Mike D’s Blog

Yesterday was time for celebration on the VMware Cloud team – we finally have a product. Well, we’ve had the technology for the product for some time and have been very busy building clouds with it around the world but yesterday we actually hit GA for VMware vCloud Director.

As you can see from some of the blog posts starting to show up we had a really good time as a group last night. Boy, I’m feeling it this morning. Now the real work begins. Unlike what Simon Crosby thinks, there are a lot of VMware powered clouds. And also unlike what Simon is saying it’s not there to lock you in but rather to give you choice. You no longer have to make a decision to go and get stuck in some Uber Cloud run by a bookstore company. Now you can choose where you want to run your public cloud services based on real business decision such as existing relationships with the providers, the lowest cost, the best geographic location, or even compliance support for your industry. That’s the real power of the vCloud Ecosystem is the choice you get on where you want to run public cloud services and how. Of course it doesn’t hurt that all of these environments are 100% compatible with what you’re running in-house today (unless you’re that 2% of the world running on Xen or Hyper-V).

Like I said, now the fun begins because the cat’s out of the bag on what VMware has to offer and I’m sure people are going to be calling a lot if for nothing else than to explore the offering a little more. That brings me to the part of the post where I beg. PLEASE, if you are a smart person or know a smart person and you’re looking to join the tip of the cloud spear then contact me or go to the VMware job site and apply for a position on my team. I look for 3 main skills to help build the cloud:

1) Networking
2) Storage
3) Programming (Java preferably)

With over 1,100 providers already signed up to build clouds the team can use all of the help it can get. Anywhere in the world is good for location but on the top of my list right now is APAC (specifically Japan, Singapore, and China) and EMEA (northern or southern Europe doesn’t matter). You will travel a good bit (maybe 30 – 50%). You will have a great time at VMware. You will work hard but have a great time doing it. The team already reads like the who’s who in the virtualization world. Basically if Chad Sakac hasn’t already snatched them up then I’ve got them on my team. And since Chad and I work closely together all the time it’s sort of one large virtual team anyways.

Enough rambling. I’m sure everyone is just waking up and getting ready for the 3rd day of VMworld so I’ll stop here. If you happen to be awake today I’ll be in the following places if you want to come say “hi” or chat:

10 am – noon – The Lab Room (Moscone West)

noon – 1 pm – Speaking: Networking Best Practices in the Cloud (Moscone West 2006)

2 – 3 pm – Secret underground meeting with some strategic partners

5:30 – 7:30 pm – Office of the CTO Party

7:30 – 10 pm – VMworld Party

See you around VMworld!

Tags: vcloud

VMware has just opened up a survey to find out about what you think about cloud. And here’s the good news – they’ll give you a free cup of Joe to help you stay awake through the survey. In all seriousness this is your chance to influence what VMware is doing in the cloud space. Tell them what you want, what your pain points are, etc. Here’s more about the curvey with the link.

To gather your feedback, we’ve created a quick public cloud survey: http://bit.ly/publiccloudsurvey. Our survey asks why you chose your provider, the type of workloads you’re running, if you use intermediaries with your cloud solution, and what you perceive as the biggest benefits or concerns when it comes to cloud.

The survey only takes about 10-15 minutes to complete, and the first 100 participants receive a $5 Starbucks gift card in the mail. Please note, this survey is open to ALL public cloud users, not just VMware customers.

Tags: Cloud, VMware

Recently I was up at the Charlotte VMUG which was a HUGE and very well organized event. David Davis from Train Signal was there and in the audience as I talked all about cloud. He recorded the talk and you can see the video below. NOTE: This is *not* the official VMware talk but one that I put together to disseminate information and keep the audience engaged. You’ll figure that out quickly as you start to watch the talk.

Enjoy!

Tags: Cloud, video, vmug

A lot of people keep asking what I’m up to and why I’m so quiet all of the time. I’ve been telling you all that I’ve been super busy building VMware based public clouds. Well, one of my customers just broke their silence so I thought I’d give you a pointer on the types of environments I’ve been working in.

