Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I work as a technical architect in a consultancy role in the Windows Infrastructure & Virtualization space, and as such I’m paid for my experience and opinion, but it’s also an important part of my job to proactively keep on to top of industry trends and investigate new technologies that may solve customer problems, even problems they don’t know they have {yet}.

Twitter and blogs are a useful resource for current and less formal or structured information if used carefully, but it’s all too easy to be distracted from the job at hand by the latest shiny tech or flamewar so you need to measure the amount of time you spend there and they are no substitute IMHO for traditional study and hands-on “playing” time.

Like many I’m currently studying for my VCP4 exam, and have recently upgraded my MCSE to the current MCITP:EA 2008 certification so I thought I would publish a reading list for anyone else looking to do the same as well as general industry books I have been reading recently.

Maintaining a balance between this study/pro-active time and staying a well utilised/billed out resource is hard and I find it often spills into my own personal time so you need to have a good level of personal interest/dedication otherwise you will struggle – I’m a geek at heart and I look upon this as investing in my career but it’s more important that your kids remember what you look like!

This is one area where travelling for work via public transport rather than driving works well – plenty of study time to be had with a good pair of headphones

(i.e not the rubbish ones that ship with the iPod), a good list of tunes to block everyone else out and a book/laptop with VMs.

Maintaining a good home lab environment is also critical for me, and I run all the services for my demanding demo environments as well as my home users (read: wife & kids) there and that really does teach you something about availability :)  I wrote some details of my lab setup here but I have an updated post in the pipeline as there have been some significant changes to support my vSphere study.

Anyways, enough rambling and on with the list..

VCP4 Upgrade

You can’t go far wrong with the Lowe, this is the definitive vSphere book at the moment.

VCP4 practice exams online at the SLOG here

VCP4 resource list here

if you wanted a similar book for VI3 I would recommend this one;

Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)

Windows 2008 MCITP Core Exams study guide

This is a comprehensive set of books for the 4 core exams, not as dry as previous versions and lots of practical lab excercises, as usual good set of practice tests on the included CD

For the client component of the MCITP:Enterprise Administrator cert

MOSS 2007 Exam

Not the most exciting product for me, but it does cover the exam requirements – seems to spend a lot of time explaining what each menu item is within the MOSS UI, which was a bit frustrating.

Very good book, puts a lot of real world around MOSS deployments

General Good Books to Read

Cisco UCS

Good book covering what Cisco’s new UCS blade system and consolidated I/O model is; not much information available elsewhere at the moment, although 1/2 the book is spent discussing the various CPU/memory bus architectures which is a good update to your knowledge but would have liked to have seen more time dedicated to how UCS works and some example configurations

General computing/tech

An excellent book, with a focus on open source technologies and a lot of practical insight from the building of Flickr – good for briding the infrastructure/application divide.

If you don’t get cloud computing or understand where things could go, you need to read this book, brilliant and not a long, drawn-out read and not that technical.

Aimed more at developers rather than infrastructure people but if you want to try things out for yourself it has some easy to understand examples.

I hope you found this list useful, you may notice that these are affiliate links – should you wish to purchase any of these books Amazon will pay me a nominal commission which I can use towards the normally ad-free funding of this site and my time, although you are entirely able to go and purchase any of these books directly from the Amazon site.

Baby and non-IT related books

We recently had our 2nd child and it reminded me of these great books for all fathers to-be 🙂

Travel is sometimes great, but it’s not always possible and there is expense/loss of family time etc. to consider. If, like me you can’t be at VMworld in person this year, here are some tips for feeling like you are “virtually there”

Keep Twitter open and watch the #vmworld hashtags; Tweetdeck is particularly good at this watch the usual VMware Twitterati (list here)
Keep an RSS reader open and watch the v12n feeds

Watch the daily keynotes online (8am PDT), live at this link (registration required)

None of this gets you access to the actual session content..

there is a list of freely available content here

And you can purchase a subscription to the break-out session content here for $699/year

I am going to be speaking at the IBC conference in Amsterdam on 11th September on cloud production and delivery.

IBC is the event of the year for the broadcast and electronic media industry and I’m pleased to be representing ioko. Following my presentation I’ll be participating in a panel discussion with other industry experts.

Details of my session can be found here and I’ll be focusing on work I have been doing to apply cloud, and particularly private cloud concepts and technologies to the broadcast industry.

