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It’s been a while after VMware acquired Zimbra. In a VMware Console blog, VMware CTO Steve Herrod explained how Zimbra fits in VMware’s mission to simplify IT.

After the acquisition, I actually tried the online demo at Zimbra website. The impression I had was that the Zimbra client was very much like Microsoft Outlook in a browser.

Today I attended a seminar on Zimbra at VMware engineering weekly tech talk. Kevin and Maria from Zimbra team explained both client side (browser based and desktop) and server side architectures. They also introduced one of the biggest implementations with a service provider, from number of subscribers to the hardware configurations. I am very impressed by the scalability Zimbra offers. This answers partially my question, “Why did they want to create a new mail/collaboration product?”

At the end of the seminar, we got a link to an architecture document. This is a public resource. Although written in 2005, this 33 page document gives a great in-depth introduction on the architecture. Better than describing what it is, the document also explains why and how they made key architectural choices. Highly recommended for anyone, even though you are not really interested in collaboration software. It’s a great case study for software and system architecture design.

BTW, the Zimbra team is hiring. Check it out here.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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Last week I saw an incoming link at my blog site from privatecloud.com, a website promoting private cloud computing inside enterprises backed by EMC. Due to curiosity, I browsed the website and found a video by VMware CEO Paul Maritz on cloud computing. BTW, my website is also featured at the home page. Thanks privatecloud.com!

In the video, Paul talked about the cloud computing, mostly referring to services over the Internet, can also be an architecture pattern for enterprises. When that architecture is implemented, you will have a private cloud on premise. Although not using cloud services from any service provider, you still get almost all the benefits in a private cloud.

From the system architecture perspective, your applications built within a private cloud aren’t much different than those built using external cloud services. If both of the services follow the same interface spec, your application may switch between public cloud and private cloud either statically or dynamically. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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OVF stands for Open Virtualization Format, a platform independent, extensible packaging and distribution format for virtual machines. It’s now a DMTF standard.

VMDK stands for Virtual Machine Disk, a format that encodes a single virtual disk for a virtual machine. It’s proprietary by VMware but whose format is publicly documented by the company. You can use VDDK to manipulate the VMDKs.

To package VMware virtual machines, both OVF and VMDK are needed. OVF includes metadata that describes the configurations of virtual machines, including CPU, memory, network, references to virtual disks, etc. Its content is very much like that of one or multiple .vmx file, and pretty small in size compared with disk images. VMDK has everything of a hard disk image and mostly huge in size. To package virtual machines for other hypervisors, you might need other disk formats like VHD from Microsoft.

Although OVF is platform independent, it does not mean you can import/export an OVF package with any disk format. For that, you may need converters, either standalone or built-in, that convert the images before importing or exporting.

Besides the vSphere Client, VMware has shipped OVF Tool for managing OVF packages. Check out here for more details.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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While reading my personal emails today, I also checked the spam folder. One email title caught my eyes instantly, “Express Your Love with A Domain Name.” That sounds like an interesting idea for techies.

Following the lead, I was thinking what VMware can offer to help you to express your love. Obviously VMware has done far more than expressing. According to our CTO Steve Herrod, VMware VMotion had saved 74 marriages by the time of his keynote at VMworld 2009 (32’35”). I bet the number is even more today.

With that statistical in mind, one quick solution is the VMotion and DRS which balance the computing workload, also your work and life I suppose. It’s great but only for the system administrators who have access to vSphere and VMware Infrastructure. For other people, it’s not that practical.

Luckily, VMware is not only about business, but also about personal. Here are several ideas you can consider for this coming Valentine’s day: Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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Since joining VMware two and half years ago, I have been working like a consultant on partner enablement projects in various technical areas like SDK, SRM array adapter, VI Client plug-in, DRS clustering, etc. While working on these engagements, I always think about more efficient and more effective ways to get my work done and grow our developer ecosystem.

To summarize what I learned and thought, I decide to use CO2 as the success formula because it fits well when we talk about an ecosystem. The CO2 here means differently though. It represents Cash + Open source + Open communication.

Cash

You have to show the money, at least the potential to make money, to your ecosystem. Once you do that, you don’t need to convince anyone to join you. Companies and developers will just come to you to see how they can build application on your platform or/and how they can extend your platform with their products.

Android market, for example, got 20,000+ apps and games as of Dec. 2009, and was predicted to reach 150,000 apps by the end of 2010. What motivated these developers to write applications for Android in general? Mostly money, directly or indirectly.

Open Source

You have to enable the ecosystem. The best way, in my opinion, is to open source your platforms, APIs, frameworks, and tools. There is an interesting discussion regarding open source vs. open standard by Jonathan Schwartz. Basically open source is not necessarily open standard, but

The best open-source projects are the ones that actually amplify a standard, increasing its acceptance in the marketplace and enhancing cross-platform compatibility.  –Jonathan Schwartz

I think you get the idea. So embrace the open source model as much as possible, at least open source these components that are used directly by the developers. In return, the developers who use these components can contribute back their code back to enhance them. It’s win/win for both the company and the developers.

Open Communication

You have to make the information flow in your ecosystem. The most efficient and effective approach is to foster open communications. You don’t want closed communications, which isolate developers and partners from each other, and information cannot be shared. The key problem of one on one model is that it doesn’t scale. This can be a serious problem for a growing company with ever expanding ecosystem.

When communication is open, you can have an ecosystem that can help itself. But to get it started, you got to do several things:

• Basic Documentation: Get Started Tutorial, API Reference, Samples, FAQ, Troubleshooting Guide. These are the fire starters to get the communication going. When working on engagement projects, it’s my top priority to get them ready, therefore I got less questions and could focus more on value added works.
• Community Forum: it’s where the community helps each other. Developers can not only ask questions, but also share code samples. Questions answered can benefit all the developers in the ecosystem. Social media can be leveraged as well.
• Evangelism: Get the messages out and get the community started.

Overall, open communication is beneficial to the developers, even more so to the company which can then scale the enablement to the whole system with limited resources in short time.

As IT professionals, you may have seen many successful ecosystems and not so successful ones. Please feel free to share your thoughts as well.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.