vegas: Day One

Steve Jin — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 04:59:21 +0000

Today is day one of VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. The most important part is of course the keynotes by CEO Paul Maritz and Co-President Carl Eschenbach. The following is based on my personal note and has not reviewed by anyone. All the mistakes and errors are mine and only mine.

Paul started his keynote with a slide showing that more than 50% of total workloads are virtualized. One new virtual machine gets created in every six seconds, faster than the rate of babies born in the US. Twenty million virtual machines are running on VMware vSphere with 5.5 vMotions per second. There are 800,000 vSphere administrators, 68,000 of whom are VMware Certified Professionals.

As the cloud era unfolding itself, Paul asked the question, “how to redeploy investment to the future in a smart and orderly way?”Instead jumping onto the answer, Paul reviewed the history of computing with his own experience – he got his first job with Baro (not sure about exact spelling but it’s no longer there) doing debugging microchips after being rejected by companies like IBM in London in 1978. From there, he felt lucky to get onto Client-Server era instead of being trapped in mainframe era.

The canonical apps in mainframe/mini era is automated “book-keeping;” in Client/Server era are ERP, CRM, eCommerce, Non-Real-time Analytics; in Cloud era are Real-time, high-scale analytics and commerce. There are billions of connected users and devices, and PCs are becoming minority.

The challenge is to bridge to the future – modernizing infrastructure and operations to carry existing and future apps; invest in new and renewed apps; bridge from existing to new modes of end-user access.

Paul reviewed each of the 3 vSphere releases at VMworld since 2008: 4.0 leading with performance and scale, VM fault tolerance, automated power management, first distributed virtual switch; 4.1 leading with performance and scale, “noisy neighbor” resource protection; Hot VM memory and CPU add; 5.0 leading with performance and scale, storage load balancing, automatic storage tiering, virtual storage appliance, automated host provisioning, very large VMs.

The newly GAed vSphere 5.0 comes with more than 1 million engineering hours, more than 2 million QA hours, 200 new features, more than 2,000 partner certifications. It enables greater automation, greater scale, and greater resiliency, leading to more apps, more efficiency, and more mission critical workloads.

On top of vSphere 5.0 are vCenter SRM5.0, vCenter Operations 1.0 (I am proud that it’s built on top of VI Java API I created), vShield Security 5.0, and vCloud Director 1.5. Paul predicted 5.1 for next VMworld for a suite of products. For SMB, he emphasized vSphere Essentials as “Datacenter in a Box.” and VMware GO as SaaS services for SMB.

After the virtualization layer, Paul moved onto the application layer around Spring and other frameworks like RabbitMQ, Hyperic, GemFire/SQLFire, and the newly announced vFabric Data Director which automatically provision and manage databases/fabrics on vSphere. The Data Director comes with a customized Postgres database optimized for vSphere. The optimization techniques will be shared with other DB vendors as well.

Around the middleware comes CloudFoundry which is an open PaaS platform that supports Java, Ruby, Node.js, Scala, etc. It will be offered in three packages: public cloud, private cloud, and micro cloud for individual developers.

On the top is the new end user access around VMware View 5.0, Horizon (single sign on for SaaS), and VMware Apps like Zimbra, SocialCast, etc.

Paul concluded his keynote by calling actions to accelerate virtualization of mission critical apps, and amplify it with IT-as-a-Service as evolutionary path to IT control, agility and choice.

Following Paul’s vision, Carl came on stage sharing customer success stories around cloud journey. IT executives from NYSE Euronext, Revlon, and Southwest airline joined Carl to share their stories.

After the keynotes, the SolutionExchange opened with reception party. The Elastic Sky band by VMware employees performed on stage just outside the exhibition. As I heard, the name of ESX was actually inspired by the band name.

VMworld 2011 Las Vegas: Day One originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Developer/Administrator (devops) Meet up at VMworld 2011

Steve Jin — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 01:53:54 +0000

As part of the VMworld #vMeetups in the Community Lounge, this developer/administrator (a.k.a. devops) meet up will take place on August 30th from 12PM to 1PM at VMworld Community Louge, located just outside the entrance to the solution exchange. Because it’s lunch hour, please feel free to bring your lunch.

This event offers you a unique opportunity to meet and network with other professionals who create or use VMware APIs and CLIs for integration and automation.