If you are going to the IBC show and want to meet to discuss in more detail, drop me a line via the comments.

Today is the 1st day of the full public conference, for me the keynote was a repeat of most of the partner session yesterday but with a few tweaks and customer details.

VMware always have good lead-in videos for their conferences and nice to note that Ducati are one of the many organisations that use VMware 🙂

“Virtualization is the tipping point, from the server room to the C-sute virtually anything is possible” etc. etc.

Paul says >70% of IT budget "keeping lights on" – less than 30% going into competitive advantages/new development – VMware aims to reduce this effort, enabling real IT as a service.

Paul confesses that he was blame for the proliferation of underused x86 servers at his time at Microsoft, at least he’s honest 🙂

Google does the level of cloud scale it does through set of highly specialised purpose built applications and DC systems – they could do this as they had the luxury of a green field implementation. Virtualization means encapsulation which means you can do it evolutionary way (take current apps, run them more efficiently).

Mention of Storage virtual appliances as part of vStorage that I missed yesterday, that’s interesting… hopefully something good coming from EMC on this.

vSphere/Next version of ESX will introduce no technical reason for <100% virtualization – significant performance improvements and taking advantage of VM-aware hardware, FT/HA baked-in and Open standards & Extensibility

Terramark showed a nice demo of their web UI for their vCloud platform showing oversubscription tied to billing engine to enable burst based usage

Technology makes them confident enough to implement the cloud with an official SLA with penalty clauses based on pragmatic capacity via burst/over-subscription & HA/FT.

EngineYard demo – a RoR company which supports vCloud & EC2 demo shows it controlling Terramark’s cloud via vCloud delivering “RoR as a service” and federation to multiple vCloud providers

Sungard doing DR as a service using vCloud and Logica extending LabManager and providing as a service – Lab on demand.

Announcements were made around the Client hypervisor and formal announcement of vmware partnering with Intel on client hypervisor

Management vPro

CVP – client virtualization platform

More technical details coming in Steve Herrod session tomorrow.

SAP Managed Services detailing how they are using VMware

SAP Managed Services 28k servers 8k VMs (internal services)

Data backup 340TB/day

Training & demo, QA/support biggest consumers

Moved ops to low-cost countries

Lifecycle Manager for end-end management of services.

Made some interesting comparisons for how the airline industry manages oversubscription and the IT/cloud industry.

A bit disappointed that there weren’t any big announcements or dates for vSphere (other than the public unveiling of the already leaked name) – but it can’t be far off now – will look forward to Steve Herod’s session tomorrow for the details.

New open ask the Exec team session tomorrow at 2pm – ask Paul your questions, etc.

I’m here at VMworld Europe in Cannes after a good flight with BA from LHR Terminal 1, very efficient bus transfer from the airport to the conference centre, turn left at the arrivals hall – or follow the people with VMworld signs – Microsoft take note; there was no shuttle bus the day before TechEd Europe last year when a lot of the people were arriving.

I’ve registered at the conference centre (opened at 4pm local time if you are en-route) and the following is a picture of the goods…

The bag is pretty decent – and has a metal strap clip, not the useless squeaky snappy plastic ones that you normally get at these types of event.

I have 2 passes, one for partner day (Monday) and one for the normal conference – there isn’t anything in particular to denote that I’m an “official blogger” so hopefully that won’t give me any issues getting into a lounge.

There is a shuttle bus service from the conference centre to the various official hotels, one hint though – when they ask what hotel you are staying at shout – the driver on route 3 seems hard of hearing as I had to tell him 3 times and still ended up being the last on the bus when my hotel was the closest 🙂

Hopefully able to go to the official Veeam party this evening to meet up with the twitter brigade and fellow bloggers.

Also need to go for a run and work off that sizeable lunch!

Addendum – I see from Eric’s video that I checked in at the wrong desk; might explain the pass thing 🙂

Zeus technologies from Cambridge here in the UK are one of my favourite tech companies, they are small and agile and produce an excellent bit of traffic management software called the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager.

It’s an IP traffic manager on serious, highly-available steroids and has a very impressive list of features, I have seem many of these deployed in customer environments for some of the largest media websites in the UK (and even the world, in some instances).

For me, the beauty of them is their simplicity, it’s “just” software; not a hardware appliance like F5/Cisco etc., or mysterious black box that hums away and costs £100000’s every time you need to replace one.

