Ontic Oren

That would be William Shakespeare or Stephen Sondheim.

The IT team and developer team look more and more like the Sharks and Jets or the House of Montague and Capulet every day.

Check out some quotes from VMworld this week:

The SpringSource CTO is on stage, hopefully to explain this. Unfortunately people start to leave as soon as they see code. — Virtualization.info Day 2 liveblogging

And just one from the many on twitter:

Can’t help notice the number of attendees leaving the keynote as VMware demos SpringSource :-( — @markbowker

Over the past 40-50 years, the world has evolved an order to the IT world.  Developers create, IT deploys, Ops manages, and we’ve got vendors that cater to each.  Each silo has it’s own jargon, procurement process, goals, etc.  Each has it’s own self-reinforcing feedback loops strengthing the status quo, from press to analysts, to the vendors themselves.  IT is a $1.66 trillion business.  Down from previous years.  Trillion. Larger than 50% of the annual US budget.

The most brilliant thing VMware has managed to do is introduce an amazing new (or really old) technology, without disrupting the process in any way.  Each silo still gets to work the way they have in the past.  Macro processes remain in place.  Developers still code.  IT still provisions stuff.  Ops still manages stuff.  Some of it just is running on other stuff now.  VMware enables IT to deliver what they’ve been promising for years.  Finally, IT teams are able to deliver servers at a pace, reliability and capabilities that they’ve promised for decades.  For once, IT is a rock star!  Frankly, if you’re IT team isn’t using some kind of virtualization, you may want to look real close at that team.

PaaS, though, is a whole different beast.  When you start talking about letting developers code AND auto-deploy, it begs the question: what are those IT guys gonna do?  Sure, some still need to be around.  But not 1 for every 50 vms.  If this actually catches on, it might get as low as 1 for every 500, or even 5000 VMs.  That’s disruptive to the very people who’ve built the 1.66 trillion business.  Of course they’re gonna walk out of the room – what possible value is in it for them?

Show that same demo to a room full of Java developers though – say at the next JavaOne (er, oracle world?  What is the conference for Java developers these days?), and see what kind of reaction you get.  If our experience with ruby developers is any indication, I’d bet they’ll get a standing ovation.

As easy as using Heroku is, setting up DNS seems to be one of the trickier parts. Heroku has some decent instructions, but the dirty secret is that their required config is actually in violation of the DNS RFC.  While I’m sure they’re trying to fix this, I’ve been running this for a few months and it does actually work, email and all.

Show don’t tell, so here’s a 2 minute screencast that walks through the process of setting it up.  For those who want the one piece of magic: when you want to setup your domain to point to heroku so that http://yourdomain.com actually works, the trick is in the “host” field of the CNAME, put yourdomain.com. <— NOTICE that there is a trailing period there.  Put your domain name, plus a period at the end of it, and you should be good.

Configure Go Daddy DNS & Heroku from Oren Teich on Vimeo.

Rich Miller (CEO of Replicate) posted about our search for some larger ESX shops.  If you’ve got >40 ESX servers in one virtual center instance, and are interested in a 1 year free subscription to RDA, please get in touch!

We’ve been encouraged by the response to the announcement of RDA 1.0.  The number of visits, registrations and people downloading the free evaluation version of the product has been terrific.  

But we’re not yet satisfied: We are particularly interested in finding organizations with sizable VI3 virtualized datacenters who would like to evaluate the datacenter analyzer.  The majority of our users have indicated that the number of ESX hosts under management by Virtual Center (or should I say vCenter ?) is 20 or less.  We’d like to find the installations with 40 or more ESX hosts under management.  

To that end, we’re extending to three organizations with more than 40 ESX hosts in their datacenter, the opportunity to become a Replicate Technologies design partner.  In exchange for providing us with modest amount of feedback on your experience, design partners will receive one year’s free subscription for the full compliment of servers in the datacenter.  If you’re interested, give us a call or use the sales inquiry submission form here.

New research report out from EMA today that’s well worth looking into.  SearchCIO-Midmarket.com has a great article on it.

Behind these figures are management challenges that companies are only starting to recognize, let alone address, the surveys found. Only 24% of respondents to an Enterprise Management Associates Inc. survey of 627 corporate IT decision makers published last April said they thought virtualization makes security administration easier — as compared with 42% in 2006. Just 32% said software control and distribution is easier in a virtualized environment, down from 58% two years ago. And configuration management numbers plummeted from 58% to 32%.

