Gardner: Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security,    performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across   the  globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out   are up  at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

Successful  virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing  complexity when you get beyond the 20   percent or 30 percent level and  expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

So  how to take advantage of the best things  about virtualization? Part of  that means allowing your IT team to have  access to other experienced  support teams, from HP and VMware,  around  the world, 24×7, to help  keep systems up and running. Such support also  allows your IT team to  progress, to learn as they go,  and to be able to  take advantage of  more virtualization benefits over time.

Expert panel

So    how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the    positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an    insurance policy around service and support?

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical.   In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the   technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set  of  folks who would actually look at not just the  reactive support and  even  some of the proactive, but how actually your  entire business is  running according to the ITIL standard.

That    is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with   you on a  type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our   critical and  independent support includes onsite resources from HP   that also include a  lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more   focused on specific  management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

... We  also have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have  with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support.   That can notify HP that you're having a disk  drive failure. Or we  will  call you and say that we know that disk drive is  failing, or  something  on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can   even take  that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating  system.   We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't  care about   the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding  that automation  to  other operating systems. We have installation and  startup services  that  we can actually go out and set up and configure  the hardware and   software at a site.

So    we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run    the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our  proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no  stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and  running.

... One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select,    a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe    planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some  consulting   time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and  migration.  You  may need some performance or you may need some type of   environmental  assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services,  how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is  out on our website.   They saw that the customers who have the  mission-critical services,   reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and  increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem    management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due    to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment,    and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the  study.   It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these   support processes can  certainly help you reduce that downtime.

... I've been in the multi-vendor space  for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all  with HP.

In   2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually  became alliance   partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and  thus began our   support partnership with them. It would only extend  recent in 2005, we   also became an OEM.  We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But    we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're    also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP  also  does  education on these technologies as well. We’ve  trained over   20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had   this  very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have   support  teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same   level of  training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to   their  facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further  do  this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made    available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend    a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and    as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware,  we   are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In    addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the  other   teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and   storage,  and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate   with them  and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the   customer's whole  environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally,   you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so   many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as   Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with    them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end  solution  and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are  different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a  problem,   they can either call in at their local region telephone number  --   whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are    different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in    via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer.    They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their    cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first    they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool,    where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2    engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them   before they  even get to a point of escalation.

If    the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already   collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the   case. That  saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of   server you  have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the   problem  there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as   we can continue  to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the   hardware teams, too, so  we can look at the server and make sure that   the environment is what we  need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we   can also go to Level 3 with  VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We   have a great  relationship with the folks that we work alongside with   and would escalate  calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into   Level 1 at VMware because we’ve  already done all that work, and we are  a  service partner. They'll go  right up to our peers over at VMware  and  then we work together, while  always owning the solution that we  provide  back to the customer.

Another  part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that  we  have a  single customer database. I can give an example. A call  came  into our  Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the   European  folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French   engineer  could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were    offline.

HP Virtual Room

So    we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the    case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and    another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we  had   to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had    already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s    environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The    EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the    French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to   get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready   to  home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we   placed a  call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next   day. So our  counterparts in European support teams picked that up and   worked with  the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what   happened and  prevent it in the future.

We have another  process in HP that can   actually go with top organizations, our  escalation  manager process. I  was lead source for a particular case  where we had a  field team  assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware,    servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite    know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues   by  trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware  at   one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local   office  to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and    network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource    (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our    escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not    only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the  actual   escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track.  We  knew  where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case,  but we  did  finally find was that the customer was on the technological  edge,  and the  "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Site visits

Pat  Lampert is a technical account manager and does site  visits. The   technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re  aware of the   environment. We have the information of your environment  documented  into  the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now  what kind of  server  is this? What’s the firmware?"    We know this because we already have it documented. We could be   calling  them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already   which know  VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And    because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know    that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a  new   build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's    specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further  incidents,   because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your  business.

Gardner: What are some of the the most frequent questions you receive from the field?

Reddy: I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically,    HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers.  It   then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also  adds   any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and  certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

And   one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware  image  is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a  disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5.    As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would  do   is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because  starting   with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to  understand what   the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and    download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done,    hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the   added value  of getting support directly from HP. It was partly   addressed during the  presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware   does have a fine  support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware  Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP,    in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also   offers  our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems   based on HP Blades.    The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the    performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you    will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware   product,  but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in   the  proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with  running   vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that,  we have  a  partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for  support   through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we  have to  go  to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One  other   question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce    problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United    States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a    number of different types of servers already in those configurations,    and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a    problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server    model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able    to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: What other issues are users grappling with?

Reddy: One question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death."    Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to   rule  out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to   see if  it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we   engage the  hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and   fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail  with Sumithra’s  comment there, one of the questions I get  frequently  is what to do if  you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs,  and that  seems to be almost  more common than the Purple Screen of Death.  Some  customers are't aware  that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out  Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in    VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a    hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and    isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with    the ESX host software.

One question that came up ahead  of time is what HP suggests as far as   getting a handle on our  inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in   field testing some new  tools from HP that will be available in January   and February regarding  vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade   and Firmware Analysis  that takes into account the VMware environment on   our Blade systems  which we are working on having ready soon. We have   just completed  field tests.

And the second is a really nifty   Inventory Report  HP has just put together. We're just completing field   tests on that  now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a   small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can    be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead  of   time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold  as a   service to customers.

The   report is really quite nice,  with all sorts of charts and showing   availability of machines and  availability of memory and also disk space.   It's a very nice report.

• Continuous Improvement and Flexibility Are Keys to Successful Data Center Transformation, Say HP Experts
• HP's Liz Roche on Why Enterprise Technology Strategy Must Move Beyond the 'Professional' and 'Consumer' Split
• Well-Planned Data Center Transformation Effort Delivers IT Efficiency Paybacks, Green IT Boost for Valero Energy
• Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transformation as Priority, Says Research
• Data Center Transformation Includes More Than New Systems, There's Also Secure Data Removal, Recycling, Server Disposal

A hierarchical database in Windows Operating System that stores configuration settings and options is termed as Windows Registry. Thus, the registry database mainly has configuration settings for applications, hardware devices, and users. However, at times the corruption or the damage in the Windows registry database occurs due to various reasons like improper system shutdown, virus infection, operating system malfunctioning, file system corruption, human errors, etc. The major issue that arises after Windows Registry corruption is unbootability of Windows-based system and so unavailability of valuable data. In such case, complete backup of your data works as a boon, but in the absence of proper backup or if the backup also fails to restore your data then reliable third-party data recovery software can do the needful.

Let us discuss it through a practical example. While trying to restart your Windows XP based computer, you may encounter one of the following error messages:

Thus, after encountering any of the above mentioned error messages, your system becomes unbootable and in addition the data saved in it becomes inaccessible.

Resolution:

To fix the above error message, you may try the below mentioned steps:

• Try to restore the system state before Windows registry damage.
• Check all the firmware drives, BIOS (Basic Input/Output) settings, hardware, and disk.
• However, if the problem still persists and you still are unable to get access to your data then formatting of hard drive is recommended. Formatting deletes all the data from the hard drive thus, to restore your valuable data you can use an updated backup. However, in unavailability of backup, opting for third-party data recovery software is a wise decision.

