Amazon VPC and Citrix

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new enhancement to its Elastic Computing Service (EC2), called Virtual Private Cloud, more cloud acronyms!! But what is it?

VPC provides network isolation to virtual servers running in Amazon EC2 cloud. Workloads in VPC do not have any connectivity to the public Internet, instead they have IPSec VPN connectivity to the customers private network.

The virtual servers get a corporate IP address from your range and it even supports DHCP.

To set this up, you use new features of the Amazon API that lets you create a VPC container (a logical construct for the concept of your private cloud), subnets, and gateways. When you actually activate the VPN, you begin paying 5 cents an hour to keep the tunnel up. You pay normal Amazon bandwidth charges on top of that.

When you launch an EC2 instance, you can now specify that it belongs to a particular VPC subnet. That instance is not physically isolated from the rest of EC2; you're still part of the general shared pool of capacity. Rather, the virtual privacy is achieved via Amazon's proprietary networking software, which they use to isolate virtual instances from one another.

VPN connectivity for cloud servers is not a new thing in general, and part of what Amazon is addressing with this release is a higher-security option, for those customers who are uncomfortable with the fact that Amazon, unlike most of its competitors, does not offer a private VLAN to each customer. What distinguishes the Amazon offering is that the provisioning is fully automated, and the technology is proprietary.

Amazon is a top tier strategic partner for Citrix in the Cloud market. Over time, Amazon VPC will enable all Citrix enterprise customers to seamlessly expand their Citrix infrastructures, starting today with XenApp, by adding highly secure and reliable on-demand resources from AWS as a natural extension of their current on-premises Citrix based applications.

Want to know more about how this could benefit you, then contact us

PlateSpin Forge 2.5 Released

Back in 2007 PlateSpin launched Forge into the DR marketplace, building upon their strong virtualiastion reputation with a physical appliance to address the needs of simplified DR to protect both physical and virtual workloads.

The company updated the platform to version 2.0 exactly one year ago, months after being acquired by Novell.

Earlier this month Forge reached version 2.5, introducing the following features:

• Support for Windows Server 2008 & Windows Vista (both file-based and block-based live replication)
• Support for Block-Based Transfers with 64bit protected systems
• Server Sync Block-Based Transfers
• Physical Machine Server Sync
• Support for replications longer than 24 hours
• Role-Based Access & Multi-Tenancy.

Want to know more, click here or email me.

Microsoft SCVMM R2 is at RTM

A couple of days ago the Microsoft virtualisation management solution System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 was set as RTM.

As expected the RTM arrives just a few weeks after Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 were released to the Microsoft partners, such as ourselves.

The most important new capability included in this release is the long awaited live migration for virtual machines. Microsoft also added in other features such as Quick Storage Motion and support for VMware port groups.

The Release Candidate should be considered feature complete but Microsoft managed to squeeze another feature into the RTM: partial support for VMware vSphere 4.0.

Basically Microsoft supports the new VMware platform only for the same features that were available in VI3.5. Some of the new capabilities that VMware offers will be supported in a future update of SCVMM.

The full version instead will be available to its its Volume License customers first, starting on October 1st.

Want to see it in action along with Windows 2008 Hyper-V R2, then why not sign up to our event in Reading here

Citrix not to be outdone by VMware Distributed Switch

Earlier this year at Citrix's annual conference for end users (Synergy), they announced the availability of an open source switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V the Cisco made available for vSphere.

There is now an official website about the Project, and is called Open vSwitch. The vSwitch is to be released under the Apache 2 open source license.

The first release which is available online is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:

• Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking Per VM policing NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing Kernel-based forwarding Support for OpenFlow Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code

On top of that the following features are part of the roadmap:

• User-space forwarding engine
• sFlow
• Compatibility layer for VDE
• Ethernet over GRE (for ERSPAN and virtual private network creation) Full L3 support + NAT Priority-based QoS More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NetFlow) 802.1x/RADIUS
• Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs)

EMC Enhances Clariion to become more VMware aware.

EMC has added faster I/O modules to its Clariion storage and made Clariion software more VMware-aware.

It is adding a 10Gbit/E UltraFlex I/O module to support iSCSI access. An 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel I/O module was added last quarter. The company will add a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) module providing a native FCoE interface next year; vague timing. It says up to eight times more virtual machines can be supported by a Clariion array because of these faster I/O modules.

On the software front Clariion Replication Manager now provides instant and image-level recovery of VMware virtual machines.

