Passion is contagious. When I was in high school, I watched the film A Room with a View. In that movie, there is a bucolic shot of an Italian field of poppies accompanied by Puccini playing in the background. The sound and imagery were so compelling I decided then and there that I would spend my junior abroad and study in Italy.

Fast forward a few decades, and here I am working with Cloud Academy, a technology and educational content company that offers best in class, platform-neutral cloud training. Cloud Academy employs people from all over the world. However, the staff in our Mendrisio, Switzerland office is mainly Italian, and I finally have the pleasure of practicing the language I learned so long ago.

One of the people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet here is their advisor Riccardo Di Blasio. Di Blasio’s educational and professional history are quite impressive. He studied computer science and completed several executive programs from the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. Before coming to the U.S., he was in the Italian Navy and served with NATO forces, was the Middle East and Africa Area Manager at Alfredo Porro and Enrico Cassina (a multi-national architecture and planning firm), and soon found himself in IT where he worked closely with Sun Microsystems in Rome. The year was 1997, and Sun Microsystems was the place to be. Though they didn’t call it cloud at the time, it was then and there that the cloud was invented.

In 2001 Di Blasio joined EMC where he worked up the ranks, from Account Manager covering Rome to VP EMEA Telecom Global Accounts based in London, to SVP of Sales and Alliances, Cloud Service Providers in Boston, and some positions and locations in between. In 2013, Di Blasio joined VMware and moved to Palo Alto, where he was responsible for starting up and growing VMware’s hybrid cloud platform worldwide through a direct and online model, as well as building a solid partner ecosystem.

Where Sun Microsystems is where the cloud was born, Di Blasio considers VMware the place where it came of age. VMware brought virtualization to market. Before this, enterprises needed to support all aspects of application support, from servers to data centers, to the space where all of this hardware lived. But in 1999 that all changed when VMware introduced virtual server systems, made SaaS a must have, and completely and beautifully disrupted tech. Virtualization of entire data centers made them agile, and this sea-change in information management was a profound secular shift.

Di Blasio goes on to explain to me that disruption is not black and white, or winner takes all. VMware did not go on to become one of the current major cloud platforms. Nonetheless, VMware is a significant player in the computing ecosystem. Computing is a modern market because it offers the ability for companies to use hybrid support services. Customers benefit when they have a choice and aren’t locked into one system. When you think about large enterprise, this flexibility in vendor choice is essential as companies grow, merge, and acquire new businesses. Many of the SaaS companies in cloud enhance the cloud platform experience. And, having been an independent part of the development of cloud computing since its inception made VMware an extremely attractive partner for AWS.

Working at all of these influential and innovative organizations has given Di Blasio the experience and opportunity to hold a very informed view on current technology development, business planning, and investment know-how. While he can speak enthusiastically about the cloud, as he’s been doing professionally for 20+ years, his passion comes through in bold colors when he talks about new organizations, innovations, and technologies.

Di Blasio believes firmly that innovation is born of disruption and that a startup environment is the only place where this can happen.

This belief doesn’t necessarily mean that all startups produce serviceable products or that no established company can be competitive or innovative. In fact, it’s the companies that maintain a startup culture (and significant investment), like Amazon and Microsoft, that have brought some of the most valuable innovations to market. When he left VMware, he did so to join startup Cohesity, a project and undertaking like no other he’d managed, and an experience from which he learned a great deal.
Today, Di Blasio is an angel investor, board member, and advisor for several tech companies. Having been Cloud Academy’s advisor for the last few months, I asked Di Blasio about his impression of what we’re doing:

I believe Cloud Academy is precisely what is currently needed in the market, delivered in a pure SaaS modality, and that’s the main reason why the company is experiencing such exponential growth. There is a huge gap between the speed of evolution of today’s cloud platforms available in the market and the necessary skills available in IT organizations.

CIOs of modern data centers must invest in their people training and development to make them more “cloud savvy” so they can generate efficiency and savings when moving workloads into the public cloud.