There are a large number of data recovery software available online but it is recommended to use only one which has good experience in the field of data recovery and has simple recovery steps. One such software is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery. The efficient data recovery software safely recovers lost/deleted data and also the data which is lost due to formatting or corruption of hard drive. This software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, 2000, and NT (SP4). So, what are you waiting for get your Windows data recovery software now!!!

More Benefits of Flat Rate IT Support?

• Swiftness and Expertise: Outsource all your IT needs to a company who specialize in the field.  Seba Systems has the specific equipment and technical expertise to handle any IT related problem. Thus allowing you to recover faster and prevent future computer outages.

• Reduced Operational Costs: Outsourcing eliminates the need to hire individuals in-house; hence hiring and operational costs are greatly reduced. This is one of the prime advantages of  outsourcing your IT needs to Seba Systems.

Example Scenario:

• Tax & Accounting Service Company Located in Los Angeles, CA

• 10 Employees

• All Workstations Running Windows 7, MS Office 2010 Suite, Accounting software, etc..

• Tax Preparation Software hosted from Central Server

• Office is open Monday-Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm

• Network Printer, Company E-mail, Daily Server backups, Anti-virus, and DSL Internet

• To Support this network and users, an experienced IT professional is required.

• Average Annual Salary: $38,000

Salary does not include Social Security Tax, Payroll Tax, Health Insurance, Sick Leave and Vacation Time Off.  Employee work hours -  40-50 hours per week.

Benefits of Moving to Seba Flat Rate IT Support:

•     Our staff consists of 10 experienced IT professionals ready to help tackle any computer problem you face.

•     We have 24x7 staff that provides proactive network monitoring to our clients.
•     Onsite staff is always available when needed even after regular work hours.
•     We provide unlimited support for any Server or Network related issues.

•     Ten (10) hours per month is included for workstation related issues.
•     All our technicians are covered with $2M Professional Liability Insurance policy.
•     We offer assistance with any new office expansion, relocation or other projects outside the scope at nominal costs.
•     We require NO Social Security Tax, Payroll Tax, Health Insurance, Sick Leave or Vacation Time Off.

Your Total Montly IT Support Cost : $1050 Per Month.

Package Details:

Supersonic: $1050 per month for (10) Workstation, (1) Server, Email Support, Network Support, Daily Server backups, Anti-virus & Voip Phone Support. Includes 10 free onsite visits per month. Click Here For More Info

Gardner: Clearly one of the  requirements  in game development is the need to   ramp up a lot of servers to do the builds, but then they sit there essentially unproductive    between the builds. How did you flatten that out or manage the    requirements around the workload support?

Hart: Typically,  in the early stages of   development, there is a fair amount of testing  going on, and it tends   to be quite small -- the number of staff  involved in it and the number   of build iterations.

Going on,  when the game reaches to the end of its   product life-cycle, we’re  talking multiple game iterations a day and  the  game size has gotten  very large at that point. The number of people   involved in the testing  to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped   on date is into the  hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Gardner: How has virtualization and moving your workloads into different locations evolved over the years?

Hart: We work on the idea of having a central platform for a lot of these    systems. Using virtualization to do that allowed us to scale off at    certain times. Historically, we always had an on-premise VMware platform to do this. Very recently, we’ve been looking at ways to use that resource within a cloud to cut down from some of Capex loading but also remain a little bit more agile with some of the larger titles, especially online games that are coming around.

Gardner: We’re all very familiar with the amazing video games that are being  created nowadays. And SEGA of course is particularly well-known for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise going back a number of years. What are some of the other critical requirements that   you have from a systems architecture perspective when developing these games?

Hart: We have a lot of development studios across the world. We're working on  multiple projects.   We need to ensure that we supply them with a  highly scalable and   reliable solution in order to test, develop, and  produce the game and   the code in time. ... We’re probably   looking at  thousands of individual developers across the world.

... The  first part was dealing with the end of the   process, and that was the  testing and the game release process. Now,   we’re going to be working  back from that. The next big area that we’re   actively involved in is  getting our developers to develop online games   within the hybrid  environment.

So they’re designing the game and   the game’s  back-end servers to be optimal within the VMware  environment.  And  then, also pushing from staging to live is a very  simple process  using  the Cloud Connector.

We're restructuring and   redesigning the  IT systems within SEGA to be more of a development   operations team to  provide a service to the developers and to the   company.

Gardner: How did you start approaching that from your  IT  environment, to build the right infrastructure?

Targeting testing

Hart: One of the first areas we targeted very early on was the last process    in those steps, the testing, arguably one of the most time-consuming    processes within the development cycle.    It happens pretty much all the way through as well to ensure that the    game itself behaves as it should, it’s tested, and the customer gets   the  end-user experience they require.

The biggest technical  goal   that we had for this is being able to move large amounts of data,    un-compiled code, from different testing offices around the world to  the   staff. Historically we had some major issues in securely moving  that   data around, and this is what we started looking into cloud  solutions   for this.

For very, very large game builds, and we're talking game builds above 10 gigabytes,  it ended up being couriered within the country and then overnight file  transfer outside of the country. So, very old school methods.

We    needed both to secure that up to make sure we understood where the   game  builds were, and also to understand exactly which version each of   the  testing offices was using. So it’s gaining control, but also   providing  more security.

Gardner: So we’re seeing a lot more of the role-play games (RPG) types of games, games themselves in the cloud. That must influence   what  you're doing in terms of thinking about your future direction.

Hart: Absolutely. We’ve been looking at things like the hybrid cloud model with VMware as a development platform for our developers. That's really what  we're   working on now. We've got a number of games in the pipeline that  have   been developed on the hybrid cloud platform. It gives the  developers a   platform that is exactly the same and mirrored to what it  would   eventually be in the online space through ISPs like Colt, which should be hosting the virtual cloud platform.

Gaining cost benefits

And one of the benefits we're seeing in the VMware offering is that regardless of what data center in the world is the standard platform, it also allows us to leverage    multiple ISPs, and hopefully gain some cost benefits from that.

Very   early on we were in discussions with Colt and also VMware to understand   what technology stack they were bringing into the cloud. We started   doing a proof of concept with VMware and a professional services company, and together we were    able to come over a proof of concept to distribute our game testing    code, which previously was a very old-school distribution system. So    anything better would improve the process.

There wasn't too much    risk to the company. So we saw the opportunity to have a hybrid cloud    set up to allow us to have an internal cloud system to distribute the    codes to the majority of UK game testers and to leverage high  bandwidth   between all of our sites.

For the game testing studios around Europe and the world, we could use a hosted version of the same service which was up on the Colt Virtual Cloud Director (VCD) platform to supply this to trusted testing studios.

Gardner: When you approach this hybrid cloud model, what about managing that?   What  about having a view into what’s going on so that you know what   aspects  of the activity and requirements are being met and where?

Hart: The virtual cloud environment of vCloud Director has a web portal that allows you to manage a lot of this configuration in a central way. We’re also using VMware Cloud Connector,    which is a product that allows you to move the apps between different    cloud data centers. And doing this allows us to manage it at one    location and simply clone the same system to another cloud data center.

