Last week I took a two day boot camp on OpenStack, which is increasingly popular these days. The project was initially created at Rackspace in answering Amazon Web Services, and open sourced to the community.
Not only service providers and software vendors showed interests in the project, but also hardware vendors tried to pre-install OpenStack as one of key differentiators (inside most, if not all, of hardware boxes are Intel therefore not much difference). Read more... (401 words, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)
BusinessWeek recently published an article “In Silicon Valley, Hardware is Hot Again.” Almost all big names started to sell hardware now, Microsoft, Google, and Apple of course. Apple’s stellar success in iPhone and iPad disrupted the conventional wisdom that software is higher in margin compared to hardware. Also, Apple’s hardware and software combined devices posts a real risk for Microsoft and Google. To be exact, the hardware in the article title should really be software bundled hardware. That is why Google and Microsoft had to get into hardware business competing directly against Apple. Read more... (265 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)
This past week was a busy one for Hadoop community with two Hadoop events in Silicon Valley. The first one was “what role will hadoop play in the enterprise” by Churchill Club which attracted about 300 attendees in a Palo Alto hotel. The second one was the much bigger conference Hadoop Summit in San Jose Convention Center. I will write a separate article on the second event soon. Read more... (649 words, estimated 2:36 mins reading time)
As software professionals, we may still use the same programming languages and tools as 10 years ago. But there has been a fundamental shift in how we think of software, and make and consume software.
Static blueprints
Traditionally software really means blueprints, which are used to construct running software instances. The blueprints include binary code, installer, and related documentations guiding the installation and configuration of the software. Software vendors make the software packages and sell them to customers who then deploy and run them. Read more... (595 words, estimated 2:23 mins reading time)
While installing and configuring vCloud Director recently, I kept thinking how to simplify it by removing un-necessary concepts and steps. To be fair, vCloud Director as of version 1.5 does a decent job to provide a high level abstraction for cloud infrastructure. Still it can be significantly improved just like every other new technology. Note that I pick vCloud Director as an example for the following discussion simply because VMware is the leader in virtualization space and what it does has ripple effects on other vendors. Read more... (579 words, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)
As I predicted for 2011, the cloud will be the ultimate powerhouse for mobile devices. The reason is simple: although fancy and stylish, the mobile devices typically do not have enough computing power and storage space for certain applications. Read more... (299 words, estimated 1:12 mins 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.
- Using VMware Remote Console which is a standalone application
- 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.)
- 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)
Last week VMware released a news “VMware Expands VMware vCloud Developer Ecosystem With Open-Source Java and Python SDKs for VMware vCloud API”. It says,
VMware has also made a number of open-source contributions to the Cloud Tools project, which powers the SpringSource Cloud Foundry service, enabling Java developers to deploy, test, and manage applications for VMware environments via VMware vSphere(TM) and the VMware vCloud API. Read more... (393 words, estimated 1:34 mins reading time)
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