In the 14th edition of Tech Talks we discuss VMware’s new hybrid cloud.

I took me a while to figure out where the settings for the Network Editor in VMware Fusion 5.0 Professional.  Found it so, I thought I’d share a quick video on locating and configuring it.

Software Defined Data Center vs. Cloud Computing what’s the difference. You have to watch to find out.

If you’ve never watched these Youtube videos from Cisco you should check them out.  They are almost as good as my Tech Talks .  At the end of most of them they decide what part of the technology discussed is the unicorn.  Meaning what is realistic today and what still needs to mature.  The topic of this particular post was about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC).  I think SDDC is somewhat a unicorn in itself.  Which makes the type of Cloud Management that brings value to organizations another unicorn.

To have SDDC you need to have mature Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS) and even if it’s not a proper term let’s keep it rolling Software Defined Compute (SDC).  Of the three SDC is obviously very mature.  It doesn’t matter if we are talking VMware, KVM, XEN or Hyper-V.  It seems as if vendors have SDC under control.  It’s the other two area’s that have some work in the form of both standards and an actual operating model in the case of SDN.

Looking at SDS as it kind of exists in various technical forms.  Vendors have virtualized or abstracted storage for a long time now.  You can present storage in a SDDC no matter what the backend physical components make up the block layer storage.  Using controller software you can present NFS, SMB or LUN’s to clients using these underlying protocols.  The physical storage can be white box servers with SATA drives or an EMC VMAX with a tray of Solid State Drives (SSD).  The gray is when it comes to having visibility into the abstracting and presenting the different capabilities of the underlying storage.  Each vendor goes about it in a different way.  There a great write up on Duncan Epping’s Yellow-Bricks site that goes into detail on the state of SDS.

Then there’s SDN.  I won’t repeat a lot of the challenges that face SDN but if you want to start here on this blog.

This brings us back to Cloud Management.  Ultimately you have to ask yourself what capabilities would you like in a Cloud Management solution.  Some of which depends on if you are looking to extend your infrastructure or develop cloud aware applications.  The difference can basically be broken down into the vCloud vs. OpenStack question. But ultimately you want to be able to deliver as much control via abstraction to the SDDC components of your cloud without concern of the underlying hardware.  You want the end user of the Cloud Management solution to be able to select the storage attributes related to their service, the network attributes, along with the compute attributes.

Most mature Cloud Management systems allow you accomplish these goals by interfacing directly with the API’s of the individual vendors of these products.  You want to deliver a “Fast” pool of disk to your application.  Well today the Cloud Management solutions need to communicate directly with the API’s of your storage vendor.  What if you want multiple storage vendors in the backend?  This is where SDS with standards will step in and help.  The current approach is for solutions like OpenStack to build that capability hardwired into the Cloud Management platform.  When the unicorn of Cloud Management is reached there will not be a need to hard wire the capability.  The ideal future your “Fast” storage can be backend by VMAX SSD’s or Hitachi SSD’s without making major configuration changes to your Cloud Management platform.  It would just be done at the middleware layer that’s SDS.

I actually started this post to just be a link the the video.  But hey I like to talk.

Reblogged from GigaOM:

Here's the narrative that cloud vendors would like us to believe: there are infinite workloads flowing to clouds of infinite capacity. There's enough business for all, keep moving.

But there is nagging worry, sparked anew by Rackspace's laggard Q1 cloud growth, that the appetite for cloud services may not be unlimited after all. For its first quarter ending March 31, Rackspace(s rax)logged $91 million in public cloud revenue, up 4 percent sequentially and 40 percent year over year.

Read more… 544 more words

Reblogged from GigaOM:

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The Open Compute Project, which Facebook launched a little more than two years ago, has decided that utterly disrupting the server and storage market isn't enough. On Wednesday, it said it would solicit input on an open source top-of-rack switch.

The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community.

Read more… 884 more words

Talking about home labs again.  Go into a little detail of some sample hardware setups.

My Dell 8500 Setup

My XPS 15 Setup

Link to the Blacks In Technology Site.

Follow Blacks In Tech on Twitter @blkintechnology

It’s all about Virtualization.  That’s network vs. server virtualization.

I’ve done server virtualization long enough that I just get it.  It seems natural to this point.  What doesn’t seem as natural is Network Virtualization.  I re-read the VMware post announcing the NSX product and it all kind of just clicked for me.  I had a problem disassociating the physical access layer with the abstracted network component.  After all it makes sense that the device that the port is connected to is the device that controls the behavior of the device of the network.

Source VMware

The Physical Infrastructure really is just that that the physical infrastructure.  It’s the assurance that every device is physically connected to the network.  It can be via Token Ring, Frame Relay, Ethernet or ATM.  In theory it can even be a overlay network.  It really doesn’t matter from a logical perspective.  You have to ensure that the physical infrastructure is reliable and meets the latency requirements of your applications but that’s it (maybe a bit oversimplified).  Now that there is physical connectivity a solution like NSX can take over.  You create virtual ports and associate them to physical ports or other virtual ports on virtual switches.  These virtual ports can then be assigned to a virtualized Firewall, Switch, Router or IDS ports based on the need.

Cisco has a similar device level approach with their ISR architecture.  A port on an ISR router can be an IDS, Firewall or Router port as examples.  Network virtualization just takes the abstraction one level higher and broadens the capability of each individual port.  You now eliminate physical limitations of the device and virtualization the capability of the port.

The virtualized network devices can then have all the characteristics we associate with server virtualization.  They can be cloned, copied, vMotioned, DRS’d and snapshot.  Many of the operational advantages associated with server virtualization is now available to us on the network.  The only requirement again is that there is physical connectivity and VMware is able to do the easy part which is create a network Hypervisor capable of creating the robust abstraction layer needed to manage all of these dynamic ports.  I can see a pretty significant challenge in creating a high speed/low latency fabric.  I can also see where troubleshooting physical vs. logical performance will be a challenge.  However, these were some of the same challenges server virtualization faced during the early years as well.

I haven’t been excited by networking since I got a sample loaner Gigabit switch back in 2001 from Cisco.  This is actually a pretty big deal and I look forward to seeing a shipping product from VMware and customer feedback.  Your thoughts, is this a operation model that translates to your network?

I’ve been hesitant in launching a new blog because WordPress.com blogging can get pretty expensive.  I don’t like WordAds and I wanted to map the domain name.  This would have costed $45 a year along.  I’m already shelling that and more out for the other two blogs.  So, I decided to go ever to the darkside and launch the new blog on Blogger. 

You can find my personal musings at www.keithtownsend.co