In    that regard, the configuration very much was in a single place for us    in the way that we designed the proof of concept. It actually helped    things, and the previous process wasn’t ideal anyway. So it was a    dramatic improvement.

One of the immediate benefits was  around the design process. It's very   obvious that we were tightening  up security within our build delivery  to  the testing studios. Nothing  was with a courier on a bike anymore,  but  within a secured transaction  between the two offices.

Risk greatly reduced

Also    from a security perspective, we understood exactly what game assets   and  builds were in each location. So it really helped the product    development teams to understand what was where and who was using what,    and so from a risk point of view it’s greatly reduced.

In terms of stats and the amount of data throughput, it’s pretty large, and we’ve been moving terabytes pretty much weekly nowadays. Now we’re going completely live with the distribution network.

So    it’s been a massive success. All of the UK testing studios are using    the build delivery system day to day, and for the European ones we’ve    got about half the testing studios on board that build delivery system    now, and it’s transparent to them.

VMware was very  good at allowing us to understand  the technology and  that's one of the  benefits of working with a  professional services  reseller. In terms  of gotchas,  there weren't too  many. There were a lot  of good surprises that came  up and allowed us  to open the door to a lot  of other VMware  technologies.

Now, we're also looking at alternating a lot of processes within vCenter Orchestrator and other VMware products. They really gave us a good stepping stone into the VMware catalogue, rather than just vSphere, which we were using previously. That was very handy for us.

Gardner: I’d like to just pause here for a second. Your use of vSphere 4.1  must have been an important   stepping stone to be able to have the  dynamic ability to ramp up and   down your environments, your support  infrastructure, but also skills.

Hart: Absolutely. We already have a fair footprint in Amazon Web Services (AWS),    and it was a massive skill jump that we needed to train members of  the   staff in order to use that environment. With the VMware  environment,  as  you said, we already have a large amount of skill set  using vSphere.  We  have a large team that supports our corporate  infrastructure and  we've  actually got VMware in our co-located public  environment as well.  So it  was very, very assuring that the skills  were immediately  transferable.

Gardner: Now that you've done this, any words   of wisdom, 20/20 hindsight, that  you might share with others who are   considering moving more  aggressively into private cloud, hybrid cloud,   and ultimately perhaps  the full PaaS value?

Hart: Just get some hands-on experience and play with the cloud stack from  VMware. It’s inexpensive to have a go and just get to know the  technology stack.

• Germany's Largest Travel Agency Starts a Virtual Journey to Get Branch Office IT Under Control
• Virtualized Desktops Spur Use of 'Bring You Own Device' in Schools, Allowing Always-On Access to Education Resources
  
• From VMworld, Cosmetics Giant Revlon Harnesses the Power of Private Cloud to Produce Impressive Savings and Cost Avoidance
• From VMworld, NYSE Euronext on Hybrid Cloud Vision and Strategy Behind the Capital Markets Community Platform Vertical Cloud
• VMware's vSphere 5 Hits the Streets
• VMware Launches a Developer Edition for Cloud Service

Hi All,

     This is my First blog about VMware vcloud Director...I hope it's usefull to you for better understanding about VMware vCloud Director...

     National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is defined as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned

and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

 

     Cloud Computing is a revolution that will define IT beginning in the second decade of the 21st Century. This new form of computing is perfectly poised to provide solutions to a host of business problems within organizations large and small. Cloud Computing will be the catalyst for the long predicted notion of "ubiquitous computing." So just what "is" Cloud Computing, and why it is so different from what has come before? The following pages will detail four main areas in which Cloud Computing allows businesses to break from the past:

Virtualization – The ability to increase computing efficiency.

 

Democratization of Computing – Bringing enterprise scale infrastructure to small and mid-size businesses.

 

Scalability and Fast Provisioning – Bringing web scale IT at a rapid pace.

 

           Commoditization of Infrastructure – Enabling IT to focus on the strategic aspects of its role.

 

This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of three service models and four deployment models.

 

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In this environment, the capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.

 

2. Software as a Service (SaaS), in which the consumer is given access to software running in the provider’s environment.

 

3Platform as a Service (PaaS), in which the consumer can use the provider’s hardware to run applications created with the specific programming languages and tools supported by that provider.

 

Cloud environments may be separated into four categories based on the consumers they serve:

 

Private cloud—The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

 

 

Community cloud—The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizatio  or a third party and may exist  on premise or off premise.

 

Public cloud—The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

 

Hybrid cloud—The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private,community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds).

 

Many enterprises and IT service providers are developing cloud service offerings for public and private environments.

 

All above given information related to Cloud Computing it's essential for better understand to VMware vCloud Director 1.5...

 

VMware vCloud Director:  The VMware vCloud solution is a suite of products designed to enable an IT organization to build a private cloud on top of a vSphere environment. The product suite consists of vCloud Director 1.5, VMware vShield Edge 5.0 and VMware vCenter chargeback1.6.2.

 

 

vCloud Director a single instance of vCloud Director is known as a “cell.” A cell consists of the vCloud Director components installed on a supported system. In larger implementations, multiple cells can be deployed with a front-end IP load balancer to direct end-user traffic to the correct cell.

vCloud Director stores information about managed objects, users and other metadata in a database. The current release of vCloud Director supports Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server for database platforms. In most environments, the vCloud Director and database components are installed on separate virtual machines for  proper load handling.

vCenter Server :   

 

Each vCloud Director cell can connect to one or more vCenter Server instances to access resources for running workloads. Each attached vCenter Server instance provides resources, such as CPU and memory, which can be  leveraged by vCloud Director.You have to deploy vcloud VM over vCenter by Installabe Package or OVF Appliance , you can donwnlaod trial Package by www.vmware.com.

 

VMware ESXi  hosts:

 

  VMware ESXi hosts provide the compute power for vCloud Director. ESXi hosts are placed in groups of resources, such as clusters or resource pools. These groups and their associated storage are then made available to vCloud Director. Add Esxi Host in Cluster and make a Resource Pool, if you are seeing no option for enabling Resource Pool, edit the cluster setting and select DRS option enable. 

 

VMware vShield Manager:

VMware vShield Manager provides a central point of control for managing, deploying, reporting, logging and integrating vShield as well as third-party security services. Working in conjunction with vCenter Server, VMware vShield Manager enables role-based access control and separation of duties as part of a unified framework for managing virtualization security.

 

vShield Edge secures the perimeter, or edge, around a virtual datacenter. vShield Edge secures the edge of a virtual datacenter with firewalling, VPN, NAT, DHCP, and Web load-balancing capabilities. vShield Edge allows cloud infrastructures to be scaled in a rapid and secure manner.

vCloud Director Components:--->

 

 

 

Gardner: Is  there a  fundamental change in how we approach the data that’s  coming  from IT  systems in order to get a better monitoring and  analysis  capability?

Kumar: The data has to be analyzed in  real-time. By real-time I mean in  streaming mode before the data hits  the disk. You need to be able to  analyze it and make decisions. That's  actually  a very efficient way of  analyzing information. Because you  avoid a  lot of data sync issues and  duplicate data, you can react  immediately  in real time to remediate  systems or provide very early  warnings in  terms of what is going wrong.

