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

vApps were introduced as part of the vSphere 4 release but were largely a forgotten area of functionality until now.

The concept of a vApp is as a bar-code for an IT service, where that service consists of a number of inter-dependent virtual machines containing applications that provide a service – for example a website. the vApp contains a number of virutal machines and is tagged with required levels of service and other pertinent information like start-up order, dependencies and required networks etc. to allow them to run successfully.

For example a corporate Sharepoint service could be grouped and deployed as a vApp containing relevant domain controllers, DNS, SQL and MOSS VMs to allow it to run – from a VMware perspective you manage and deploy the servers as a whole vApp rather than individual VMs.

With the vCloud Director (vCD) announcements it’s clear what VMware’s intention was; vApps are core to the service catalog concept for vCD, you don’t just pick virtual machines you can pick ready-to-use and self-contained application stacks to deploy and un-deploy.

However, if you think about it, it’s not as simple as it might seem once you go beyond the infrastructure level as you’ll still need to do in-guest engineering and automation to make this sort of deployment model successful but it’s a good foundation to work from.

This type of rapid provisioning and the level of in-guest automation required to make it useful can be problematic with Windows guest OS’es – there are still tight dependencies on domain controllers, forests and domain SIDs to get around for many applications. As more and more Microsoft applications move to PowerShell at the core this becomes more feasible but architecturally speaking it’s a problem for anything other than trivial applications.

The guest automation story is much better for Linux VMs deployed as part of vApps as scripting and automation is at the core of Linux deployment and always has been but it’s not done for you, vCD just handles the {virtual} infrastructure provisioning; tailoring and automating the resultant guest OS images is up to you but there is much more precedent on this space.

Strategically, Springsource makes a lot of sense for these sort of container deployments, the use of application frameworks breaks the dependencies on the underlying OS and makes applications much more flexible and portable, but this is an evolution away from current enterprise applications.

I took a different approach to VMworld this year, usually I try to cram in as many sessions as possible and don’t usually spend much time on the hands-on labs. – this year I am planning to do a 60/40 mix of labs and sessions. Because the sessions are audio recorded I can review them at a later date and make the most of the hands-on labs whilst I’m on-site.

From what I saw today queues for sessions can be big, although if you get there early it’s not too bad, but this isn’t a new problem for VMworld I don’t think they’ll solve it unless they start to move to Tech-Ed scale venues. with 16k attendees at this VMworld in the US maybe the tipping point is coming, although they have added Moscone West to the facility this year which has helped a lot.

Whilst session queues may have been long the hands-on labs have been pretty quiet in Moscone West with no major queues and it’s open 8am until 10pm Monday and Tuesday so I think I’ll focus on that.

There wasn’t a main keynote on day 1, I quite like this as in VMworld’s of old there was a general keynote on day 1 which was more marketing/product announcements with the more interesting technical keynote and demos on Tuesday.

I did all of the labs for an upcoming cloud related product that cannot be named until tomorrow – which is funny as you can take the cloud director (oops :)) labs today, which is going to be useful as I’ll be working with it when I start at VMware next week 🙂

I also did my joint session with Eric Siebert and Simon Seagrave, we ran out of time for most of the demos I had lined up so I’m going to upload them to YouTube in the next couple of days and post them on my blog if you are interested to see how the vTARDIS performs and is configured.

I look forward to the keynote tomorrow and will try and blog as much as possible – although there are certainly a lot of people doing twitter this year, so maybe just click this link and watch the #vmworld hashtag 🙂

Along with a number of other bloggers I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of the VMworld 2010 labs setup today.

Wow, the setup is impressive, there is a massive self-paced labs room in Moscone West, offering 480 multi-lab seats, unlike previous years there are no specific areas for each lab, each workstation is self-contained and connects you your chosen lab from the "Lab Cloud" – which will be much better in managing the load and waiting times for popular labs.

You will have to register at the entrance and your session will be allocated to your badge number, there is a comfortable waiting area whilst you are called forward to do your labs; combined with the fact that each seat can be for any lab this is a great idea for managing foot-fall and waiting times.

There are a number of labs sessions pre-provisioned and ready to go and some will be provided on-demand when you are logged on, the ops team will be keeping a close eye on demand and can dynamically adjust the number of pre-provisioned labs to reduce start-up times for popular labs.

There are also labs upstairs where a subject matter expert (or “lab captain”) will run an audience through a presentation of the lab session and will be able to take Q&A and provide more information on the background.

The lab cloud is a heavily customised Lab Manager/vSphere environment offering up 30 different lab setups – each lab session runs from a dedicated vPod – a group of virtualized ESX, AD, vCenter hosts built from a totally automated template and accessed by a thin-client; making heavy use of virtualized ESX hosts (ala vTARDIS, but on a massive scale :))

The back-end infrastructure providing the lab cloud is split across 3 sites, 2 external DC’s and an on-site facility – the lab is closely monitored and automation deals with distributing load across the 3 facilities with resilience – the same infrastructure will be scaled down and will support VMworld Europe, although VMworld Europe 2010 will only have approx 1/2 the number of self-paced lab seats.

As you’ll see from the picture below the self-paced labs room is large, the podium in the middle is the operations centre where VMware staff co-ordinate and manage the labs environment, statistics will be relayed on realtime on the large projection screens.

Each lab workstation has a help button where you can request help from the on-site subject matter experts, I like this model better as it means the SMEs can be dispatched anywhere in the room to help out whilst allowing the maximum number of seats to be balanced across the available labs "on-demand"

I’d strongly encourage you to check out the labs, remember the normal presentation sessions are audio recorded (keynotes are usually video’d) and slides are available post-VMworld but labs are not, so this is your only chance to go hands-on – although the team know this is high on the list of "wants", the .PDF lab manuals will also be made available for download post-VMworld.

Interesting stat of the day, the environment will be creating/destroying about 5,000 virtual machines per HOUR, and over the course of the week they expect to handle 75-100,000 virtual machine create/destroy operations.