Continuous advancements in cloud technologies and services make keeping those skills up to date a challenge. While AWS “is the cloud” for now, both Microsoft and Google Cloud Platform are gaining ground, and new tools and applications like containers will encourage even more changes.

As Di Blasio writes in, Containers And Cloud Computing: The “Airbnb” Of Modern Datacenters, Linux containers—Docker, and Kubernetes, and Mesosphere—are set to undermine the powerful lock-in that AWS and other cloud players enjoy today. In fact, Di Blasio believes that containers will have an impact on IT similar to Airbnb’s impact on the hotel industry. Just as Airbnb makes it easier for travelers to move from one place to another, “containers allow you to move your workloads wherever you want.”

Beyond the cloud

While he isn’t investing, advising, or raconteuring, Di Blasio is spending time thinking about space; as in beyond the clouds.
If you are a baby boomer reading this article, you no doubt have memories of the pinnacle accomplishments of mid-century space programs, especially the moon landing of 1969 and the Apollo missions of 1970-75. If you are part of Generation X, as I am, you may have witnessed the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion of 1986, as I did with my classmates. If you are a millennial and you think about space, you may very well think of office space or open space, but rarely outer space or space travel, or in a tangible and shared cultural experience.

Though the American interest in space travel and exploration is currently taken for granted by most of our populous, Di Blasio contends that the technologies and programs we develop for this industry will ultimately serve everyone, one way or another. Investment and development of space programs will make it the next significant technological disruptor and will produce the most valuable innovation.

Space industry investment and growth is the next path, and it gives Di Blasio hope. He believes that much of the funding for investment in space projects will need to come from the private sector and venture capital.

Though this type of investment is a sea change from nationally funded organizations, like NASA, the two (investors and organizations such as NASA) will not be mutually exclusive in their pursuits. With the right leadership, the former will likely influence and finance the latter. Think of Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Di Blasio is fervent when explaining that innovation and development in the space industry need a new driver, a new spark. He firmly believes that this spark is going to come from the private sector, and specifically from the technology sector. The bridge between high tech, high finance, and very high flying will prevail because space programs and projects will be funded by the same people that fund technology startups, and those startups will support projects and programs that not only benefit the pursuit of knowledge but humankind as well.

Di Blasio is emphatic that a manned mission to Mars is in our future (I happen to concur). Whatever technological innovation goes into making this event happen will be scalable to more everyday use experience, here on earth. At this point, we don’t know if we’ll see breakthroughs in travel, biological science, climate control issues, or data gathering and analytic models. What Di Blasio holds true is that everyone will gain from our continued desire to explore the great unknown beyond the cloud.
Di Blasio’s passion for space innovation and investment is not a hobby; he is actively taking part in driving a dialogue, meeting and connecting people, and learning as much as he can. Earlier this year he outlined his manifesto in Save Planet Earth…By Getting To Mars! Why Space Colonization Is The Most Important Milestone Of Our Future. And, next month, he will speak at the Space Foundation’s 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He will present an initiative called NASA iTech, which is a startup incubator/accelerator within NASA and is led by visionary NASA Program Executive Kira Blackwell. The initiative’s purpose is to discover and help break-through technologies become integral and instrumental to space colonization, but not for space alone. The central goal of the initiative is that all of the innovation will benefit colonization as well as life here and yield research methodology that we can apply to science, life science, healthcare, transportation, water sanitation, and alternative energy sources.

Now that cloud has been around for some time, and more and more companies are migrating from on-premise to it, what new technologies might arise and disrupt? Who are the next disruptors and innovators? Maybe you? If you, or someone you know, is creating a career in the cloud and want to achieve success similar to Di Blasio’s but aren’t sure if you have the skills or if your organization is ready for an enterprise on-premise to cloud migration, be in touch with us for a free trial.

The post Coming from the Cloud. Reaching for the Stars. An Interview with Riccardo Di Blasio appeared first on Cloud Academy.