The challenges in doing  this streaming-mode analysis are scale and speed. The traditional  approaches with pure relational databases alone are not equipped to  analyze data in this manner. You need new   thinking and new approaches to  tackle this analysis problem.

Gardner: Also for issues of  security, offeners are trying different types of attacks.  So  this needs to be in real-time as well?

Kumar: You might be familiar with advanced persistent threats (APTs).    These are attacks where the attacker tries their best to be  invisible.   These are not the brute-force attacks that we have  witnessed in the   past. Attackers may hijack an account or gain access  to a server, and   then over time, stealthily, be able to collect or  capture the   information that they are after.

These  kinds of threats cannot be   effectively handled only by looking  at  data historically, because  these  are activities that are happening  in  real-time.

These kinds of threats cannot be   effectively  handled only by looking at data historically, because  these  are  activities that are happening in real-time, and there are  very,  very  weak signals that need to be interpreted, and there is a  time  element  of what else is happening at that time.   This too calls for  streaming-mode analysis.

If you notice, for   example, someone  accessing a server, a database administrator accessing a   server for  which they have an admin account, it gives you a certain   amount of  feedback around that activity. But if on the other hand, you   learn  that a user is accessing a database server for which they don’t   have  the right level of privileges, it may be a red flag.

You   need  to be able to connect this red flag that you identify in one   instance  with the same user trying to do other activity in different   kinds of  systems. And you need to do that over long periods of time in   order to  defend yourself against APTs.

Gardner: It's always been difficult to gain accurate analysis of large-scale IT  operations, but  it seems that this is getting more difficult. Why?

Kumar: If you look at trends, there are on average about 10 virtual machines (VMs) to a physical server.    Predictions are that this is going to increase to about 50 to 1,  maybe   higher, with advances in hardware and virtualization  technologies. The increase in density of VMs is a complicating   factor  for capacity planning, capacity management, performance   management,  and security.

In a very short period of time, you have in effect    seen a doubling of the size of the IT management problem. So there are  a   huge number of VMs to manage and that introduces complexity and a  lot   of data that is created.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is another big trend. All analyst research and customer feedback suggests that we're  moving to a hybrid model, where you have some workloads on a public  cloud, some in a private cloud, and some running in a traditional data center. For this, monitoring has to work in a distributed environment, across multiple controlling parties.

Last    but certainly not the least, in a hybrid environment, there is    absolutely no clear perimeter that you need to defend from a security    perspective. Security has to be pervasive.

Given these new    realities, it's no longer possible to separate performance monitoring    aspects from security monitoring aspects, because of the distributed    nature of the problem. ... So change is happening much more quickly and  rapidly   than ever before. At the very least, you need monitoring and  management   that can keep pace with today’s rate of change.

At the very least, you need monitoring and management   that can keep pace with today’s rate of change.

The  basic problem you need to address is one of analysis.   Why is that? As we  discussed earlier, the scale of systems is really   high. The pace of  change is very high. The sheer number of   configurations that need to be  managed is very large. So there's data   explosion here.

Since you  have a plethora of information coming   at you, the challenge is no longer  collection of that information.  It's  how you analyze that information  in a holistic manner and provide   consumable and actionable data to your  business, so that you're able  to  actually then prevent problems in the  future or respond to any  issues  in real-time or in near real-time.

You  need to nail the   real-time analytics problem and this has to be the  centerpiece of any   monitoring or management platform going forward.

Advances in IT

Gardner: So we have the modern data center, we have issues of complexity and    virtualization, we have scale, we have data as a deluge, and we need to    do something fast in real-time and consistently to learn and relearn   and  derive correlations.

It turns out that there are some   advances  in IT over the past several years that have been applied to   solve  other problems that  can be brought to bear here. You've looked  at what's being done with big data and in-memory  architectures, and you've also looked at some of the great work that’s  been done in services-oriented architecture (SOA) and CEP, and you've put these together in an interesting way.

Big data is   about volume, the velocity or the speed with which the data comes in and   out, and the variety or the number of different data types and sources   that are being indexed and managed.

Kumar: Clearly there is a big-data angle to this.

Doug Laney, a META and a Gartner analyst, probably put it best when he highlighted that big data is    about volume, the velocity or the speed with which the data comes in and    out, and the variety or the number of different data types and sources   that are being indexed and managed.

For    example, in an IT management paradigm, a single configuration setting    can have a security implication, a performance implication, an    availability implication, and even a capacity implication in some cases.    Just a small change in data has multiple decision points that are    affected by it. From our angle, all these different types of criteria    affect the big data problem.

Couple of approaches

There  are a couple of approaches.   Some companies are doing some really  interesting work around big-data   analysis for IT operations.

They  primarily focus on gathering the   data, heavily indexing it, and  making it available for search, thereby   derive analytical results. It  allows you to do forensic analysis that   you were not easily able to  with traditional monitoring systems.

The   challenge with that  approach is that it swings the pendulum all the  way  to the other end.   Previously we had a very rigid, well-defined   relational data-models  or data structures, and the index and search   approach is much more of a  free form. So the pure index-and-search type of an approach is sort of the other end of the spectrum.

What    you really need is something that incorporates the best of both  worlds   and puts that together, and I can explain to you how that can  be   accomplished with a more modern architecture. To start with, we  can't do   away with this whole concept of a model or a relationship  diagram or   entity relationship map. It's really critical for us to  maintain that.

What   you really need is something that incorporates the best of both worlds   and puts that together.

I’ll    give you an example. When you say that a server is part of a  network   segment, and a server is connected to a switch in a particular  way,  it  conveys certain meaning. And because of that meaning, you can  now   automatically apply policies, rules, patterns, and automatically    exploit the meaning that you capture purely from that relationship. You    can automate a lot of things just by knowing that.

If you stick    to a pure index-and-search approach, you basically zero out a lot of    this meaning and you lose information in the process. Then it's the    operators who have to handcraft these queries to have to then    reestablish this meaning that’s already out there. That can get very,    very expensive pretty quickly.

Our approach to this big-data   analytics  problem is to take a hybrid approach. You need a flexible and   extensible  model that you start with as a foundation, that allows you   to then  apply meaning on top of that model to all the extended data   that you  capture and that can be kept in flat files and searched and   indexed. You  need that hybrid approach in order to get a handle on this   problem.

Gardner: Why do you need  to think about the architecture that  supports  this big data capability  in order for it to actually work in  practical  terms?

Kumar: You start with a fully  virtualized  architecture, because it allows  you not only to scale  easily, ... but you're able to reach  into these  multiple disparate environments and  capture and analyze and  bring that  information in. So virtualized  architecture is absolutely  essential.

Auto correlate

Maybe    more important is the ability for you to auto-correlate and analyze    data, and that analysis has to be distributed analysis. Because  whenever   you have a big data problem, especially in something like IT    management, you're not really sure of the scale of data that you need  to   analyze and you can never plan for it.