RecoverPoint Replication integrates with VMware's vCenter server and shows the replication status of each virtual machine, and can identify unprotected virtual machines. Admin staff can manage replicated storage for virtualised and physical servers from a single view and EMC claims it is the only such software integrated with vCenter for automated VM replication management.

Navisphere Manager is also more VMware-aware and provides faster access to virtual machine data. EMC says the discovery and reporting of VMware environments and the mapping to backend storage of a 10 VMware ESX server environment can go from 200 screens before to 2 screens now. Data had to be manually exported to a spreadsheet before; now it can be automatically exported in Excel or CSV format.

Navisphere automatically discovers and maintains relationships between the logical and physical environments, again speeding up admin tasks.

VMware to Support Google Chrome OS

Announced this week VMware will fully support Google Chrome OS in H2 2010 when released by Google.

"VMware will welcome Google Chrome OS to the family of desktop OSes as another choice for running specialised applications when it's available," said Raj Mallempati, VMware group product manager.

Nobody can speculate what impact Google Chrome OS will have on the Microsoft dominance of the desktop, but one thing is certain you can bet the other hypervisor providers will support it also.

As we highlighted in an earlier blog posting this could be very interesting for the VDI world and the mass hype around Cloud/SaaS. Compared to alternative operating systems Chrome is reported to be more lightweight allowing providers to support potentially millions of users, it also has very little to concern the end user about licenses which can only be a good thing.

So not too much to write about here, but thought it should be of interest now we have the heavyweight of Virtualisation supporting it.

As if the VDI space wasn't already massively talked about, this should be an interesting time!!

Virtualisation and the Cloud

Dataplex have been undertaking virtualisation solutions for our clients for longer than I care to remember, and have had some pretty interesting projects along the way with a number of unique business drivers being the facilitator for these projects.

But there is a single buzz word that is used time and time again to describe why we are embarking on this journey - Cost Cutting (virtualisation is a consolidation technology), which of course it is, but this ultimately is a tactical deployment. Virtualisation is far more than just tactical and should be part of an overall strategic deployment.

Lets face it, in today's climate saving money is a good thing! But thinking strategically about virtualisation is not just about cost cutting but an enabler for flexible sourcing and cloud computing.

Whether or not you like the phrase cloud computing it looks here to stay, and virtualisation unlocks many doors to private, public and federated clouds through the following avenues:

1. Economies of scale through a multi tenanted architecture, its what the cloud providers do and its what you should be doing to.
2. Allows the IT department flexibility in sourcing and provisioning as the barriers to physical server implementation moves to an SLA and service provision architecture, with the option to provide cross departmental billing.
3. Virtualisation changes the culture of business and expectations, gone are the days of 4 week server lead times, deploying virtual machines can be done in a matter of a few clicks. This brings with it challenges in service uptime, provisioning and management all of which have been addressed by cloud providers.
4. Charge back has become a key play for many organisations as typically users demand more as they can get it faster than before. IT needs to focus more on usage accounting, and charge back.

So in review we have economies of scale, SLA/SOA, faster time to provision, multi tenanted architectures and billing on usage - is this not what cloud providers promise?

So if you started reading this thinking - "Cloud computing not for me thanks", maybe you are further down the cloud computing route than you thought, its an evolution:

Virtualisation>>Private Cloud>>Public Cloud>>Federation

For more on how Dataplex can help you understand and build your cloud architecture click here.

New VMware Acquistion - SpringSource.

VMware announced yesterday that they are to acquire SpringSource, who are a 5 year old company specialising in enterprise and web application development.

On the surface it can be difficult to see where the two organisations will combine to release true value to the end user, but if we look a bit deeper we can start to see some key synergies between the two:

Both Organisations have strived to reduce the complexity typically placed in IT.

VMware's mission (and in fact, the promise of “Cloud Computing”) has been to shift the typical spending of IT Budget (70% maintenance) towards activities that move the business forward or just improve the bottom line. The most recent deliverable on this mission is VMware vSphere 4.

SpringSource has also been a technology innovator with a very similar mission, but focused on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of complexity.

VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within the virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing, this has started to shift with the advent of vSphere and the vApp capability. It is clear to see that VMware will take SpringSource into the vApp party and start to enhance speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or provide resiliency in the face of component outages.

The Cloud and PaaS

Lets face it all technology companies are talking about cloud technology and the benefits this will bring to the table, VMware have the following as their vision for cloud technology (public, private and federated):

So with this acquisition we start to see VMware moving into the PaaS (Platform as a Service); Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are two of the best known examples of PaaS today, with Microsoft providing Azure for their cloud providers.