According to a recent IDC report, worldwide spending on public Cloud Computing is expected to “reach nearly $70 billion in 2015.” This obviously indicates a significant shift in organizational practice. Who is succeeding so far in this rapidly changing market? Here’s Gartner’s May, 2015 Magic Quadrant illustrating “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” among cloud infrastructure providers:

Some of the high performers – especially AWS – are obvious. But you shouldn’t discount VMware as a serious player. VMware’s vCloud Air Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering has a lot that recommends it. If you’re looking to modernize your on-premises infrastructure by adding cloud compute, networking, and storage resources, they are probably worth a look.

Here’s a bit of a technical overview of vCloud Air, to be followed by a step-by-step account of the first launch of a virtual machine.

vCloud Air provides many sophisticated solutions, particularly related to hybrid clouds. Like any IaaS provider, vCloud provides all the basic compute, networking, and storage blocks.

Technical Details: vCloud Air provides…

• The ability to add CPU, memory, and disks to a running VM.
• Automatic live VM migrations to servers better able to handle evolving capacity.
• Native migration – often without the need for reconfiguration.
• Load balancing, firewalls, disk I/O, and NAT at no additional charge.
• Relational database support (only MS SQL).
• Object Storage services powered by EMC or the Google Cloud Platform.
• Service through data centers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Australia.
• Discounts based on duration, volume, and prepayments.
• Full compliance with ISO 27001:2005, SOC1, SOC2, HIPPA, CSA, and FISMA.
• Provisioned VMs of any size, 20G of network bandwidth.
• Accelerated flash and disk performance.
• Stretch your layer 2 and layer 3 network from your data center to vCloud Air.

vCloud Air Offerings:

Launching a Virtual Machine in vCloud Air

If you’re considering giving vCloud Air a try, you can get $300 service credits valid over ninety days by signing up.

Let’s see how it works. On the Dashboard, choose the data center location where you want to deploy your VM. You can either deploy virtual machines from an existing catalog image or from scratch. Here’s the New vApp window you’ll see if you click on the Create my Virtual Machine from Scratch link:

In the New vApp window, click on Add Virtual Machines, then enter your settings for Virtual Machine name, Computer name, Virtual hardware version, Operating System Family (MS Windows, Linux, or Other), an Operating System, CPUs, memory and hard disk sizes, Bus type and the number of Network interfaces you’ll need. When you’re done, click OK.

Back in the New vApp window, click on the Configure Resources link to accept the default Storage Profile (if that’s what you want). Click Next.

Now select an available network in the Configure Virtual Machines page. If you don’t want this virtual machine to be accessible externally, select an isolated network.

Finally, review all of your settings and click on Finish. In the My Cloud tab, right-click on your virtual machine and click Start. In the list of virtual machines, you will see the new virtual machine you just created.

If you’re like to learn about VMWare Cloud on AWS, what it is and how it can benefit your business, this Introduction to VMWare Cloud on AWS is your go-to course.

The post vCloud Air from VMware: Launching your First VM on the ‘Other’ Public Cloud appeared first on Cloud Academy.

If you’re looking to the cloud for the solutions to all of mankind’s many problems, you’re in for a disappointment. Chewing gum will always lose its flavor after a while. So there’s that. But even the IT world has scenarios for which the cloud has nothing to offer: some applications need to live on-premise because of security, legacy hardware, or compliance issues.

Since it’s getting harder to maintain entirely local deployments, many look to balance their on-premise resources with cloud connectivity. If your on-premise tools include a VMware stack, then some kind of AWS VMware solution could work for you.

What can an AWS VMware hybrid solution offer

In general, hybrid computing combines the resources of both public and on-premise infrastructure. Intelligently designed combinations can sometimes prove far more effective than single-host deployments.

• Security:

  many users can’t expose their critical data to the public cloud because of security and regulatory concerns. So, for example, they might use a public platform to host their web application but keep their database on-premise. They could also create very fast AWS-VMware connections using Amazon’s Direct Connect or a VPN.