Think of it as applying a MapReduce type of algorithm to IT management problems, so that you can do    distributed analysis, and the analysis is highly granular or specific.    In IT management problems, it's always about the specificity with which    you analyze and detect a problem that makes all the difference  between   whether that product or the solution is useful for a customer  or not.

In  IT management problems, it's always about the specificity with which     you analyze and detect a problem that makes all the difference.

A major advantage of distributed  analytics is that you're freed from   the scale-versus-richness trade-off,  from the limits on the type of   events you can process. If I wanted to  do more complex events and   process more complex events, it's a lot  easier to add compute capacity   by just simply adding VMs and scaling  horizontally. That’s a big  aspect  of automating deep forensic analysis  into the data that you're   receiving.

I want to add a little bit  more about the richness  of  CEP. It's not just around capturing data and  massaging it or  looking  at it from different angles and events. When we  say CEP, we  mean it is  advanced to the point where it starts to capture  how people  would  actually rationalize and analyze a problem.

The  only way   you can automate your monitoring systems end-to-end and get  more of  the  human element out of it is when your CEP system is able to  capture   those nuances that people in the NOC and SOC would normally use to rationalize when they look at events. You not    only look at a stream of events, you ask further questions and then    determine the remedy.

No hard limits

To    do this, you should have a rich data set to analyze, i.e. there    shouldn’t be any hard limits placed on what data can participate in the    analysis and you should have the flexibility to easily add new data    sources or types of data. So it's very important for the architecture to    be able to not only event on data that are is stored in in  traditional   models or well-defined relational models, but also event  against data   that’s typically serialized and indexed in flat file databases.

Gardner: What's the  payoff if you do this  properly?

Kumar: It is no surprise that our  customers don’t come to  us saying we have a big data problem, help us  solve a big data problem,  or we have a complex event problem.

Customers say they are so  interconnected that they want these managed  on a common platform.

Their   needs are really around  managing security, performance and   configurations. These are three  interconnected metrics in a virtualized   cloud environment. You can't  separate one from the other. And   customers say they are so  interconnected that they want these managed   on a common platform. So  they're really coming at it from a   business-level or outcome-focused  perspective.

What AccelOps   does under the covers, is apply  techniques such as big-data analysis,   complex driven processing, etc.,  to then solve those problems for the   customer. That is the key payoff --  that customer’s key concerns that I   just mentioned are addressed in a  unified and scalable manner.

An   important factor for customer  productivity and adoption is the  product  user-interface. It is not of  much use if a product leverages  these  advanced techniques but makes the  user interface complicated --  you end  up with the same result as before.  So we’ve designed a UI that’s very easy to use, requires one or two clicks to get the    information you need; a UI-driven ability to compose rich events and   event  patterns. Our customers find this very valuable, as they do not   need  super-specialized skills to work with our product.

Key metrics

What  we've built is a platform that monitors data center performance,    security, and configurations. The three key interconnected metrics in    virtualized cloud environments. Most of our customers really want that    combined and integrated platform. Some of them might choose to start    with addressing security, but they soon bring in the performance    management aspects into it also. And vice versa.

And we take a  holistic cross-domain perspective -- we span server, storage, network,  virtualization and applications. What   we've really built is a common  consistent platform that addresses  these  problems of performance,  security, and configurations, in a  holistic  manner and that’s the main  thing that our customers buy from  us today.

Free trial download

Most of our customers start off with the free trial download. It’s a very simple process. Visit www.accelops.com/download and download a virtual appliance trial that you can install in your data center within your firewall very quickly and easily.

Getting    started with the AccelOps product is pretty simple. You fire up the    product and enter the credentials needed to access the devices to be    monitored. We do most of it agentlessly, and so you just enter the    credentials, the range that you want to discover and monitor, and that’s    it. You get started that way and you hit Go.

We  do most of it agentlessly, and so you just enter the   credentials,   the range that you want to discover and monitor, and that’s   it.

The  product then   uses this information to determine what’s in the  environment. It   automatically establishes relationships between them,  automatically   applies the rules and policies that come out of the box  with the   product, and some basic thresholds that are already in the  product that   you can actually start measuring the results. Within a  few hours of   getting started, you'll have measurable results and  trends and graphs   and charts to look at and gain benefits from it.

Gardner: It   seems that as we move toward cloud and mobile that at some point  or   another organizations will hit the wall and look for this  automation   alternative.

Kumar: It’s about automation and distributed   analytics and about getting very  specific with the information that you   have, so that you can make  absolutely more predictable, 99.9 percent   correct of decisions and do  that in an automated manner. The only way   you can do that is if you  have a platform that’s rich enough and   scalable and that allows you to  then reach that ultimate goal of   automating most of the management of  these diverse and disparate   environments.

That’s something  that's sorely lacking in products   today. As you said, it's all  brute-force today. What we have built is a   very elegant, easy-to-use  way of managing your IT problems, whether  it’s  from a security  standpoint, performance management standpoint, or   configuration  standpoint, in a single integrated platform. That's   extremely  appealing for our customers, both enterprise and cloud-service    providers.

I also want to take this opportunity to encourage  those of your listening or reading this podcast to come meet our team at  the 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference, Dec. 5-9, at Booth 49 and  learn more. AccelOps is a silver sponsor of the conference.

• A Technical Look at How Parallel Processing Brings Vast New Capabilities to Large-Scale Data Analysis
• Why Data and Information Management Remain Elusive After Decades if Deployments and How to Fix It
• Cloud and SaaS Force a Rethinking of Integration and Middleware as Services for Services
• Delivering Data Analytics Through Workday SaaS ERP Applications Empowers Business Managers at Actual Decision Points

The stakes have never been  higher for keeping applications and business up and running.

• Continuous Improvement and Flexibility Are Keys to Successful Data Center Transformation, Say HP Experts
• HP's Liz Roche on Why Enterprise Technology Strategy Must Move Beyond the 'Professional' and 'Consumer' Split
• Well-Planned Data Center Transformation Effort Delivers IT Efficiency Paybacks, Green IT Boost for Valero Energy
• Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transforation as Priority, Says Research
• Data Center Transformation Includes More Than New Systems, There's Also Secure Data Removal, Recycling, Server Disposal

Gardner: We have heard a lot about IT as a service. How have you at Southwest been able to  keep IT squarely in the role of enablement?

Young: As we are taking a look and trying to be what travelers want in an    airline, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve Southwest    Airlines and make it better for our customers, that's really where virtualization and IT as a service comes into play.

People want to be able to get on Southwest.com,   make a reservation, log on to their Rapid Rewards or our Loyalty   Program, and they  want to be able to do it when they want to do it, when   they need to  do it, from wherever they are. And it’s just great to be   able to  provide that service.

We provide that to them at any   point in  time that they want in a reliable manner. And that's really   what it  gets right down to -- to make the functions and the solutions   that we  provide ubiquitous so people don’t really need to think about   anything  other than, "I need to do this and I can do it now."

At your fingertips

Gardner: I travel quite a bit and it seems to me that things have changed a lot  in the last few years.   One of the nice things is that information  seems to be at your   fingertips more than ever. I never seem to be out  of the loop now as a   traveler. I can find out changes probably as  quickly as the folks at the   gate.