That’s exactly one of the problems we set out to solve with RDA.  We recognize that administrators are being thrust into administrative positions that challenge them to broaden their expertise dramatically.  Managing a virtualized datacenter requires deep network, storage, server, and virtualization skills, often in very short supply.  RDA helps, by providing clear guidance and prescriptive remediation to help administrators find and fix problems in their datacenter quickly and easily.

Another favorite quote:

ndeed, everything from performance and capacity management to troubleshooting and security administration becomes more difficult in a volatile, multilayered and often heterogeneous virtualized environment, Mann said. 

And finally:

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of software tools that manage virtual and physical environments or multi-platform virtualized installations in an integrated fashion, the EMA report stated. Only 21% of management tools in use can integrate effectively with other enterprise system management tools, according to EMA’s Mann.

If this sounds like you, go check out RDA!

It’s a sign of just how great and busy we’ve been that it took me 4 days to post this!

As of Monday, November 11th, Replicate’s first product – Replicate Datacenter Analyzer – is officially launched.  

What is RDA? From our website:

Over 60% of downtime, security, and performance issues are due to configuration errors, and virtualization is only going to drive that percentage up. To ensure proper virtual datacenter operation, it is critical to have a holistically configured datacenter based on industry best practices.

Combining empirical data from our IP network probes with configuration information obtained from other individual datacenter elements, RDA constructs a unified view of how the entire datacenter works across different administrative domains. Ensuring that administrators can quickly see the relevant information, RDA “knowledge packs” apply industry defined best-practices to highlight latent problems and overt mis-configuration in a virtualized datacenter that can impact security, reliability, or even downtime.

Go check it out!  We’ve got a free trial, screencasts, and all sorts of other goodies on our website.

Over at my day job, we’re conducting a quick little survey to help us get a better handle on the configuration problems that people are running into setting up and managing a virtualized datacenter.  We are looking for feedback on the challenges that frustrate administrators in a virtualized world, and then some specifics on areas that may be of particular pain such as IP management, network configuration, etc.

The survey should take < 5 minutes, so if you’re reasonably technical, have played with or administered virtualization (citrix, vmware, microsoft, KVM, whatever), please help us out and take the survey.  Feel free to pass the link to anyone else. 

I’ll be posting the full results of the survey (barring personal information) next month, no filtering or editing.  If I get more than 50 useful results, I promise to even post the raw XLS for anyone else (competition or otherwise) to use as well.

Survey: http://bit.ly/4vhktO

As the first product from Sun to be released under a GPLv3 license, there’s a ton of interest and questions coming up around our Ops Center open source plans. Consider this blog post my attempts to help answer any questions. I’ll queue up a podcast in a few weeks to discuss the open source process and what we’re doing with Ops Center as well. Please let me know any questions you want answered.What we’re open sourcing

• The agentry infrastructure, AKA “CAC” or Common Agent Code. CAC is the basis and building block for the agent itself. This is the first component to be open sourced, and will be available on OpenxVM December 10, 2007
• The agent itself. The agent does the actual work. The agent sits on each managed operating system instance
• The proxy server. The proxy server provides both scalability and network efficiency. It has an embedded DB and a web server.
• The satellite server. This is the main act – where all the UI is performed, the logic, and everything that makes ops center so great.

When we’re open sourcing itTurns out, open sourcing code is hard work. We need to scrub the code for 3rd party, copyright, encumbrances, etc. We need to pull out any non-relevant information. We need to do the actual physical process of getting code outside our firewall. We need to deal with lawyers. All of which means, it takes a while. We’ve been working on it for a few months, and we’ll keep working on it for a few more.Net net – we’re going to do this in phases. To start, we’re releasing the aforementioned CAC on December 10th. This is both a sign of good faith, plus demonstrate our commitment. It gives people a set of code they can start to evaluate and play with, and help expand some of the functionality. As we continue to get the code base approved and in process, we’ll then be in place to release the entire product open source by 2Q 2008 (that’s calendar year, not silly Sun financial year)What about xVM server?It’s already open source! xVM is integrated into every nevada build now. We’re working tightly with the community, and developing this further all the time.If I missed anything, let me know via email or the comments. I’ll either update this post, do another one, or even add it to my next xVM unscripted podcast!

