During the Microsoft Management Summit last month, I had an interesting chat with Rakesh Malhotra who is the VP product of Apprenda. It made me to think more about two important technologies: virtualization and PaaS. As we know, virtualization is almost a must for IaaS. Will it be the same case for PaaS?
Pure PaaS or PaaS over IaaS
The software-defined networking is the new buzzword for network centralization, which is also known as OpenFlow or network virtualization. The idea is to centralize the control to a server (or a cluster of servers) called controller.
With the acquisition of Nicira by VMware, the software-defined networking has caught many eyeballs from the community. From there, VMware extended it to a new vision called software-defined datacenter which includes three elements of computing: compute, network, and storage.
I flew to Vegas this week for Microsoft Management Summit 2013, which happens to be in the same hotel (Mandalay Bay) as VMware Partner Exchange one and half months ago. The organizations and activities of both conferences are pretty similar – keynotes, breakout sessions, hands on labs (HOL). It’s pretty exciting to learn new technologies and meet new people.
Hands On Labs
After VMware touting out the new term “software defined data center,” I suddenly saw many vendors claiming they support software defined data center at VMworld. Days ago I read a news about Joe Tucci, the CEO of VMware’s parent company EMC, explaining what “software defined data center” is.
As I mentioned in a previous article, Hadoop is in a similar stage as virtualization 10 years ago – the technology is mostly ready for wider adoption. There were certain secret sauces leading to virtualization’s stellar success, especially VMware in the enterprise space. Here I examine some of these success factors that could be learned by Hadoop community.
Strive For Out Of Box Experience
I just did an interview with Ricky Ribeiro, who is online content manager of BizTech Magazine. It was published last week as part of the Q&A series of Must Read IT blogs. In response to Ricky’s great questions, I shared thoughts on a broad range of topics, including blogging, cloud computing, and technical innovation in general.
The following is part of the article. For full coverage, please check out here, where you can also find links to interviews with other top IT bloggers.
Weeks ago, ThoughtWorks published a new issue of Technology Radar compiled by its senior tech leaders. It has done a great job to track latest technology and market trends since 2010 (for archives, scroll to the bottom of this page).
In my previous post “Physical is New Virtual,” I mentioned that I would talk about when you will need virtualization and when you don’t. This topic could be a little controversial as we at virtualization community all assume that virtualization is the way to go, which is true in general.
There are however use cases in which virtualization doesn’t make much sense. In the following, I will detail some of these use cases and explain why it doesn’t make much sense to use virtualization. Like everything else, virtualization doesn’t fit all.
Today I read an interesting article “The Efficiency Paradox” in latest Business Week magazine. It reviews the book Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intention Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problem Worse by David Owen. I haven’t read the book but got the main idea of the book from the article.
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.
I went to EMC office at Milford, MA last week for a 5 day training class on Vblock Administration. As you may have known, VCE Vblock is the industry’s first and leading converged infrastructure with compute, network, and storage from industry leaders. For the compute, it uses Cisco UCS. If you have followed my blog, you should know that I have blogged about the UCS emulator and XML management APIs.
After finishing up my reflection of 2011 predictions , it’s time to make my predictions for 2012 as today is the last day of 2011. 
1. Virtualization war will be heated between VMware and Microsoft. The trigger will be the Hyper-V 3.0 which is expected to ship in the middle of 2012 with the Windows 8 server. According to many people, the 3.0 release will bring it on par or better than latest VMware hypervisor.
While checking out the exhibitions at CloudExpo weeks ago, I learned about the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0. Due to my interest in virtualization APIs, I started to look into its management APIs. With no surprise these days, it’s a REST API.
As cloud computing gains momentum, more mega data centers are constructed or to be constructed. You can find cool videos on how companies like Google, Microsoft build and run their state-of-the-art data centers.