PaaS simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerates application development by providing a self-service, self-managing utility for building, deploying, running, and managing applications. Key characteristics of PaaS are:

1. Elasticity: automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the application
2. Multi-tenancy: being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared infrastructure
3. Simplified provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets installed and deployed
4. Self-service: allowing developers to gain access to their development infrastructure at any time, in many cases to circumvent the processes and inefficiencies of their typical IT service request processes.
5. Rapid development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during the development and test phases.

So this should be an interesting time with VMware, we have View and SRM about to become fully compliant with vSphere and Lab Manager should prove fundamental to SpringSource.

Microsoft App-V 4.6 Beta Release

Microsoft has officially launched the App-V 4.6 beta program.

This version is still oriented to client applications but introduces a major new feature: the support for 64bit platforms (including the just released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2).

For the first time customers will be able to sequence a 64bit application, something that nobody else on the market can do at the moment according to Microsoft.

Microsoft expects to finalize App-V 4.6 during H1 2010. Meanwhile you can enroll for the beta program here

VMware Launches Teradici PCoIP Private Beta

VMware have been talking long enough about the new VMware View protocol that apparently will make it a contender to Citrix ICA, guess we will have to wait and see on that one. Anyway the new View 4.0 finally introduces the software-only implementation of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol.

VMware has been working on a way to replace Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) since late 2007, which has been one of its main problems to date.

VMware has developed a two-phased plan to deliver a more efficient protocol for its VDI platform.

1. the company signed an OEM agreement with the thin client vendor WYSE Technology, to use its TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) technologies.
2. VMware started a co-development program with Teradici, to create a software-only version of its high-performance PCoIP protocol.

At the moment the Teradici technology only works with the help of dedicated graphic adapters that must be installed on the machine serving the virtual desktops.

After months of work it seems that the two companies have something ready to show because this first private beta of View 4.0 is completely dedicated to PCoIP.

Subsequent beta builds will focus more on the connection broker itself and may be open to a wider audience.

We’ll see if what the two companies are building is fast enough to replace RDP (which is becoming more VDI-focused thanks to the Calista technologies that Microsoft acquired in January 2008).

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Following on from yesterdays blog post, we thought it would be useful to see a direct comparison of the features now present in the standalone version of Hyper-V compared to that of its predecessor R1, so here you are:

This version also has the ability to boot from flash, which puts it right up there against its rivals ESXi and XenServer in the OEM editions.

Novell Release PlateSpin Protect 8.1

After the release of Migrate 8.1, Novell has released Protect 8.1.

Both Migrate and Protect come from the original PlateSpin PowerConvert. Novell split it in these two products after completing the acquisition of its subsidiary.

The idea behind this move is that customers may want to use the P2V migration engine for disaster recovery and so they want to have specific features for this task, and is something that Dataplex have recommended for many years.

The new Protect 8.1 introduces the following features:

• Live incremental replication with block-based transfers
• File-level restore
• Support for live incremental replications in V2P migrations
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Last week Microsoft released Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 to manufacture. This is the free version of Microsoft’s server virtualisation engine, and the same updated software is also included in Windows Server 2008 R2, which was also released to manufacturing last week.

Firms could download and install as many copies of the free Hyper-V 2008 R2 as they want, but Hyper-V does not include the normal Windows graphical user interface or much of the other software found in the full Windows Server 2008 suite. Instead, it includes only enough software to run virtual machines, with management taking place from a remote server on the LAN.

The obvious choice here is Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. However, like Hyper-V, this can only be run on hardware fitted with a modern x64 CPU. Also, VMM2008 requires Windows Server 2008, so the cost of that software must be factored into the equation when buying VMM2008. The current version of VMM2008 does not support all the features in R2, but Microsoft is preparing VMM2008 R2, which will support Hyper-V R2. VMM2008 R2 will be released within 90 days of the launch of Hyper-V R2.

Another new feature in R2 is Cluster Shared Volumes software, which is a vital component of the Live Migration feature. Live migration speeds will depend on the architecture in place and how busy the hosts currently are.

One of the most useful things about Live Migration is that it can be combined with free Performance and Resource Optimisation (PRO) tools from Microsoft and third party vendors. This combination could then automatically manage things if something goes wrong with a particular Hyper-V server. For example, Microsoft distributes a PRO management pack with VMM2008 that monitors Hyper-V resources such as CPU and RAM and could trigger a migration if a server is working too hard and there is spare capacity elsewhere. To use PRO you need to install Operations Manager agents on your hosts and virtual machines, so it’s a bit more intrusive than VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and works only with guest operating systems for which agents are available.