• Disaster Recovery:

  a primary design principle for successful disaster recovery strategies is to keep your backup data as geographically distant from a potential disaster site (i.e., your data center) as possible. When you use AWS S3 or Glacier for storage, adding incremental transfers at regular intervals, you’ve got that one nailed.

• Product proof of concept:

  even if your prototype product could never be deployed on AWS in production, you can still use the public cloud for a quick proof of concept demonstration. No matter how much server and storage power you’ll need, using AWS you’ll never pay for what you don’t actually use, as you’ll completely decommission your resources once the demo is complete.

• Use hard-to-reproduce cloud services:

  while you may decide to keep your main infrastructure elements on-premise, that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of those particularly attractive AWS services (like S3 and CloudFront) that are difficult to build in your datacenter.

Nothing is impossible. It’s all about understanding what’s available and implementing the proper design. So here are three approaches you could take (besides my own thoughts on the topic from a few months ago):

AWS VMware stack integration offerings

VM Import/Export

AWS’s VM Import/Export makes it simple to convert VM images to EC2 instances and back again. Through the AWS CLI, individual server images or entire infrastructures can be moved between your data center and the AWS cloud. There’s no need to abandon either the configurations or the security of your deployments, and you’re definitely not locking yourself into any one platform choice.

AWS Management Portal for vCenter

If you’ve already been using VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform – and particularly their vCenter Server management tool – then the AWS Management Portal for vCenter will make your connections and conversions straightforward.

The Portal is a plugin that lets you migrate, create and manage VMware images alongside your AWS resources. The look-and-feel and the workflow that you use to create new AWS resources will be familiar. You can download the AWS Management Portal for vCenter and install it into your existing vSphere Client:

AWS Direct Connect

In hybrid cloud environments, you will always need connectivity between your on-premise VMware servers and AWS. As we’ve discussed, security – and especially the security of your data in transit – is a very important concern whenever you’re working with more than one location. You can greatly lower your risks through AWS Direct Connect. Direct Connect is a dedicated, high capacity, secure and private link that you can create between your site and an AWS location.

Direct Connect can add to your AWS VMware balance and help you reduce bandwidth costs while providing consistent network performance and private connectivity.

The post AWS VMware Hybrid Solutions: the Best of Both Worlds appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Try VMware’s vCloud Air OnDemand and get up to $1,000 in free service for your first 90 days.

While vCloud Air is a relative newcomer to the cloud hosting market, its creator, VMware, is certainly no stranger to virtualization. To convince you of their claim that they’re the real deal – and able to deliver a compute performance that’s significantly superior to AWS and Azure – they’re offering up to $1,000 of free service over your first ninety days.

So VMware built vCloud Air on top of vCloud…which lives within vSphere. I found all that just a bit confusing. Here’s what each of them actually does:

VMware is a software and services virtualization pioneer. They should require no introduction.

vSphere is a VMware platform that allows locally managed virtualized deployments.

vCloud (and vCloud Suite) allow efficient and agile locally managed vSphere-based private clouds.

vCloud Air is a public cloud platform built on vSphere, that allows both deeply integrated hybrid and pure cloud deployments.

vCloud Air offers secure, pay-as-you-go, cloud compute hosting where you can create and dynamically scale virtual machines and resources up or down while paying only for the resources you use. The billing scheme seems roughly analogous to other cloud providers.

Until December 31, 2015, you can get a $300 service credit on sign up.

But that’s just for people coming in off the street. This link – if you use it to create a new account before the end of June – will get you a $500 service credit along with a chance at an additional $500 (one winner is drawn each week).

Once you’re done with your credits, you will find that the on-demand model can be customized by region, time period and resources required for compute, storage and other additional services.
You can choose between per month, per hour or even per minute price offering, billed in various currencies. An online support option is available for 7% of the invoice amount, and production support is available at 12% of the invoice.

