All Posts in “Enterprise Solutions”

vCloud Air On-Demand Beta Review

/ / Cloud, Enterprise Design Considerations, Enterprise Solutions, vCloud Air On-Demand, vExpert, VMware / Leave a Reply

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The IT community is split into sub-tribes, the vendors who sell technology and the operations folks that use it. 2014 vExperts were given early access and beta use of vCloud Air on demand services with free credits to test the environment in exchange those with this access would then post a blog. This is that blog ….

Dun-Dun

Sorry I watched some Law & Order before starting this blog.

If you are working in the VMware arena and don’t live under a rock, odds are you have heard about vCloud Air (formerly VMware Cloud Hybrid Services vCHS). If not a brief aside:

VMware vCloud Air is a hybrid cloud solution, with pre-set virtual templates and the access and capability for bursting from a customer datacenter into this hosted solution. With vCloud Air your company or organization can leverage internal templates by placing a copy in your cloud catalog, as well as extend layer 2 networking. Another benefit is the ability to leverage existing management tools and consoles to manage the cloud environment. This includes extensible controls into vCenter and vRealize Automation Center (formerly vCAC).

Now that we are all on the same page, the comparisons of VMware’s cloud to Amazon AWS EC2 have basically been that VMware is running from behind when it comes to development environment usage and on-demand. Up to this point vCloud Air has only been available as a contracted block of resources that are shared with in a tenant organization. VMware will be announcing the general availability of vCloud Air On-Demand service. This is going to be VMware’s Coup de eta for cloud solutions.

Where does it start you might be saying, or why do I care. Well for the later if you are reading this blog you are probably doing it for the comedy more than the technical content. But for the former, it all starts at My.VMware.com where you establish a subscription service and enter your billing information. All of your billing is run through my.vmware and allows for centralized cloud costs. This helps to eliminate shadow IT spend by centralizing management but more on that in a bit. Here is the my.vmware dashboard to track pricing.

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 1.04.07 PM

 

But wait there’s more, considering that this is just the billing management. There is a difference between vCloud Air and the On-Demand version. Here is what vCloud Air looks like this:

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 12.53.21 PM

While vCloud Air on Demand looks like this:

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 12.07.59 PM

(vCloud Air on demand dashboard)

You can still create a virtual private cloud (VPC) as with standard vCloud Air, however within the VPC you get a Resource Usage Dashboard

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 12.31.25 PM

From here you can see the utilization and monthly cost assessment. This is very similar to EC2’s which again unless you live under a rock you know looks like this:

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 12.39.15 PM You can also drill into individual VPC’s to see their specific cost modeling and usage.

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 12.34.06 PM

Now is the point of the post where you may be asking yourself managing is cool but what about the VM’s and Services.

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 12.57.35 PM

Let’s start with VM’s there are some pre-configured VM’s ready for easy deployment. Here you will find your usual suspects and can leverage your own MS licenses or pay to play similar to how AWS works. Then there is an assortment of linux images CentOS and RHEL.

In addition you can connect your vCloud Air On-Demand instance to your vCenter instance and copy template images and add them to your catalog. This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile. Why, because what this means is we can centrally manage and secure the images that are deployed in the cloud. Say what? That’s right fully managed and secured image right from the comfort of your own vCenter image. Remember how I mentioned Shadow IT?

Shadow IT is the concept that developers and app owners are going out and leveraging AWS to obtain the IT they need to accomplish their jobs. Mostly this happens because internal IT is burdensome and slow. vRealize is attempting to resolve this by allowing for IT automation of these applications and environments. Take this a step further and allowing these VMs to be provisioned in the cloud just as easily and on demand, and with an approved image would increase security and meet the app owner\dev requirements. In addition that are starting to drive organizations away from AWS are the costs associated with additional features that are additional costs like RDS, Elasticache and DirectConnect.

With all this said, vCloud Air On-demand seems like a decent solution for the VMware Admins who are looking for a way to avoid the long term contracts or aren’t sure how to size their public cloud deployment. I don’t think it is quite where EC2 is with regard to capabilities and features but VMware is investing a lot in vCloud Air. I think the future will show that this investment will begin to close the gap. In the mean time watch the VMware announcements that will be coming out during PEX.