So how has this transfer of  information been possible?  How  have you been able to keep up with the  demands and the expectations  of  the travelers?

Young: If we talk about information and the  flow of  information through  applications and services, it really starts  to  segment the core  technical aspects of that so the customer and our   employees don’t  really need to think about it. When they want to get  the  flight at the  gates, the passenger is on a flight leg, etc., they  can  go ahead and  get that at any moment in time.

... The same is true   of how we provide IT as a  service. What we want to be able to do is   provide IT whenever they  want it, whenever they need it, at the right   cost point, and to meet  their needs. We've got some of the best   customers in the world and  they like to do things for themselves. We   want to allow them to do  that for themselves and be able to provide our   employees the same.

Gardner: How in  IT have you been able to create common infrastructures,  reduce   redundancy, and then yet still ramp up to meet all your  requirements?

Significant volume

Young: What   we've been able to do and how we have been able to meet some  of those   challenges is through a number of different VMware products.  One of the   core products is VMware itself, if we talk about vSphere, vMotion, etc., to be able to provide that virtualization. You can get a 1-to-10 virtualization depending on which type of servers and blades you're using, which helps us on the infrastructure side of the house   to  maintain that and have the storage, physical, and electrical   capacity  in our data centers.

But it also allows us, as we're moving, consolidating, and expanding these different data centers, to be able to move that virtual machine (VM) seamlessly between points. Then, it doesn’t matter where it’s running.

That    allows us the capacity. So if we have a fare sale and I need to add    capacity on some of our services, it gives our us and our team that run    the infrastructure the ability to bring up new services on new VMs    seamlessly. It plugs right into how we're doing things, so that internal    cloud allows us not to experience blips.

It's been a great add for us from a capacity management perspective and being able to get the right capacity, with the right    applications, at the right time. It allows us to manage that in such a    way that it’s transparent to our end-users so they don’t notice any  of   this is going on in the background, and the experience is not  different.

...  We started our virtualized   environments about 18 months ago. We went  from a very small amount of   virtualization to what we coined our  Server 2.0 strategy, which was   really the combination of  commodity-based hardware blades with VMware on   that.

And that  allowed us last year in the first and second   quarter to grow from  several hundred VMs to over several thousand, which   is where we're at  today in the production environment. If you talk   about production,  development, and test, production is just one of those   environments.

It  has allowed us to scale that very rapidly   without having to add a  thousand physical servers. And it has been a   tremendous benefit for us  in managing our power, space, and cooling in   the data center,    along with allowing our engineers who are doing the day-to-day work  to   have a single way to manage it, deploy, and move stuff around even   more  automatically. They don’t have to mess with that anymore, VMware   just  takes care of the different products that are part of the VMware   Suite.

Gardner: And your  confidence, has it risen to the  level where you're looking at  70, 80,  90, even more percent of  virtualization? How do you expect to  end that  journey?

Ready for the evolution

Young: I would love to be at 100 percent virtualized. That would be   fantastic.  I think unfortunately we still have some manufacturers and   software  vendors -- and we call them vendors, because typically we   don’t say  partners -- who decide they are not going to support their   software  running in the virtualized environment. That can create   problems,  especially when you need to keep some of those systems up 24 x   7, 365,  with 99.95 percent availability.

We're hoping that    changes, but the goal would be to move as much as we can, because if I    take a look at virtualization, we are kind of our internal private    cloud. What that’s really doing is getting us ready for the evolution    that’s going to happen over the next, 5, 7, or 10 years, where you may    have applications and data deployed out in a cloud, a virtual private cloud, public cloud if the security becomes good enough, where you've got to bring all that stuff together.

If you need to have huge amounts of capacity and two applications are not co-located that need to talk back and forth, you've got to be much more  efficient   on the calls and the communications and make that seamless  for the   customer.

This is giving us the platform to start  learning more   and start developing those solutions that don’t need to  be collocated in   a data center or in one or two data centers, but can  really be pushed   wherever it makes sense. That could be from wherever  the most efficient   data center is from a green technology perspective,  use the least   electricity and cooling power, to alternate energy, to  what makes sense   at the time of the year.

That is a huge add  and a huge win for  us  in the IT community to be able to start  utilizing some of that   virtualization and even across physical  locations.

Gardner: Is there a   centralization feature to this that also is paying dividends?

Young: That’s a huge cornerstone of the suite of tools that we've been able   to  get through VMware is being able to deploy custom solutions and  even   some of the off-the-shelf solutions on a standard platform,  standard   operating systems, standard configurations, standard  containers for the   web, etc. It allows us to deploy that stuff within  minutes, whereas it   used to take engineers manually going to configure  each thing   separately. That’s been a huge savings.

The other  thing is, once   you get the configuration right and you have it  automated, you don’t   have to worry about people taking some human  missteps. Those are going   to happen, and you've got to go back and  redo something. That   elimination of error and the speed at which we  can do that is helping.   As you expand your server footprints and the  number of VMs and servers   you have without having to add to your  staff, you can actually do more   with the same number of or fewer  staff.

Gardner: How you feel about desktop virtualization?

Young: What’s really driven us to take a look  at  it is that around our  environment we can control security on virtual   desktops, etc., very  clearly, very quickly and deliver that in a great   service.

New mobile devices

The    other thing that’s leading to this is, not just what we talked about   in  security, is the plethora of brand new mobile devices -- iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Galaxy. HP has a new device. RIM has a new device. We need to be able to deliver our services in a  more   ubiquitous manner. The virtual desktop allows us to go ahead and   deliver  some of those where I don’t need to control the hardware. I   just  control the interface, which can protect our systems virtually,   and it’s  really pretty neat.

I was on one of my devices the   other day and  was able to go in via virtual desktop that was set up to   be able to use  some of the core systems without having all that stuff   loaded on my  machine, and that was via the Internet. So it worked out   phenomenally  well.

Now, there are some issues that you have to   do depending on  whether you're doing collocation and facility, but you   can easily get  through some of that with the right virtualization  setup  and networking.

• From VMworld, Cosmetics Giant Revlon Harnesses the Power of Private Cloud to Produce Impressive Savings and Cost Avoidance
• From VMworld, NYSE Euronext on Hybrid Cloud Vision and Strategy Behind the Capital Markets Community Platform Vertical Cloud
• VMware's vSphere 5 Hits the Streets
• VMware Launches a Developer Edition for Cloud Service
• Priming the Private Cloud Pump, HP Releases VirtualSystem for VMware at VMworld

Generally I.T. folk, whether in Storage, Virtualization, Change Management or Project Management love the use of acronyms and synonyms to express key concepts amongst each other. What other industry would allow an individual to spurt a line such as “Have SOX seen the BCP and CAB approval for our VDC’s DR SAN and will this then be added to the CMDB by CoB today?” without immediately flinching or bringing in a logopaedics specialist for help. More often than not, I.T. folk have also used these synonyms and acronyms as smokescreens to prevent outsiders from realizing “well this I.T. stuff is actually quite easy to understand and quite straightforward”.