Use cases for vCloud Air

Moving packaged applications to the Cloud

Your IT department can move a packaged application into the cloud, allowing you to more effectively use your on-premises infrastructure for critical applications. This will minimize the department’s administrative burden and allow them to focus on more strategic operations. In some cases, it can also reduce your IT budget by reducing the on-premises IT infrastructure. In some scenarios, it can also improve mobile user experience and remote office application access.

More importantly, vCloud Air supports more than 5,000 applications and 90 operating systems (I’ll bet you didn’t know there were 90 operating systems). This interoperability can save you a whole lot of code re-writing and configuration headaches.

Speeding up application development and testing

Because it’s all virtualized within a single ecosystem (VMware), you can easily sync your on-premises environment with your vCloud Air deployments. That means they can test, deploy or iterate faster. The vCloud Air environment is scalable, so your QA process can move at full speed without the need for new tools or training.

Teams can migrate applications between on and off-premises quickly without needing re-writes. Pivotal Cloud Foundry – an enterprise PaaS solution – can be used in combination with vCloud Air to accelerate and simplify the application development and deployment.

Protecting your data in the cloud

How do you protect the mission-critical environment data you’ve replicated to the Cloud? vCloud Air uses automated replication, on-going monitoring, and assured application availability. And, again, because it’s all part of the vSphere system, location barely matters. vCloud Air:

Provides an agentless, policy-based recovery solution for virtual machine (VM) data and content; it replicates your existing IT policies defined on-premises at the VM level.

Disaster Recovery and Failover Plans

vCloud Air disaster recovery (DR) is entirely self-service, using asynchronous replication and failover. Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) can be comparable to locally-based backups (with the obvious advantage of NOT being locally-based!).
Remember: you can get as much as $1,000 in free vCloud Air credits by using this link to create a new account before the end of June.

Additional video resources

Introductory video for OnDemand

Configuring your OnDemand VMs

OnDemand User Access and Tracking Consumption

The post vCloud Air OnDemand – VMware’s IaaS and Hybrid Infrastructure Service appeared first on Cloud Academy.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to migrate your on-premise virtual machines to AWS – focusing mostly on the forklift method – along with key prerequisites and limitations.

Cloud Computing can be described as a metered data center service for running applications at global scale. Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and physical servers, you can use a cloud computing provider’s servers and only pay for the computing resources you actually consume. Now there’s no need to desperately guess at your future capacity needs: you can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required. With Cloud Computing, you can easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks and provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost. By migrating your application to the cloud you can save on power, cooling, administration, and software licensing costs. Once the move is complete, you’ll be free to concentrate on your application, not on infrastructure

Migrating virtual machines (and the applications they’re running) to the cloud can be cumbersome and complicated unless you use the right tools for the job. Amazon Web Services offers a variety of ways to migrate your applications and servers.

Migration Methods

Forklift: the forklift, or Lift&Shift, a method is best suited for moving a legacy application to the cloud. That is, rather than moving single system components over time, you forklift the whole environment, with all its complex dependencies, in one go.

Hybrid migration strategy: Rather than moving the entire server all at once, individual parts of the application can be moved. This can reduce the risk of unexpected behavior after migration and it is ideal for 3 Tier applications.

Leverage the cloud: Redesign the application with AWS in mind. It might cost a bit more up front, but embedding scalable and manageable services like auto-scaling and edge caching of static content can greatly reduce administration activities – and costs – over the long haul.

Migrating Virtual Machines: the Forklift method:

Let’s look at forklifts in detail:

1.Identify VM for Lift & Shift

Pre-Requisites

• Operating systems that can be imported into EC2, Windows: Windows Server 2012 R2 (Standard), Windows Server 2012 (Standard, Datacenter), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Standard, Datacenter, Enterprise),Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Datacenter, Enterprise), Windows Server 2003 R2 (Standard, Datacenter, Enterprise), Windows Server 2003 (Standard, Datacenter, Enterprise) with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later
• Linux: Linux/Unix (64-bit)- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1-5.10, 6.1-6.5, CentOS 5.1-5.10, 6.1-6.5, Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, Debian 6.0.0-6.0.8, 7.0.0-7.2.0 (RHEL 6.0 is unsupported because it lacks the drivers required to run on Amazon EC2).
• Image-Formats Supported: RAW format, VHD, VMDK, (you can only import VMDK files into Amazon EC2 that were created through the OVF export process in VMware).