Feel free to ask question I am happy to give some more testing feed back etc.

PaaS is BadaaS

/ / @Mike_Colson, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Foundry, DevOps, Enterprise Design Considerations, Enterprise Solutions, PaaS, Pivotal / Leave a Reply

Admittedly it has been a long time since I have written code as part of my job. I have written scripts and worked on projects but not really true code writing to build an application. Now everyone seems to be doing just that, my 9 yr old daughter is interested in writing her first app for her iPod Touch, my 13 yr old nephew has taken coding classes and gone to coding summer camp.

I am however a big consumer of apps, whether it is the Movember app during the month of prostate awareness in November, or twitter or any of the countless others that I have installed across devices. The saying “software is eating the world” appears to be true. I am constantly looking for ways to interact with customer service and sales people less and less and report issues or buy things through apps.

The types of applications have changed too, I am not talking about the Exchange and SharePoint monoliths that require months of planning and deployment time and consulting hours. I am talking about the mobile applications and the homegrown in house finance and collaboration systems that are popping up through out corporations and agencies. These applications are written in Java, Python or Ruby and are developed using agile methodology. They are deployed iteratively and constantly updated to ensure they are meeting their users needs and requests. This is the age of software, and perhaps it really is eating the world.

Enter PaaS

That’s where PaaS comes in, let’s imagine a world where corporate Git repositories are leveraged to collaborate on application builds. The code is then stored in the repository, the agency has infrastructure in multiple datacenters and have already tackled the job of creating a service catalog for the traditional platform 2 applications (Exchange, Windows, SharePoint). In this world there would be a PaaS instance deployed in each of their datacenters, as well as into a public cloud offering like vCloud Air\vCGS or even AWS. Now let’s say that our Developers have access to that PaaS and a browser (crazy talk I know).

Leveraging a Cloud Foundry deployment they could perform CF Push commands from the CLI or via the browser GUI call the Git Repository and deploy their application to any of the sites available to them or all the sites at once. Each dev team could have their own agnostic CF environments to deploy their application into and unlike OpenShift from RedHat these teams won’t be able to see or sniff the traffic running in other dev instances.

These applications can be pushed across sites and scaled up in seconds, 100’s of instances near instantly deploying all from code. The PaaS examines the code determines the infrastructure requirements and if they have the appropriate pieces be it a linux VM or an in memory database service and builds the required pieces as it deploys the application.

I know what you are going to say so let me beat you to it, “But Docker can containerize the application and allow me to deploy it to blank infrastructure as well”. The answer there is both yes and no, because Docker can enable application decoupling from the infrastructure and container based apps can be deployed more nimbly, however Docker requires a pretty sturdy infrastructure to stand on and still relies on a third party configuration and automation layer; think Puppet, Chef or Ansible. Docker is a cool technology but it fails to meet the same ease of deployment that Cloud Foundry has.

Don’t believe me? Check out this video demo:

Ok I get that it’s a marketing video but you see the potential it’s a matter of pushing out application code and being able to do it across instances and change pointers without downtime. Meaning you can have continual releases of the application. All Cloud Foundry cares about is Apps, DNS names, and number of instances, you don’t have to worry about whether the instance is starting because once you push you are told when the app is deployed. No more checking on your AWS instance to see if each service started.

To me PaaS really is the future and it’s cool as hell.

Try it yourself at

http://Run.pivotal.io

VMware EVO:Rail

/ / @Mike_Colson, EMC, Enterprise Design Considerations, Enterprise Solutions, EVO: Rail, Hyper Converged, Hyper Converged Infrastructure Appliance, Solutions, vExpert, VMware, vSpecialist / 1 Reply

For the tens of you who read this site you know that I am a believer in hyper converged architectures. Like anything there is benefits and drawbacks, but I will say that there is a cooleness factor and simplicity that make hyper converged infrastructure really appealing. As it is VMworld this week I am sure many of you have heard the announcement of EVO: Rail and I am behind the bigger blogs on posting something.

The reason for my waiting is as a vSpecialist I didn’t want to get ahead of EMC announcements. Now that Chad has done his sessions I feel safe to at least start talking about the public aspects of EVO: Rail and what EMC is planning to do.

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