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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)

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.  Read more... (408 words, estimated 1:38 mins reading time)

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.  Read more... (675 words, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

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.  Read more... (339 words, estimated 1:21 mins reading time)

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  Read more... (610 words, estimated 2:26 mins reading time)

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:  Read more... (290 words, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)

1. The focus of cloud computing will gradually shift from IaaS to PaaS which becomes key differentiator in competition. Developer enablement becomes more important than ever in ecosystem evangelism, full software lifecycle integration, IDE support, API and framework, and etc.
2. Many more mergers and acquisitions (M&As) will take place in cloud space for companies to build stronger cloud portfolio. For big players, it should include dual vertically complete stacks both as services and products. Whoever gets there first will gain enormous advantages over its competitors.

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:

• The kernel, which manages memory, processes, etc.
• Device drivers, which drive different hardware from different vendors.
• User interfaces, including command line shell and Window system.
• File system, which provides a hierarchical way to persist data.
• Security, which authenticates users and protects information.

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  Read more... (950 words, estimated 3:48 mins reading time)

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.  Read more... (314 words, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)

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.  Read more... (896 words, estimated 3:35 mins reading time)

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  Read more... (1338 words, estimated 5:21 mins reading time)