Limitations

• Imported Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances must use Cloud Access (BYOL) licenses.
• Imported Linux instances must use 64-bit images. Importing 32-bit Linux images is not supported.
• Expanded disk image of an imported compressed image cannot exceed 1 TB.
• Make sure your VM only uses a single disk. Importing a VM using more than one disk is not supported. For Linux VMs, /boot and / can be located in different partitions, but they need to be on the same disk.
• This method is not recommended for deployments relying on shared storage or very large storage devices.

2.Install the AWS CLI

In order to initiate and manage the migration (import), you’ll need to install the Ec2 CLI tools on the machine where the source images reside. You can refer to AWS documentation for installing CLI tools or view the first video of How to Use the AWS Command-Line Interface course.

3.Migrating virtual machines: prepare your VM

• Uninstall the VMWare Tools from your VMWare VM.
• Disconnect any CD-ROM drives (virtual or physical).
• Set your network to DHCP instead of a static IP address. If you want to assign a static private IP address, be sure to use a non-reserved private IP address in your VPC subnet.
• Shut down your VM before exporting it.
• On Windows, enable Remote Desktop (RDP) for remote access, and on Linux enable SSH server access.
• Allow RDP and SSH access through your host firewall if you have one.
• Use secure passwords for your all user accounts and disable Auto logon on your Windows VM.
• Make sure that your Linux VM uses GRUB (GRUB legacy) or GRUB 2 as its boot loader.
• Make sure that your Linux VM uses one of the following root file systems: EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, JFS, or XFS.
• Export your VM from its virtual environment for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.

4.Execute the VM Export

• Use ec2-import-instance to create a new import instance task:

ec2-import-instance disk_image_filename -f file_format -t instance_type -a architecture -b s3_bucket_name -o owner -w secret_key -p platform_name

5.Check the VM import status

• The ec2-describe-conversion-tasks command returns the status of an import task
• Status values include: active, canceling, canceled, and completed
• Check the status of your import task:

ec2-describe-conversion-tasks task_id

6.Start your Ec2 Instance

• Login to your AWS console.
• In the navigation pane, click Instances.
• Note the instance ID from VM import status, right-click the instance, select Instance State, and then click Start.

Migrating virtual machines: conclusion

This is one common scenario for migrating virtual machines to AWS.

Before choosing any particular migration approach, make sure you understand both its prerequisites and limitations…then boldly migrate to the cloud!

The post Migrating Virtual Machines to the AWS Cloud appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Cloud Technology Issues:  struggles between relational databases and NoSQL, VMWare and Red Hat, and malware creators and the WordPress plugin

Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. This week we’ve got some interesting struggles: between relational databases and NoSQL, VMWare and Red Hat, and malware creators and the WordPress plugin, Fancybox. We’ll also discuss Minecraft in education and the opening up of IBM’s Watson.

The relational database strikes back

We’ve mentioned the shifting border between relational databases and NoSQL in this space before. Now James Bourne at Cloud Computing News reports that an EnterpriseDB-commissioned study performed by Forrester found a significant number of respondents reporting having trouble fully integrating their NoSQL solutions, while the capabilities of many relational DBs – and in particular Postgres – are improving the way they handle unstructured data.

Cloud technology, Watson style

ZDNet reports that IBM’s Watson, the cognitive computing system that, more and more, is opening up to developers, has now made its formidable speech-to-text, text-to-speech, visual recognition, concept insights, and tradeoff analytics available through the Watson Developer Cloud.

