September 2009

There were 6 posts published in September 2009 (this is page 1 of 1).

Cloud in your Pocket

Wyse created an application for  a VMware View / RDP client for the iPhone. An app giving the user full control over his virtual desktop through his / her iPhone. Resulting in the ability to access the cloud from your pocket through your mobile device.

 This concept isn’t new, but Wyse made such an incredible app that it’s really easy to perform actions while connected to your desktop. Easy to use also on such a small screen!

Watch the video created by Richard Garsthagen made at VMworld to see it in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ24A5kE6XM

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Amazon has managed to create a solution that lets your private cloud directly connect to their public cloud via a service called Virtual Private Cloud. Through gateways on both enda secure VPN connection is setup enabling the connection between the two clouds.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

The concept behind this new service is great. It really lets you extent your private cloud with all the nice features that the public cloud has to offer, but then as a private section in the Amazon public EC2 cloud.

This opens up the possibilities of cloud extension such as :

  • Cloud burst; Being able to add extra capacity to your cloud without having to add more hardware to your private cloud
  • Lab Cloud; Not using capacity in your private cloud for testing purposes. Enabling this in a Virtual Private Cloud. 
  • Business Continuity Cloud; In case of a disaster / failure of your private cloud continue your services in a Virtual Privat Cloud.

As you can see there are a lot of possibilities for adding “public private cloud” to your private cloud. Thing is that it needs to be easy to connect to, which in my opinion Amazon did by adding commonly used gateways (Checkpoint, Juniper, Vyatta, etc. ). The thing that worries me is the bandwidth that is needed between the internal private cloud and Amazons Virtual Private Cloud.  Ah well, it’s a first step. Lets see what the future brings us.

Fo more information on the Virtual Private Cloud by Amazon go here.

RedHat launching Broker for Cloud Computing

RedHat has launched a new open-source project in relation to Cloud Computing : the Delta Cloud. It can be seen as a cloud broker between the end-user access device and the various clouds computing solutions today. Currently each cloud provider is introducing it’s own API to interact with. RedHat’s Delta Cloud now tries to fill this gap by introducing a open-source project which will act as a doorway to multiple clouds. Currently public clouds like Amazons EC2 and solutions based on RedHat Enterprise Virtualization based private clouds are supported. Support for VMware based private clouds and Rackspace will be added soon.

For more information about the subject go to the Deltacloud projet site here.

image

Purpose of this Delta Cloud is to protect applications agains “cloud API changes and incompatibilities”. It should create a an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate across the public and private clouds available today. For example : You can start building applications build through the Delta Cloud API in your private cloud. And without any changes move this application to a public cloud. Interoperability in your hands!

vCloud Express: Easy, pay-as-you-go IaaS

VMware today announced the vCloud Express. The new type of service allows customers to get on-demand, pay-as-you-go Infrastructure as a Service. Several leading Virtual Service Providers (VSP) like Terremark, Bluelock, Hosting.com and Melbourne IT have adopted this technology and have currently several products in beta. Look here for more information.

Introducing VMware vCloud™ Express

VMware is today introducing VMware vCloud™ Express, a new class of service that will deliver reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you go compute as a service.  Built on the industry’s leading and most complete virtualization platform, VMware vSphere™, VMware vCloud™ Express will enable customers to start with VMware vCloud™ Express and grow into full enterprise-class cloud environments with highly available and service level guarantees when they are ready to move into production.   Unlike other on-demand cloud solutions, VMware vCloud™ Express will give developers quick access to a pay-as-you-go infrastructure that is compatible with in-house VMware virtualized IT environments—making the interoperability and portability of applications from external development to internal deployment easy. With VMware vCloud™ Express, customers will have the flexibility to leverage IT resources when they need it and pay for only what they use.

VMware vCloud™ Express will be available through many leading service providers including Terremark, BlueLock, Hosting.com, Logica, and Melbourne IT.  These service providers are launching beta releases of their services today.  To try VMware vCloud™ Express, find your preferred provider by going to: www.vmware.com/vcloudexpress.

“By leveraging VMware’s best-in-breed virtualization technologies and our vast experience providing solutions to enterprise and Federal government customers, our vCloud ™Express offering will provide customers a uniquely differentiated, cost-effective platform that meets their IT infrastructure needs,” said Manuel D. Medina, chairman and chief executive officer, Terremark. “Terremark’s vCloud™ Express services will provide our customers pay-as-you-go, on-demand access to enterprise-class infrastructure that is flexible enough to offer unmatched compatibility with their own internal IT platforms.”

What this really means is that you can now connect your virtual infrastructure, running vSphere, with the VSP(s) of your choice. Expansion of your infrastructure is now available just by going to a website, registering with your credit card and selecting your type of service. No more, no less. You connect your vSphere setup with the service have expanded your virtual capacity. Easy does it!

Well not entirely true. It’s still in beta and it won’t be perfect at first. But in general I like the product. It makes Cloud Computing, especially IaaS, more understandable and will help get Cloud Computing out of the “hype cycle” and into the realistic world of IT we live in. It’s not a product supported by one vendor, but also has a broad eco-system of service providers attached to it and it propagates interoperability which, in my opinion, is one of the key factors of making Cloud Computing a success!

Long Distance vMotion by Cisco & VMware

Cisco and VMware are currently working on a new technology called Long Distance vMotion. This makes it possible to move application workloads between multiple datacenters without any downtime. The vMotion technology is already available within VMware vSphere. It is used to migrate one VM from one host to another or wit Storage vMotion move the VMs data from one storage location to another. This with the machine being fully operable and available to the end-user.

image

The changing model of data center management and provisioning allows VMware VMotion to be used for several purposes without violating the application SLAs.

● Data center maintenance without downtime: Applications on a server or data center infrastructure requiring maintenance can be migrated offsite without downtime.
● Disaster avoidance: Data centers in the path of natural calamities (such as hurricanes) can proactively migrate the mission-critical application environments to another data center.
● Data center migration or consolidation: Migrate applications from one data center to another without business downtime as part of a data center migration or consolidation effort.
● Data center expansion: Migrate virtual machines to a secondary data center as part of data center expansion to address power, cooling, and space constraints in the primary data center.
● Workload balancing across multiple sites: Migrate virtual machines between data centers to provide compute power from data centers closer to the clients (“follow the sun”) or to load-balance across multiple sites. Enterprises with multiple sites can also conserve power and reduce cooling costs by dynamically consolidating virtual machines into fewer data centers (automated by VMware Dynamic Power Management [DPM]), another feature enabling the green data center of the future.

In these cases the secondary cloud can be provided by a service provider through a “virtual private cloud” connected to your “internal cloud”. Bringing down the TCO of your server infrastructure, using capacity in the secondary datacenter only when you need it and making use of a pay-per-use model for the consumed capacity. So this technology is a real cloud enabler!

For more information about this technology can be found here. Written by Omar Sultan.

Read the paper on this subject created by Cisco and VMware here.