Whether these features prove to be as popular as VMware’s DRS and HA features remains to be seen. However, Hyper-V’s Live Migration and PRO features mean Microsoft provides pretty much everything many organisations need for hosting and running their virtual machines.

Citrix provide Seamless Application Publishing from within virtual desktops

Last week Citrix revealed their new upcoming technology "VM Hosted Apps", so what is it?

Simply put, its publishing applications from a virtual desktop when Terminal Services wont fit the bill. With Hosted Virtual Machines you use a client OS such as Windows XP to run the application but the presentation of it is sent to the user.

The big issue here is the ability to still provide Remote Display Services (TS) like deployment of applications, but overcome some of the issues that Terminal Services (TS) has.

So why can’t Application Virtualisation (e.g. Microsoft App-V or Citrix XenApp) work? First off, there are certain applications that are developed either by a custom software development shop and built for a given customer and for a given OS/Application mix. There are other applications that are certified by an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) that has specific requirements.

So the solution by Citrix XenApp (through Feature Pack 2) opens some doors, probably not massively adopted due to cost (Microsoft VECD required) but will provide a good user experience.

That is not a typo - this is a feature of XenApp not XenDesktop and will at present another mmc snapin to manage it

XenApp Enterprise and Platinum customers will be able to host Seamless applications from Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 in addition to Windows 2003 and Windows 2008. Applications will be able to be delivered from hosted virtual machines running desktop OS's and/or physical and blade PCs.

Here are some more details. Each user will have a 1-1 mapping to their VM Hosted Apps in the initial release. However in subsequent releases Citrix will enable multiple published apps per user. The management experience will allow you to manage your traditional farms side by side. The infrastructure required to deploy this leverages Citrix desktop virtualisation technology.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing - What's it all about

One thing, its all about Microsoft trying to bring Google back to earth.

Last week Microsoft and Yahoo finally came to some agreement on their business relationship, Yahoo Search is soon to be Bing. Yahoo will cut is costs by ditching search technology and both companies will share the ad revenues, but more importantly Microsoft now controls approximately 1/3rd of the search engine market.

Microsoft, although have been down this road four times before have made a very good Search engine with Bing, at its WPC Microsoft announced that Search is their biggest focus for fiscal year '09 and '10 and they have put an inordinate amount of resource behind the focus.

As of June 2009 the top three search providers were:

• Google - 65% of search traffic
• Yahoo - 19.6% of search traffic
• Microsoft - 8.4% of search traffic

Microsoft, formerly at about 8% share (though that number’s fluctuating since Bing is so new), will now jump up to 28% market share, giving it the biggest leverage it has ever had. Still, it will be fragmented, and just because Microsoft will have a lot more users doesn’t mean it’ll keep them.

Microsoft is unleashing its full power of engineers, finances, resources, partnerships, and marketing to bring Google back to earth. They have made a multi-billion dollar bet with Bing and the Yahoo search deal, so you can bet Microsoft will do all it must to get a positive return.

Should be an interesting time in the search wars, just as Google are entering into the desktop operating system space with Google Chrome Operating System....

What does Software Plus Services actually mean?

In a time where most people are being bombarded with Cloud technology and acronyms such as SaaS, DaaS, PaaS to name but a few, Microsoft have taken a different stance and calling their equivalent technologies "Software Plus Services", but what does this actually mean?

SaaS is a web based model where the customer pays (typically) a flat fee to a hoster and they have no responsibility for the infrastructure - similar concept to consumer utility services (Gas, Electric, Water etc), the software is never purchased. These are strong compelling models especially in an age of economic uncertainty coupled with a desire to provide business continuity plans and mobility solutions; especially when the winter flu season (read swine flu) is coming.

Microsoft is taking a different approach to this and offering the customer "choice" throughout the software implementation life cycle.

Software Plus Services provides 3 options:

1. Hosted, subscription model (SAAS)
2. Purchasing software in a hosted environment
3. Purchasing the software to deploy on-premise.

In the subscription-based, hosted model, initial cost outlays are limited and responsibility for the customer’s IT department is low. However, over the long run this can be a significantly more costly approach, and can have some impact on customisations, integrations, etc. At some point in time, the customer may opt to bring the solution in-house, purchase the software, and maintain it internally going forward. With a SAAS solution, this is impossible (at present).

With the Microsoft approach, this can be achieved on the same version of the software. All modifications are moved into the customers environment etc. This approach gives the customer the flexibility to operate as their business needs dictate, not as their software company dictates.

If the SAAS model is appealing, evaluate the reasons why and consider Software Plus Services instead. want to know more about this and other cloud technologies, then click here