It’s hardware agnostic as it runs on Linux, Solaris or FreeBSD on physical servers or a VM, or as a pre-packaged VM appliance. This really plays well in the internal/external cloud space as you want to leverage cheap, commodity x86/x64 (and even SPARC) hardware and virtualization rather than be bound to hardware that is difficult to move and redeploy… they really “get” this kind of stuff.

There is a cool article here about using the ZXTM to talk to VMware virtual center and dynamically provision web servers as it senses demand increasing, see how powerful its scripting language & Java support is?

In this quick post I’ll show you just how easy it is to set one up, by setting one up 🙂 and a quick look around the UI.

In this instance I’ve downloaded the virtual appliance from here and am running it on VMware Workstation 6.5, it also runs happily on ESX.

It defaults to a static IP address and is administered via a web browser so I’ve got one of those here;

The obligatory EULA screen, yes of course I read every word.. honest.

Configuring the IP address, note the 802.3ad support for trunking… nice

DNS Server configuration

Date & Time

Admin password, note browser and SSH access

Licence key – we’ll skip this now and upload later.

Summary screen

Basic setup complete and all done in minutes, and ready to go.

Login screen

Uploading the evaluation licence

All Done! now you just need to add your services like web servers, farms, caching etc. Almost anything it doesn’t have a button for out of the box can be implemented in its TrafficScript language. For example; making it talk to Twitter or text you – the KnowledgeHub has lots of example code and how-to’s and the FAQ is here.

To wet your appetite I’ve put some quick screen captures of the ZXTM web interface below.

ZXTM’s can be clustered together for high-availability (no special hardware required, just out of the box commodity servers and ethernet), and configuration is simple to backup and restore (as with traditional physical appliances) they scale up to multi-gigabit loads and are well suited to scaling vertically for large demand.

You can download evaluation versions of all of this from here, and they have just launched their own blog here – download it and have a play, it’s so simple.

One of my colleagues is probably Zeus’s biggest fan, his blog is here and I’m sure this will give him a nudge to blog some of the very cool stuff he’s been doing with the ZXTM.

[disclaimer] This post isn’t an advert it’s just me trying to share my experiences… whilst my employer are official Zeus partners, this is purely on the basis of merit rather than any entirely commercial grounds; we’ve deployed the ZXTM in some of the most popular TV/video on demand platforms in the UK and both the technology and support services behind the product are outstanding.. which is why I choose them time & time again and they are a core part of my internal cloud reference architecture. They’re also small enough that they are genuinely interested in what you want in the product and how you are using it.

Well over the weekend this blog turned over 50,000 visits since it started in November 2007 whilst I was on a break at Briforum 2007 in Amsterdam, so lots of thanks to everyone who has been reading, this blog is currently averaging 500 views/day which considering I just started it as a repository for my own useful work tidbits is quite amazing to me.

I’ve got a couple of interesting posts in the pipeline around unattended ESX installations and a step by step to build this under VMWare Workstation and my experiences with Platespin PowerConvert – particularly how it maps into my mini/dedicated cloud architectures to deliver a totally flexible and easy to manage infrastructure through the physical to physical conversion process (P2P) and the normal V2P/P2V features.

Similarly, if there is anything you’d like to see – comment here with your suggestions!

Happy reading

Useful Post on betanews from last year on details of new kernel level features in Windows Server 2008 as presented by Mark Russinovitch at WinHEC in May 2007

I like this excerpt from Mark’s keynote presentation… lol 🙂

“This slide…this being a keynote, the marketing people had to make a pass through the deck. And this thing is technical, which is a little bit different from what they’re used to, they didn’t understand any of the slides. But they still wanted to feel like they were adding value, so they threw this slide in. And of course, I don’t understand this slide. But I hope you like it.”

Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow

Linkage here. Looks like a good idea, it’s always a pain doing this type of thing, especially remotely.

cool.. http://www.hpcsystems.com/blog/?p=24

Hyper V apparently only supports 16 cores , but here’s some info on hyper V running on an 4 x 4 CPU core system.

Won’t be long before the price point for these really drops; imagine how many VM’s you can cram on one of these at the recommendation of 3vCPu:1pCPU-Core.

(8 sockets x 4 core) x 3 vCPU = 96 single CPU VM’s per server Nice.