Orange Business Services (think France Telecom) has just announced their cloud intentions. It’s a very exciting project that builds on top of the cloud service they already have launched with VMware. This is one of the largest telcos in the world that all of our enterprise customers will be able to seamlessly federate to using common technologies, support, and formats. That’s a really big thing. Enterprise customers keep telling us over and over again that they want to use their existing tools and technologies to manage resources whether they are in the cloud or not. Since OBS is building a vCloud based cloud offering Enterprise customers will get just that – seemless federation using their existing tools.

Anyhow, I thought I would point out that yes, we are building clouds and yes we’re building a lot of them. You should be able to figure that out by all of the job postings we’ve been putting up and by the 200,000+ miles I’ve flown since January this year. Now I just wish I could talk about all of our other projects that we’ve done. Rest assured if it’s a launched public cloud and it’s not Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Rackspace then it’s a VMware powered cloud. And heck 2 of those 4 are even on the move. If you want to know more about VMware cloud technology and why everyone is basing their cloud services on it then make sure to go and read up.

Until the next announcement….

Tags: Cloud, VMware

I recently listened to a demo done by a software vendor that was running a cloud based service. One of the questions that came up was around how the end user verifies that their data is safe. It wasn’t the question of being safe from hackers but rather the cloud vendor’s own admins. This started a huge internal debate on the VMware cloud team on how, when, and why you should audit your administrator’s activities.

There are probably several answers to this question and I would be really interested to get some comments on how people look over their admins (or don’t) in their own environments. My personal answer to this is if you don’t trust someone that has all the root passwords and a key card to your physical datacenter then you have much bigger issues at hand versus making sure they aren’t touching people’s data.

Still internal issues do pop up. I remember an incedent when I worked for the Department of Revenue in the state of Georgia many years ago. Turns out some of the people on the security team were running a “credit cleaning” business. For a certain sum they would log in and clean up your credit record since the state holds a lot of power to do so. Of course after several months of this they were escorted out of the building one day by the FBI. But how did these people get caught? It wasn’t anything too high tech. They simply got greedy, put out ads, and one of the ads turned up on the GBI (the state FBI) bulletin board. Funny how things work.

Like I said, there are many software packages on the market to audit everything that anyone does, but doesn’t someone also maintain those software packages? Isn’t it usually the same people that have admin access to other systems like the security team? How do you stop something at the very top?

Needless to say this is something my team will be thinking about and building into the cloud architectures that we build. Just thought I’d bring it up and start a conversation to see what other people think can be done for this issue.

Tags: Cloud, Security

One of the 3 cloud killers is licensing. The others are comfort and compliance in case you’re wondering. More on that later. Licensing is the one that’s most often overlooked by most people implementing or consuming the cloud today. People often confuse a serial number with a license and think that just because they put a valid serial number in they’re ok. The truth is much different than that. In reality most of the times a license is an agreement or a piece of paper and “licensing” a piece of software is often referred to as “assignment”. The act of assigning a license is usually as complicated as pointing to a server or a piece of software with your finger and saying “you are now assigned a license”. Yup, that’s about all it takes. What you might not realize is these licenses are actually governed by many carefully crafted legal documents that tell you in really small print what you’re allowed or not allowed to do with that license. Sometimes these are EULAs (End-User License Agreements) and often those EULAs refer back to some other legal documents with even more terms and conditions. Now how many of us actually go off and read all of those terms and conditions? I thought I wouldn’t see many hands there.