Minecraft as cloud giant in the education market?

Why not? The Minecraft gaming world is a mature platform with a huge and fiercely loyal, paying user base that just happens to present enormous educational potential. Besides the existing programs using Minecraft mods to teach kids programming skills, a recent Atlantic Monthly article points out that some educators are apparently now incorporating Minecraft worlds into a much broader swath of their curriculum.

The big boys are having it out in the enterprise cloud ring.

Cloud Computing News reports that Bryan Che at Red Hat isn’t impressed with VMWare’s new hybrid cloud initiative, writing that VMWare is not the ideal platform for architectures requiring significant scale-out (rather than scale-up) options. Che feels that a specifically scale-out cloud base like OpenStack would benefit from a more closely matched infrastructure.

WordPress plugin bug

Did you really think we’d go a second week without reporting some nasty exploit? If your WordPress deployment uses the Fancybox image displaying plugin, then you might just be in for an unpleasant surprise: Fancybox has a vulnerability that can leave you wide open for attack. ZDNet reports that WordPress has already removed the plugin from its own repositories, but anyone hosting WP locally and using Fancybox, might want to remove it immediately.

The post Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest – Issue #12 appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Using modern technology doesn’t mean that our data-center is bulletproof, every technology has its own limits. VMware experts already know that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host, so to limit your overall downtime. Nevertheless, what if your machines are in such a critical state that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT).

VMware Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for virtual machines by creating and maintaining a Secondary VM that is identical to, and continuously available to replace, the Primary VM in the event of a fail-over situation. Read it as a ghost VM backing up your primary one covertly.

There is another proprietary patented algorithm that helps VMware achieve this unusual feature, that is the vLockstep technology we were talking about. Let’s deep dive into how vLockstep helps us to take advantage of fault tolerant VMs.

VMware vLockstep: How it Works

VMware vLockstep is a technology that captures inputs and events that occur on a primary virtual machine (VM) and sends them to a secondary VM. This supports VMware’s Fault Tolerance component of VMware vSphere.

VMware’s Fault Tolerance works by keeping a primary virtual machine (VM) and a secondary VM in perfect sync. VMware vLockstep captures inputs and events that occur on the primary VM and sends them to the secondary VM. Because the secondary VM is always in sync with the primary VM, it can take over in the event of a primary VM failure without interruption and provide fault-tolerant protection. When the secondary VM takes over, VMware FT automatically creates a new secondary VM. In fact, the name “Lockstep” comes from a style of a military march that emphasizes synchronous movement.

For vLockstep to reproduce CPU instructions from the primary VM on the secondary VM, the Intel or AMD processors used must have the appropriate performance counter architecture and virtualization hardware assists. Both hosts supporting the VM pair must be in the same processor family.

VMware vLockstep should be set up on a dedicated network interface card (NIC) with at least 1 GB/s of throughput. Although all data is synchronized between the paired VMs over a server backbone network, outputs are suppressed in the secondary VM. For instance, VMware FT ensures only the primary VM initiates write operations to storage. Certain actions and instructions that are irrelevant for the secondary VM are not synced via vLockstep, reducing the burden on disk space and processors.

In versions of vSphere earlier than v.5, the vLockstep VM pairs were marked as “disabled” in VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), enabling higher compatibility between VMware FT and DRS. In either case, users experience no interruption in service and no loss of data.

A fault tolerant virtual machine and its secondary copy are not allowed to run on the same host. This restriction ensures that a host failure cannot result in the loss of both virtual machines. You can also use VM-Host affinity rules to dictate which hosts designated virtual machines can run on. If you use these rules, be aware that for any Primary VM that is affected by such a rule, its associated Secondary VM is also affected. For more information about affinity rules, see the vSphere Resource Management documentation.

Fault Tolerance also avoids “split-brain” situations, which can lead to two active copies of a virtual machine after recovery from a failure. Atomic file locking on shared storage is used to coordinate fail-over so that only one side continues to run as the Primary VM and a new Secondary VM is re-spawned automatically.