With the stroke of midnight, Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0 is launched to a joyous world.So what is it? It’s a highly scalable datacenter management platform that runs across cross-platform Linux and Solaris OS-based x86 & SPARC systems to help customers improve efficiency, and save time & money by:

• Better managing datacenter consolidation, keeping guest OSes up-to-date and monitoring for virtual assets on a network
• Automating provisioning & updating OS instances (Solaris & Linux) to increase availability & utilization & minimize downtime
• More effectively deploy, manage and monitor security and compliance in IT operations, either locally or remotely

You can see the features here, click the image for a bigger version.There’s a huge amount of cool stuff in here, but one of the enhancements we’ve put in place that I’m most excited about is the new network architecture. It’s cool for a few reasons:

1. Firewall friendly. All communication is up and out, and it’s all XML over HTTPS. So what? This means that the agent talks to the proxy, the proxy to the satellite. And it’s all over the same ports that your network admin already has open, and is managing. No custom firewall rules, no custom network config, no painful installations!
2. Scalability. You can now have hundreds of agents talking to each proxy, and hundreds of proxies talking to each satellite. Put a different proxy in each location, or use multiple in one location to really scale into the thousands of nodes.

So go ahead, check it out!

Recently decided to try out VMWare ESX.

• ESX offers two management interfaces, a desktop client or a browser interface. Neither support the Mac.
• It looks like you must use the “Virtual Infrastructure Client”, a windows app, to get started using ESX
• Took me a little bit to figure out how to get ESX running inside Fusion. Virtualization.info had some good pointers. Watch out if you’re copying from the web for “smart quotes”. Curly quotes will crash VMware right quick

The results: a really silly screenshot. What, you may be asking, is that? It would be Joomla appliance from rPath running on ESX running on Fusion, with the VI client running on Windows running on Fusion. It worked amazingly well, though joomla booting was a bit slow – about 30 min.In case you’re wondering, the key lines to add/edit in the vmx file are:

scsi0.VirtualDev = "lsilogic"ethernet0.virtualdev = "e1000"monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUEmonitor_control.vt32 = TRUE

Be careful of the windows you look through – sometimes you won’t be happy with what you see. Sun has posted review widgets on our site for a few months now. In keeping with our blog philosophy and our open source culture, it makes sense to solicit feedback direct from the source. One of the keystones of a review is a fair basis of understanding – the reviewer knows and understands what it is they are reviewing. So what do you do when that breaks down?One of my products, Sun Connection has had a spate of bad reviews recently. As soon as they came up, we looked closely at each one. And each one has the same problem – it’s not for the product that we have listed! To a tee, every review was really feedback on a feature in Solaris that provides single system patch updates, confusingly called Sun Update Connection (vs this product – Sun Connection). Sun Connection is an enterprise patch management tool that works across Linux, zLinux and Solaris systems. Sun Update Connection is a simple interface into downloading patches from Sun for a single machine.Choice reviews inlcluded such pointed feedback as:

• Extremely buggie product. It hangs very often and sometimes is very difficult to put the tool working again.
• I will never use Sun again. I have been migrating my business and my customers from Solaris to Linux. This is absurd. No more patch clusters. Register for this. Register for that. Sun used to be a great company. No more. I can’t get security updates without remembering my username for this, my username for that. Ubuntu and Debian, here we come!
• While the GUI is nice in theory, I hate it. It gives no feedback onwhat it is doing and which machine it is doing it on. I wouldmuch rather have a CLI based method that give proper feedback and syslogging. Plus updatemanager is unreliable
• Unusable. Would much rather download clustered patches, which doesn’t seem to be an option anymore

Ouch. Frankly though, fair. All these comments point out very real deficiencies in the built in patch management tools with Solaris. They also point out frustration with our patch policy. What they don’t point out is any feedback on the product the reviews show up on – Sun Connection, our enterprise patch management tool. Clearly, this is our (SMI’s) fault. We haven’t done a good enough job naming and describing our products, we haven’t communicated out patch policy well, and we apparently haven’t given customers enough options on how to use the system. We’re working aggressively on addressing all of these – with Project Indiana, launching new products and restructuring the web site.In the meantime, we’ve taken the reviews down off our product page. I want to apologize – this is a failing of my team that we’ve needed to do this, and we’re working overtime to relaunch our pages with a clearer delineation on what exactly our products are. The point of the reviews is to help spark the conversation, and keep it open even among the disenfranchised. Reviews will return soon (before the end of the calendar year). In the meantime, please take advantage of the comments, and let’s have a discussion on the issues and merits of our products! We know we’re not perfect, and we do want to make it better!