So why did I just go on a rant about all of this license assignment? Simple, it’s because most people are probably breaking a lot of these agreements when using the cloud. Before I proceed any further I want to stipulate something:

• I am not a lawyer or pretend to be one
• These are my own opinions and do not reflect my employer’s thoughts
• This is not legal advice of any manner
• You should always consult the vendor of the license on the proper ways to consume their licensing

OK. With that said, let’s continue with an example of Microsoft. I bring them up because Amazon and Microsoft announced a pilot to allow the migration of licenses from the enterprise to the cloud a while back. Yes, both are competitors to VMware but what they announced is very important. Before the announcement if you wanted to take a Windows VM that you were running in house and move it to the cloud then it would cause all sorts of problems for the service provider and their licensing compliance. Today, the only legal way to license a VM if you are a service provider is either the outsourced model or the pay per VM model. In the outsourced model the service provider is required to dedicate the hardware that a customer’s Windows VM lands on only to that customer. Think of dedicated hosting if you will. Only that customer can use that hardware. This sort of kills scalability in the cloud. The other way is for the service provider to own the license and then lease it to the customer on a monthly basis. Then the service provider can use all of their shared infrastructure together to host multiple customers. Of course this is bad for the customer that has an ELA with Microsoft because they now have to essentially pay for their licenses again without the ability to leverage their ELA.

So what did Amazon and Microsoft do? They are now allowing customers to take their existing licenses under ELA and migrate those licenses to the cloud for use. The other benefit is the customer can do this while the service provider still gets to use shared infrastructure. It’s a win-win and knocks down a major hurdle to cloud adoption. There are all sorts of requirements to be met and caveats to this plan so make sure you go and read the announcement which has all the details around pricing and terms and such.

I’m sure we’ll start to see many other vendors start to change their licensing policies. Only you, the consumer of these licenses can put the necessary pressure on your vendors to make this happen so reach out to your favorite ISV and get them to start thinking about how they will allow the mobility of licenses to the cloud.

Tags: amazon, Cloud, Licensing, Microsoft

One last, quick and short blog before I head out for the holiday weekend. Couldn’t resist sharing an interesting way to get your datacenter into the cloud. See you all next week!

Tags: Cloud

This is a report of my post on the VMware vCloud Blog.

As many have read in the past, VMware is hiring like mad for the cloud team. We continue to expand at a rapid pace to meet all of the demand around the world for our cloud products and services. As I got out and recruit more people for the team I often get asked what skills one needs to build or architect a cloud. Even customers that we pitch cloud to on the service provider or enterprise side ask what kinds of people or skills they need in order to start building their own clouds. I usually break it down into the 3 hardest parts of building up a cloud service:

1) Networking – Networking is about the most complex piece of VMware’s cloud tools. Our product manager likes to call it “flexible” which it really is (and powerful) but it’s also complex. Giving end users the ability to configure their own network segments on-the-fly complete with VLAN IDs is something that would scare most network admins and yet this is something that we need to tackle to get to “true cloud”. I usually suggest to customers that they go and engage their network team early on in the cloud building process and then recruit the best of the networking engineers to be on the cloud team.

2) Storage – Storage is another area that can get complex. How do you make it so end users don’t have to care about the underlying storage and yet land on the right volume from a performance perspective? And don’t even get me started on movement of data from one place to another or backup. All of these things are going to require an ace storage engineer on the cloud team.

3) Programming Skills – You don’t need some uber code monkey on the team but you do need someone that understands APIs, how to use them, and how you would go about plugging everything together. Automation is the name of the game in the guts of cloud and that’s why tools like BMC Atrium Orchestrator, VMware vCenter Orchestrator, and HPOO have become centerpieces in the cloud. Most of these are based on Java or Javascript so find someone that can at least start there. And since nearly everything in cloud land seems to be going the path of REST it would be great to get someone that knows that and XML really well.

So those are my 3 core skill sets that I tell people to go out and find. There are more you could add to the list such as security or billing or portal design but those can be from people that augment the core team. If you find people in the above core skill sets then you’ll be well on your way to architecting a successful cloud buildout.