How VMware vLockstep can help your organization

VMware vLockstep eliminates even the smallest of disruptions caused by server hardware failures. VMware Fault Tolerance provides instantaneous, non-disruptive fail-over in the event of server failures, protecting organizations from even the smallest disruptions or data losses when downtime costs can run into thousands of dollars in lost business.

It also provides continuous availability to any critical application. All applications that run inside a VMware virtual machine can be protected by VMware Fault Tolerance, allowing continuous levels of availability to be possible even for homegrown or custom applications. Automatic detection of failures and seamless fail-over ensure that applications continue to run without interruptions, user disconnects or data loss during hardware failures.

Finally, it delivers uninterrupted service with simplicity and low cost. VMware Fault Tolerance works with existing VMware High Availability (HA) or VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) clusters and can be simply turned on or turned off for virtual machines. When applications require operational continuity during critical periods such as month end or quarter end time periods for financial applications, VMware Fault Tolerance can be turned on with the click of a button to provide extra assurance. The operational simplicity of VMware Fault Tolerance is matched by its low cost. In fact, it is simply included as a component in VMware vSphere and requires no specialized dedicated hardware.

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I have had the opportunity to work a lot with Continuent solutions and products in the past. I worked on a project where high scalability and performance of a MySQL database where a priority, and I wanted to make the database tier totally transparent to the front-end tier, as if it was a single DB server, providing only a DNSName.

I initially thought about a solution with a MySQL Proxy installed on each FrontEnd server, so that they could access the data on the localhost (the proxy then rotated the requests to DB servers based on the query). But the MySQL Proxy project never released upgrades after the initial alpha version, so I looked for an alternative which I found in Tungsten, a service developed by Continuent that includes features like proxy balancers and routing.

Continuent did a lot of road since then. The solutions they offer for High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Scale Up, Balancing, Replication and Real-Time Conversion between different relational DB engine are really amazing. Let’s see a few examples:

• Database-as-a-Service: Create a data service in physical or virtual environments.
• Multi-master, multi-site: Optimal solutions to scale with highly efficient real-time replicas.
• Oracle Replication: Replicate data from Oracle to MySQL or the other way round in real-time.
• Replication to Real-Time Analytics and Big Data: fast and real-time replicas between RDBMS and NoSQL like MongoDB, Hadoop, and Vertica.
• Load Balancing: increase throughput by balancing automatically among many replicas.

In my opinion, thanks to this acquisition VMware will be able to gain a major competitive advantage, a very important step to get new space on the market against the big Public Cloud providers.
VMware started years ago to test the market for Public Cloud with CloudFoundry, an open source project to build a PaaS platform, someway similar to Heroku, with a command line interface to instantiate resources, deploy new software releases, etc. This project was then removed from VMware with the birth of the SpinOut Pivotal, directed by the great Paul Maritz.

Under the area of Public IaaS VMware started its journey with vCloud Express partners like Terremark, a federation of service providers using the same platform and software that allowed customers to upload their own VM on the selected provider, using a vSphere client plugin, a kind of transition from private to public cloud data centers.

Very recently VMware announced vCloud Air, a project to become a Public Cloud Providers with their Data Center while maintaining its network of service provider partners

As of now, VMware can provide a few services if we compare them with the big AWS or Azure. But the potential of the solutions of Continuent, might allow them to create a service superior to the well known AWS RDS and SQL Azure.

With the potential of multi-master replication and load balancing, VMware may provide in a short period a fully managed RDBMS service, accessible with a single DNSName, without any limits about computing power, with pay per use model. That is, they could start drawing the perfect PaaS.

In addition, with the potential of real-time replication from MySQL or Oracle to Hadoop, MongoDB, and Vertica, VMware could place interesting online services for the BigData world.

In short, VMware has added enormous potential placement with this acquisition. I’m really curious to see how long it will take to release online something interesting and powerful.

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