In these data centers, computers/storage/switches are packed and wired inside containers in factory before being shipped to a data center. After hooking up power, networking, and cooling, a container of servers are ready to go. These advances have
While 2011 is coming soon, many technologists and medias are busy with predictions for 2011. I got an email from the chief of Cloud Computing Journal Jeremy Geelan (@jg21) for my predictions. Here are my thoughts on the cloud computing for 2011 and beyond:
An operating system (OS) is a piece of software. It manages the computer hardware and provides common services for various applications. With the rise of cloud computing, people may wonder whether the OS is still relevant and what role it will play in the future cloud.
Key Components of OS
There are different flavors of operating systems: from real-time OS, desktop OS, all the way to a mainframe OS. The most recent OS is the Cloud OS.
In general, every OS has these common components:
Depending on the type of OS, you may miss something here or have something extra. For example, an embedded OS may not have a user interface and everything is controlled remotely. For the desktop OS, you may have extra commonly used applications such as a calculator, a calendar, a browser, and so on.
Squeezed Sandwich
As more and more clouds go live, it’s time to think about how they will need to interconnect and interact. InterCloud is a new terminology coined for cloud computing after Internet for networking.
Vint Cerf, the “father” of the Internet, said recently that the cloud is much like networking in 1973 when computer networks couldn’t connect or interact. He called for open standards for cloud computing so that InterCloud can become a reality.
It’s hard to design standards when people are still trying to reach a consensus on defining what a cloud is in the first place! The good news is that as an industry we went through a similar process for the Internet. So we can learn from that experience.
The idea is simple: look at basic building blocks we have for the Internet and think about their equivalent for the InterCloud. Believe it or not, InterCloud and Internet share many common characteristics. The following table summarizes some of these.
IBM recently announced its re-organization around its software and hardware business units. The previously separate business units were merged together as one – the Systems and Software Group led by the former software chief Steve Mills.
You may recall that IBM did not have a dedicated software group until Lou Gerstner created one 15 years ago to centralize all the software businesses into one business unit. This unit has been IBM’s most profitable business. Before that, IBM offered all the software as add-ons to the systems like 390 and AS/400.
Now can we expect IBM to offer hardware systems as add-ons to their software solutions?
Although companies constantly re-organize to streamline their business execution, this reorganization did indicate a big trend is happening in the IT industry. Computer vendors are striving to own vertically-complete stacks: from hardware all the way up to business applications.
The following tables list all the managed object types in VI 3.5, vSphere 4 and 4.1. A short description is provided for each type explaining its major responsibilities.
Note that the managed object types are added in an incremental way. The types in older versions are still supported in newer versions. The complete types in a verion include ones in the correpsonding table plus all the ones in all older version tables.
Hope this post gives you a high level overview of functionalities of the vSphere APIs. Check out other blogs such as best practices (1-5, 6-10) on how to use them in general. And don’t forget my book which introduces them extensively with many read to use samples.
Table 1 Managed Object Types in VI 3.5
Application Provisioning
With the right system configuration in place, it’s time to install the applications. So why not use the same tools we used for the OS and middleware? Do we need yet another set of tools?”
It depends. You can use the same set of tools for middleware to install some applications. The middleware appears like an application to the OS as well. The difference is whether your application is stable enough and whether you need to customize per node. The tools like Puppet can be good for stable applications that can be deployed the same way across all nodes. If your application is still a work in progress and you need flexibility to tweak it, you need more specialized application provisioning tools.
The big technical difference between application and middleware provisioning tools is that application tools push the application to the nodes and remotely change anything as needed. The process is procedural.
The middleware provisioning tools normally have agents on the nodes to pull the software based on the prescribed configuration files. The process is declarative.
Beyond the “push” and “pull” difference, the application provisioning tools can also manage the lifecycles of applications (sometimes called services) distributed on different nodes with a single line of command or code. Given the nature of remote command dispatching framework, the application provisioning tool can do almost anything. If there has to be a limitation, it’s your imagination.
So if you develop applications by yourself, you most likely need application provisioning tools.
Let’s see what tools are there.
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