The topics include, but not limited to:

vSphere APIs/SDKs with Pablo Roesch
vSphere Java APIs with Steve Jin
PowerCLI / AutoDeploy/Image Builder with Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens
VI Perl with William Lam
vCLI/vMA/esxcli
vFabric with Carter Shanklin, Justin Murray
Java on vSphere with Emad Benjamin
SaaS architecture with Gilbert Lau
vCO with development team
Service automation tooling with Budianto Bong
Any other devops topics on your mind

Please mark your calendar and join us! For other community lounge events, please check here. Many thanks to John Troyer and Alex Maier for hosting the event in the community lounge!

Also, please feel free to leave your comment at VMworld forum! We will also update the discussion with more info along the way.

Developer/Administrator (devops) Meet up at VMworld 2011 originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

How to Save With New vSphere 5 Licensing Model

Steve Jin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 05:01:33 +0000

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts, and strictly mine.

I missed the big launch of vSphere 5 on July 12 because I was having my vacation. When I came back, I found so many discussions around the vSphere 5 licensing change. It’s understandable that people don’t like changes, especially if the changes may have financial impacts.

Technically, the vRAM pooling simplifies the licensing model, as pointed out by Carter Shanklin. Money wise, some 10-% of existing customers are affected according to this official blog. I think the complaint is more about money than anything else. Since I am not a business person, I won’t elaborate more here.

Following the money talk, let’s look at it in a different way: how to save money with the new licensing model?

In order to answer the question, we need to understand how the vRAM is calculated. Both Al Renouf and Luc Dekens released PowerShell scripts to calculate it. I just pick up the line 23 of Luc’s script here:

$vmRAMUsed = ($VMs | where {$_.PowerState -eq “PoweredOn”} | Measure-Object -Property MemoryMB -Sum).Sum/1KB

The total vRAM is simply a summary of all the $vmRAMUsed of all virtual machines. To save on license cost, you want to drive down the total value.

Based on the formula on how it’s calculated, you have these ways to save money:

Reduce the memory usage of individual virtual machines if possible. To be sure, you want to first check the memory usage to identify these with over allocated memory. Again, check out Luc’s script which lists the stats for each VM. Once you find them, just call ReconfigVM_Task() method to change the memory allocation. Unlike its physical counterpart, a virtual machine’s memory can be increased easily. So you can always add more whenever needed later.
Reduce the number of running virtual machines. You can achieve these in two ways: power off or suspend your virtual machines not in use; consolidate applications from multiple virtual machines to one. In the first case, the vRAM used turns zero. In the latter case, the memory overhead of operation systems is effectively reduced. Note that although you can leverage memory de-duplication and save physical memory, the vRAM usage does not change.

Hope these techniques help you to save with the new licensing model. Please remember, you want to save money, but to the extent that hurts your operations. It’s trade-off you have to carefully balance by yourself.

How to Save With New vSphere 5 Licensing Model originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Success Story: Cisco Data Center Network Manager

Steve Jin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:05:24 +0000

Today I got an email from Louis Jia who is a Sr. Development manager at Cisco. He told me that the product his team has been working on had been rebranded as Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) and is formally released. Congratulations to Louis and team!

I don’t normally cover products from vendors, be it an established company or a startup. But this one is different because it’s another great success story of how the open source vijava API project helps the community to succeed.

Louis and his team approached me about two years ago and started to use vijava API in their product development. After that, we had several meetings/calls/emails and product demos. Therefore I knew their product was coming along. But I could not formally talk about it because it’s not yet released.

From a high level, DCNM is a combination of two: Cisco Fabric Manager and Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) for LAN. Since the purpose of this article is not to introduce the product itself, I will just show you the following screenshot and leave the rest for you to check out: product site, and two page introduction in PDF.

Success Story: Cisco Data Center Network Manager originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Tech Talk: Reflections on the vSphere Management API – Ease of Use and Consistency

Steve Jin — Thu, 26 May 2011 07:12:59 +0000

This is the wrapping tech talk at our last community meetup by Jeff Hu who is the tech lead on vSphere APIs. Based on his 7 years of experience since the inception of vSphere API, Jeff shared his insights on the design of vSphere API, and what can be done for better ease of use and consistency. In my opinion, this is a must read for anyone who is interested in VMware management APIs.

Disclaimer: The presentation contains forwardlooking, exploratory ideas and should not be interpreted as a statement of official product direction by VMware.

Tech Talk: Reflections on the vSphere Management API – Ease of Use and Consistency originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

DoubleCloud.org » News & Events

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