Tags: Cloud

One of the most talked about things in clouds these days is the ability to move data from one cloud to another cloud with little to no downtime. People have been doing this for a long time within a single datacenter using technologies such as VMware VMotion. Heck, I can remember first showing that off to people in 2003 and making their heads spin. Well, prepare for your head to spin again. The good people over at F5 have been hard at work and have an amazing demo of long distance VMotion (across the country to a different datacenter – live) up on the web. Watch the video below and then read on for some insights into what this means.

Pretty awesome, right? What’s interesting about this setup is that it doesn’t really require anything special on the storage side. Since they’re doing a storage VMotion over an extended distance that’s really the slow part. And if you remember from storage VMotion I can go from any storage to any storage while the VM is running. By using the unique technologies from F5 that allow for traffic redirection they’re able to move application stacks seamlessly between datacenters. The same thing could be done between clouds. What I like even more about this is that they do this by leveraging vCenter Orchestrator. That has become one of my favorite products here at VMware and it’s even included with vSphere for free. More on that product later in another post though.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this. For more information make sure to reach out to F5.

Tags: vmotion

Hey all of you smart people – where are you? We need you over at VMware. We have several job openings on the VMware cloud team still. We’re ever expanding and it’s a really great team to work on. We have part of us focused on service providers. Another group is focused on enterprise accounts. Yet another part is focused on the SI/SO community. There’s a place for everyone!

Here’s the current layout of accounts.

AMER Service Provider & SI/SO

AMER Enterprise

EMEA Service Provider & SI/SO

EMEA Enterprise

If you’re interested in any of the above or want to see more cloud jobs at VMware then visit http://www.vmware.com/company/jobs/ and submit your resume there. That will get you into the system and start the recruiting/interviewing process.

Recently, Fujitsu submitted their cloud API to the DMTF for consideration in the standards process. The news caught my eye a long time ago and I read up on the effort a long time ago but just never got around to blogging about it. Well, here I am with time to blog so let me give you a quick run down of what’s going on and then link you to a great post by William Vanbenepe for more detailed information.

VMware had submitted our vCloud API to the DMTF a while back. This was an effort to get the conversation and process started on creating a standardized cloud API for all to use. We don’t expect that ours will be the end result of this process. We really just did the submission to spark the discussion (although we also think ours is a good start). Fujitsu was the first to follow with a submission although there are others out there with an API (Amazon, Rackspace, Google, SUN, etc). Hopefully the others will submit their thoughts and participate in this process.

So what is this Fujitsu API? It’s actually less of an API and more of a definition of interconnects. I mean there are no functions per-se. Nothing to program against. It’s really interesting to see what they wrote up. I think if you combine their submission with the VMware submission you get some overlap in definitions but they really do provide a good synergy.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d make everyone aware of what’s going on. This will be a long process and we probably won’t see the first draft until the end of 2010 at the earliest. If you happen to work for or work with one of the other companies that has an API out there then encourage them to work with this process so we can get something the ISV ecosystem can really get behind. I’ve said it once and will say it 1,000 times – standards is the only way this cloud thing is going to work and stick around.

Read more on the details of the Fujitsu API at William’s blog.

As I stated on Tuesday, I was speaking on a cloud panel at a TMForum event last week. It was a really great event. One of the things that TMForum announced the day that I was down there was the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council. It’s a really interesting group that combines leading Enterprises in the cloud space with leading Service Providers/Telcos in the cloud space to figure out what Enterprises really need from a cloud. This is something that nearly everyone I’ve talked to in the cloud vendor world has struggled to truly understand. Sure there are some base requirements out there:

• Fast provisioning


• Security


• Support for enterprise apps and operating systems


• Etc

To date though people have pretty much taken a “build it and they will come” approach. While that’s fine it’s really hard to get to the commodity type of pricing that consumers want when you have to put out a lot of CapEx in order to stand up capacity on services you hope the market will consume. It’s much easier for the business to have a set of requirements to operate against. It’s the aim of this new council to work on those requirements.