Hence no surprise that when the seemingly simple concept of Cloud Computing took off, so did the emergence of an abundance of acronyms and synonyms reaping a new breed of I.T. professionals who were the only ones that could correctly understand them i.e. ‘The Cloud Specialist’. Despite this, the beauty of the Cloud (or as most people are starting to realise the synonym for the Internet) is that it not only encompasses the I.T.industry and their business demands but also the average end user who’s only experience with I.T. is their iPhone and its App Store. So while EMC’s extensive airport advertising may have initially confused a lot of tourists into thinking that the ‘Journey to the Cloud’ was a slogan for an up and coming budget airline, the general public are certainly now becoming aware of ‘The Cloud’. End users are now bombarded with Clouds from Microsoft claiming that Windows 7 is your ‘Path to the Cloud’, Pizza Restaurants offering free access to ‘the Cloud’ and Apple iPhone owners having iCloud enforced upon them (no comment on the security issues of your email contacts and personal photos being uploaded to Apple’s database).  So while the idea of Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds become more familiar and understood even amongst the masses, it’s with surprise that I often find people within the IT industry who are still unaware or unsure of Cloud Service acronyms such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Maas, Caas or Xaas.

To understand why there are so many acronyms with the Cloud, it is important to appreciate that the Cloud has a number of services which each of these classify. The first of these, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is when the consumer does not deal with the infrastructure, instead the responsibility of the equipment is outsourced to the Service Provider. The Service Provider not only owns the equipment but will also be responsible for its running and maintenance, where the consumer will be charged on a ‘pay as you use’ basis. IaaS is often offered as a horizontally integrated service that includes not only the server and storage but also the connectivity domains. For example while the consumer may deploy and run their own applications and operating systems, the Iaas provider would typically provide the replication, backup and archiving (Storage), the powerful computing requirements (Server) or the network load balancing and firewalls (Connectivity domains).

PaaS provides the capability for consumers to have applications deployed without the burden and cost of buying and managing the hardware and software.  In other words these are either consumer created or acquired web applications or services that are entirely accessible from the Internet. Usually created with programming languages and tools supported by the service provider these web applications enable the consumer to have control over the deployed applications and in some circumstances the application-hosting environment but without the complexity of the infrastructure i.e. the servers, operating systems or storage. Offering a quick time to market and services that can be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web, PaaS facilitates immediate business requirements such as application design, development and testing at a fraction of the normal cost.

Software as a service (SaaS) is the ability for a consumer to use on demand software that is provided by the service provider via a thin client device e.g. a web browser over the Internet. With SaaS the consumer has not only no management or control of the infrastructure such as the storage, servers, network, or operating systems, but also no control over the application’s capabilities. Culled from what were originally referred to as (ASPs) Application Service Providers, SaaS is a quick and efficient delivery model for key business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), HR and payroll.

Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) is at present still an emerging piece of the Cloud jigsaw but an integral one for the future. In the same way that businesses realised that their infrastructure and key applications required monitoring tools that would ensure the proactive elimination of any downtime risks, Monitoring as a Service provides the option to offload a large majority of those costs by having it run as a service as opposed to a fully invested in house tool. So for example by logging on to a thin client or central web based dashboard which is hosted by the service provider, the consumer can monitor the status of their key applications regardless of location. Add the advantages of an easy set up and purchasing process and MaaS could be a key pay as you use model for the de-risking of applications that are initially being migrated to the Cloud.

Communication as a Service (CaaS), enables the consumer to utilize Enterprise level VoIP, VPNs, PBX and Unified Communications without the costly investment of purchasing, hosting and managing the infrastructure. With the service provider responsible for the management and running of these services also, the other advantage the consumer has is that they needn’t require their own trained personnel, bringing significant OPEX as well as CAPEX costs.

Finally XaaS or ‘anything as a service’ is the delivery of IT as a Service through hybrid Cloud computing and is a reference to either one or a combination of Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructureas a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) Communications as a service (CaaS) or monitoring as a service (Maas). XaaS is quickly emerging as a term that is being readily recognized as services that were previously separated on either private or public Clouds are becoming transparent and integrated.

So as the term ‘The Cloud’ finally breaks into the minds of the masses and takes meaning, the next phase will be to take the numerous services that are offered by the Cloud, mature them and enable consumers to fully understand their benefits. From Enterprise to SMB to end users, Cloud Services will inevitably bring immense benefits and cost savings. All that is now required is for consumers to know what all those unnecessarily complicated acronyms mean!

Some nice Labs

LAB 4 - Failover

In this lab we tested fault tolerant on a VM with no down time, is setup in a cluster which is the boundary. If the cluster fails fault tolerant will also fail.

We tested also a failover on vCenter if the disaster hits the fan, vCenter Heartbeat can solve the problem. With heartbeat you build a vCenter and SQL cluster which is active/passive. Especially interesting is to user heartbeat when you use stretch clustering.

And lastly we test backup software from VMware which is simple and easy to use, perhaps not have all the function that the big backup software has but for smaller/mid company’s it good enough. Its use the snapshot function so you can user incremental and you can ship the data to NFS store like a Datadomain backup disk device unit.

LAB 5 - SRM

Interesting product, what is nice in the new version is that you can run all the tests, failover and failback which are great. You have the replication functionality or you use the storage replication software. Also get a clear view if the VM is protected or not again a disaster.

Another interesting topic is DA versus DR.

DA: Disaster avoidance for VMware is stretch clustering

DR: Disaster Recovery for VMware is SRM.

LAB 22 - VMware View

Great product, easy to user for the user and VMware has built a complete concept around this.

In this lab we had a look at the broke, composer, view manager and the security gateway.

The security gateway was a nice setup with no AD connection and striped down Windows server.

And you can now run View on most of the device out there.

Lab 9 - Performance troubleshooting

In this lab we look at some of the most commonly user troubleshooting scenarios and one of the cool thing was the storage DRS to spread the datastore load and the IOPS setting on the VM disks.

Gardner: Why virtualize mission-critical applications, things like police and fire support, first?

Sindicic: First of all, it’s always been challenging in disaster recovery and business continuity. Keeping those things in mind, our CAD/RMS systems for the police center and also our fire staffing   system were  high on the list for protecting. Those are Tier 1   applications that we  want to be able to recover very quickly.

We thought the best way to do that was to virtualize them and set us up for future business continuity and true failover and disaster recovery.

So    I put it to my CIO, and he okayed it. We went forward with VMware,    because we saw they had the best, most robust, and mature applications    to support us. Seeing that our back-end was SQL for those two systems, and seeing that we were just going to embark  on  a  brand-new upgrading of our CAD/RMS system, this was a prime time  to   jump on the bandwagon and do it.

Also, with our back-end storage being NetApp, and NetApp having such an intimate relationship with VMware, we decided to go with VMware.

Gardner: So you were able to accomplish your virtualization and also gain that disaster recovery and business continuity benefit, but you pointed out  the time was of the essence. How long did  it take you?.

Sindicic: Back in early fiscal year 2010, I started doing all the research. I    probably did a good nine months of research before even bringing this    option to my CIO. Once I brought the option up, I worked with my    vendors, VMware and NetApp, to obtain best pricing for the solution that    I wanted.

I started implementation in October and completed  the   process in March. So it took some time. Then we went live with our    CAD/RMS system on May 10, and it has been very robust and running    beautifully ever since.

