OpSource Cloud Experience — Connecting

April 5, 2011 in Virtualizationism | No comments

In the previous post, you saw an overview of the OpSource Cloud, a VMware vSphere-backed public IaaS cloud.  Today we take a look at connecting to virtual machine instances for managing and consuming services.

OpSource networking is based on Cisco switches and security; cloud users have various options for configuring access for management or public services.  When new virtual machines are instantiated, they are assigned private IP addresses and cannot be accessed from the Internet directly.  This is a good thing for security, but how does an administrator manage workloads in the cloud?

VPN for VM Management

Cisco SSL VPN capabilities are built into this cloud platform, so administrators can connect from anywhere to securely manage virtual machines.  This is very easy to use and even works from behind corporate firewalls and proxy servers — something that may be a concern if your public cloud requires direct access via SSH or RDP.

Directly Connect with NAT

For VMs providing services to the public Internet, a 1-1 NAT mapping can be configured for any of the 8 public IP addresses that come standard with an account.  There are also richer load balancing capabilities that can spread requests across multiple web servers.

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OpSource Cloud Experience — Introduction

April 4, 2011 in Virtualizationism | No comments

OpSource Cloud is an enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud backed by the reliability and performance of VMware vSphere.  It’s a bulletproof environment that is suitable for virtually any workload, offering a 100% uptime SLA and guaranteed sub-millisecond network latency.  This infrastructure cloud runs on the latest release of vSphere and also offers the ability to import and export ESX virtual machines in OVF format for easy transfer of workloads from your own VMware private cloud.

OpSource Cloud competes effectively with other public IaaS clouds and was positioned as a “Challenger” in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant.  Treb Ryan, the CEO, co-founded the company back in 2002.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to take the OpSource Cloud for a test drive and found it very easy to use.  Getting started was simple, and in no time at all I was deploying a network of virtual Windows and Linux machines to do my bidding.

This week I will be publishing a series of articles documenting my experience with the OpSource Cloud.  You may like to subscribe to the VCritical RSS feed or follow along on Facebook.

Getting Started

After setting up an account, the first thing to do is deploy a virtual network.  OpSource has designed their multi-tenant network environment using Cisco gear, separating customers with VLANs and hardware firewalls.  It takes just moments to request a new network, which includes a /24 private IP address block as well as 8 public IPs:

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Hyper-V Dynamic Memory: Not Quite Ready to Demo!

April 1, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 29 comments

Microsoft Management Summit 2011 took place last week in Las Vegas; it was another great opportunity for the Hyper-V team to extol the virtues of Dynamic Memory.  But when it came time for the demo, I could hardly believe my eyes…

The Setup

In breakout session BD12: Hyper-V and Dynamic Memory in Depth, a demo environment was presented with a dozen virtual machines allegedly configured to use Dynamic Memory, with the Hyper-V Manager interface boldly displaying “Dynamic Memory” as part of each VM name.

One small detail was omitted from the demonstration, however:  Most of these virtual machines — both the “Dynamic” as well as the “Static” variants — are empty shells with no operating systems installed, as shown this thumbnail:

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory requires cooperation with guest integration services.  Without those services, VMs will fall back to good, old-fashioned Static Memory.

The Great Fake Dynamic Memory Demo of 2011

The “demonstration” went on to show how Dynamic Memory responds when memory is consumed inside one of the virtual machines.  The only VM that appears to have an OS installed is the first one.  The other 11 VMs are powered on but never generate load on the CPU and never report memory demand back to Hyper-V — a sign that the guest integration services are not running:

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VCritical Launches into Facebook! [The North Face Backpack Giveaway]

March 14, 2011 in VCritical, Virtualizationism | No comments

I’ve done some remodeling on VCritical lately; now that the fancy new logo is up I can start thinking about crown molding and recessed lighting. Maybe not.

How about… Facebook integration.  If you’re on Facebook, you can now interact with VCritical along with the 900 million objects that you and your friends are already desperately trying to keep up with.

The North Face Backpack Giveaway

To celebrate the new VCritical Facebook Page, I’m offering a special giveaway:  The North Face Yavapai Backpack ($70 value) — perfect for travel to VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas!

To Enter: Visit the VCritical page and “Like” it.  Simple.

One lucky winner will be randomly selected from the list of Facebook users that like VCritical.  Note: this is not the same thing as liking this article, which can be done by clicking the small button below.

Contest ends March 19, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

Prize ships to US/Canada only and must be claimed within five days of notification.  Giveaway sponsored by CSN.

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Resource Pools to the Rescue

March 11, 2011 in Virtualizationism | No comments

The Resource Pool Advantage

It’s easier to manage a group of things than individual objects.  Consider filesystem directories as a way to organize and secure files, or Active Directory groups as an efficient means of assigning rights to users.

VMware vSphere Resource Pools — introduced in VI3, circa 2006 — give administrators a way to aggregate resources from multiple hosts in a cluster and then subdivide them to meet a range of business needs.  After creating pools of CPU and memory with reserves and limits, virtual machines are simply dragged as necessary to guarantee performance or prevent less-critical workloads from causing interference.

Resource Pools are a proven means to reliably share infrastructure.  So much so that vCloud Director uses them as the foundation for virtual datacenters, separating multiple tenants in a cloud environment.

Hyper-V Hardware Silos

One can learn a lot about Hyper-V by reading Virtual PC Guy’s Blog — Ben Armstrong cuts through the marketing fog and provides clear technical information on a range of Microsoft virtualization topics.  Thanks to his recent recent series on CPU resource management, it’s quite clear that Hyper-V has a long way to go before it can match the flexibility and ease of VMware vSphere.

For now, Hyper-V administrators that need to manage resources in a shared environment have few options.  Without any means of grouping CPU and memory resources, the only alternative is to manage individual virtual machines — one by one!  That could mean a significant manual effort any time a VM is added or removed.  Such a process contradicts the desired efficiencies of cloud computing and is infeasible.  To achieve guaranteed resources in a multi-tenant cloud would therefore imply silos of physical Hyper-V clusters. Read the rest of this entry »

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