Just looking through the press release on the first vendors to sign up I see a lot of familiar names:

• Alcatel-Lucent


• Amdocs


• AT&T


• BT


• CA


• Cisco


• EMC


• HP


• IBM


• Microsoft


• Nokia Siemens Networks


• Telecom Italia


• Telstra


• Deutsche Bank


• Commonwealth Bank of Australia

I’ve been working with pretty much everyone on that list to build up their cloud service so I know for a fact that all are advanced enough in cloud that we should get a good list of requirements from this group. More will be coming into the fold soon from the enterprise side to join the two enterprises already on the list.

What’s even better is this organization is also working with the DMTF. The DMTF seems to be the one common group that all of the standards orgs and bodies are working with. They already have a formal relationship with CSA (the Cloud Security Alliance) and an informal one with OCCI (the Open Cloud Computing Initiative).

Make sure you follow this org closely and sign your own organization up to help with the effort if you’re getting into cloud. Of course I’d really like to see more enterprises in this group than vendors in order to get good material out. Right now it’s too heavy on the vendor side of the house.

Here’s a list of things they are currently working on to keep your eyes on:

• Common Cloud Services Product Definitions


• Cloud Security Issues


• Cloud-to-Cloud Interoperability, Data Portability and APIs


• Service Provider Benchmarking


• Buyer-demand Forecasting


• Federated Cloud Stores


• Cloud Service Level Agreement Process Management


• Cloud Network Performance and Latency Issues

I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on this new buying council and the impact to the industry.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now but just in case – this one is hillarious.

In 2008, VMware launched the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP). This program allows service providers to pay for VMware licenses on a per VM per month usage basis. This aligns better with the monthly charges that service providers give to their customers and reduces the upfront Capex spend for service providers.

Today VSPP has over 700 service providers in the program. That’s a pretty large presence. What’s more is that nearly all of these service providers are in the middle of adding VMware-powered cloud service to their existing managed hosting environments. That is the power of the VMware vCloud initiative – choice of several hundred different providers to get you exactly what you need and compatibility between all of those various cloud providers.

For more information on the new milestone of VSPP read this press release. For more information on VSPP go here.

Previously I have talked a bit about OVF and how great it is for the industry. VMware’s implementation of OVF is called vApp and it’s fully OVF 1.0 compliant. The tool used for creating vApps is called VMware Studio and it can be found here.

The new version of VMware Studio (2.0) is now in beta. One of my favorite features of VMware Studio 2.0 is the Eclipse plug-in. Now developers can develop their apps, test them out locally with VMware Workstation, and then build them into a vApp and inject that vApp directly to a VMware Virtual Infrastructure or vSphere environment or even a VMware powered cloud. The ability to go straight from the development environment through to the cloud from within your IDE is pretty powerful – especially with how popular the cloud is for a development platform. Just another way that VMware is showing its leadership in the cloud space.

Here are some more highlights of VMware Studio 2.0 beta:

• Build vApps and virtual appliances (with in-guest OS and application components) compatible with VMware Infrastructure, VMware vSphere 4.0 and vCloud.
• Use an Eclipse plug-in version in addition to the stand-alone form factor. A Web Console and Command Line Interface are also furnished.
• Ability to accept existing Studio-created VM builds as input
• Support for Windows 2003 and 2008 Server as guest operating systems in addition to major linux distros.

ISV partners:

• Author and build virtual appliances optimized for VMware Infrastructure and VMware vSphere 4.0: Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9
• Publish patches to update deployed virtual appliances
• Extensible in-guest management framework
• Automatic Dependency resolution (static)
• Support for 32 bit and 64 bit versions of SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 and 5.3, CentOS 5.2 and 5.3, Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 as guest operating systems

Studio 2.0 also provides general purpose features enhancements in provisioning and user experience

• VMware ESX Server, VMware ESXi, VMware Server 2.0, 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6 and VMware Workstation 6.5.1 enabled as provisioning engines
• Infrastructure enhancements in the GUI and builds

The public Beta is accessible now from http://www.vmware.com/appliances/learn/vmware_studio.html.