Gardner: Tell me about your IT operations.

Sindicic: I have our finance system, an Oracle-based system, which consists of an Oracle database server and Apache applications server, and another reporting server that runs on a    different platform. Those will all be virtual OSs sitting in one of my    two clusters.

For the police systems, I have a separate cluster    just for police and fire. Then, in the regular day-to-day business,  like   finance and other applications that the city uses, I have a  campus   cluster to keep those things separated and to also relieve any  downtime   of maintenance. So everything doesn’t have to be affected if  I'm moving   virtual servers among systems and patching and doing  updates.

Other applications

We’re also going to be virtualizing several other applications, such as a citizen complaint application called Coplogic. We're going to be putting that in as well into the PD cluster.

The version of VMware that we’re using is 4.1, we’re using ESXi server. On the PD cluster, I have two ESXi servers and on my campus, I have three. I'm using vSphere 4, and it’s been really wonderful having a good handle on that control.

Also, within my vSphere, vCenter server,    I've installed a bunch of NetApp storage control solutions that allow    me to have centralized control over one level snapshotting and    replication. So I can control it all from there. Then vSphere gives me    that beautiful centralized view of all my VMs and resources being consumed.

It’s    been really wonderful to be able to have that level of view into my    infrastructure, whereas when the things were distributed, I hadn’t had    that view that I needed. I’d have to connect one by one to each one of    my systems to get that level.

Also, there are some things that we’ve learned during this whole thing. I went from two VLANs to four VLANs. When looking at your traffic and the type of traffic    that’s going to traverse the VLANs, you want segregate that out big  time   and you’ll see a huge increase in your performance.

The other thing is making sure that you have the correct type of drives in your storage. I knew that right off the bat that IOPS was going to be an issue and then, of course, connectivity. We’re using  Brocade switches to connect to the backend fiber channel drives for the  server VMs, and for lower-end storage, we’re using iSCSI.

Gardner: And how has the virtualization efforts within all of that worked out?

Sindicic: It’s been wonderful. We’ve had wonderful disaster recovery capabilities. We have snapshotting abilities. I'm snapshotting the primary database server and application server,    which allows for snapshots up to three weeks in primary storage and   six  months on secondary storage, which is really nice, and it has   served us  well.

We already had a fire drill, where one report   was  accidentally deleted out of a database due to someone doing   something --  and I'll leave it at that. Within 10 minutes, I was able   to bring up  the snapshot of the records management system of that   database.

The  user was able to go into the test database,   retrieve his document, and  then he was able to print it. I was able to   export that document and  then re-import it into the production system.   So there was no downtime.  It literally took 10 minutes, and everybody   was happy.

... We   are seeing cost benefits now. I don’t have  all the metrics, but we’ve   spun up six additional VMs. If you figure  out the cost of the Dells,    because we are a Dell shop, it would cost anywhere between $5,000 and    $11,000 per server. On top of that, you're talking about the cost of   the  Microsoft Software Assurance for that operating system. That has saved a lot of money right there   in  some of the projects that we’re currently embarking on, and for the    future.

We have several more systems that I know are going to  be   coming online and we're going to save in cost. We’re going to save  in   power. Power consumption, I'm projecting, will slowly go down over  time   as we add to our VM environment.

As it grows and it becomes more robust, and it will, I'm looking forward to a large cost savings over a 5- to 10-year period.

Better insight

Gardner: Was there anything that surprised you that you didn’t expect, when  you moved from the physical to the virtualized environment?

Sindicic: I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of reporting  that  I could  physically see, the graph, the actual metrics, as we were   ongoing. As  our CAD system came online into production, I could  actually  see  utilization go up and to what level.

I was  also pleasantly   surprised to be able to see to see when the backups would  occur, how it   would affect the system and the users that were on it.  Because of  that,  we were able to time them so that would be the  least-used hours  and what  those hours were. I could actually tell in  the system when it  was the  least used.

It was real time and it  was just really  wonderful to  be able to easily do that, without having  to manually  create all the  different tracking ends that you have to do  within Microsoft Monitor or anything like that. I could do that completely independently of the OS.

Gardner: We're hearing a lot here at VMworld about  desktop virtualization as well. I don’t know whether you’ve looked at  that, but it seems  like  you've set yourself up for moving in that  direction. Any thoughts   about mobile or virtualized desktops as a future  direction for you?

On the horizon

Sindicic: I see that most definitely on the horizon. Right now, the only thing    that's hindering us is cost and storage. But as storage goes down, and    as more robust technologies come out around storage, such as solid  state, and as the price comes down on that, I foresee that something  definitely coming into our environment.

Even here at the conference I'm taking a bunch of VDI and VMware View sessions, and I'm looking forward to hopefully starting a new project with virtualizing at the desktop level.

This    will give us much more granular control over not only what’s on the    user’s desktop, but patch management and malware and virus protection,    instead of at the PC level doing it the host level, which would be    wonderful. It would give us really great control and hopefully decreased    cost. We’d be using a different product than probably what we’re  using   right now.

If you're actually using virus protection at  the  host  level, you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck and  you  won't  have any impact on the PC-over-IP. That’s probably the way we we'll go, with PC-over-IP.

Right    now, storage, VLANing all that has to happen, before we can even   embark  on something like that. So there's still a lot of research on my   part  going on, as well as finding a way to mitigate costs, maybe   trade-in,  something to gain something else. There are things that you   can do to  help make something like this happen.

... In city government, our IT  infrastructure   continues to grow as people are laid off and  departments want to   automate more and more processes, which is the  right way to go. The IT   staff remains the same, but the  infrastructure, the data, and the   support continues to grow. So I'm  trying to implement infrastructure   that grows smarter, so we don’t  have to work harder, but work smarter,  so that we can do a lot more with less.

VMware   sure does allow  that with centralized control in management, with   being able to  dynamically update virtual desktops, virtual servers, and   the patch  management and automation of that. You can take it to   whatever level of  automation you want or a little in between, so that   you can do a little  bit of check and balances with your own eyes,   before the system goes off  and does something itself.

Also, with   the high availability and  fault tolerance that VMware allows, it's   been invaluable. If one of my  systems goes down, my VMs automatically   will be migrated over, which is a  wonderful thing. We’re looking to   implement as much virtualization as  we can as budget will allow.

• Case Study: CharterCARE Health Partners Leverages Cloud and VDI to Aid Digital Records Management and Regulatory Compliance
• Tampa Bay Rays Hit Home Run with Virtualization that Enables Tablet Applications Delivery in the Field
• VMware's Carl Eschenbach on the Scope and Depth of Cloud Computing and How CIOs Will Have to Adapt
• VMworld Showcase: How ADP Dealer Services benefits from VMware View in its expanding use of desktop virtualization
• VMworld Case Study: City of Pittsburgh's IT success and the beneficial synergy between virtualized servers and desktops
  
• From VMworld, Cosmetics Giant Revlon Harnesses the Power of Private Cloud to Produce Impressive Savings and Cost Avoidance

Smörrebröd ska det vara...

Ja då var resan igång och tåget ner gick som en dans. En ett viss spel av wordfeud förekom...

Och så var vi oss själv för en stund....