91d437f0fb56cfb5b64de81b60bd6738

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10076377-92.html?tag=inside

Author: Peter Judge

Copyright: ZDNet

I’m looking for the comparison between Xen and VMWare. I believe this interview tells some result and I highlight the key points in italic and bold from my understanding.

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Citrix aims to beat VMware at virtualization. A year ago it bought XenSource, the company created by the founders of the Xen open-source hypervisor, and switched the Citrix business focus to virtualization.

Citrix made XenServer, the commercial system based on Xen, central to its strategy, and applied a Xen brand to other Citrix products involved in delivering applications to desktops. XenSource staff gained senior positions at Citrix and have been setting the company’s future direction.

Ian Pratt, the original project leader of Xen and a founder of XenSource, remains a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, but is now also vice president for special products at Citrix–and remains chairman of Xen.org.

ZDNet UK spent a day at Citrix’s U.K. headquarters with Pratt and his colleague, Simon Crosby, who has moved from chief technology officer of XenSource to become chief technology officer of Citrix. After lengthy briefings on Citrix products and the future of virtualization, we sat down with Pratt to understand where Citrix is going and why.

In the first of what will be a two-part interview, Pratt discusses how Citrix hopes to make headway in the virtualization market.

At the moment there is a lot of publicity for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Is there a danger XenWare will be overlooked–especially as it is difficult to measure market share in virtualization? Could XenWare become the Liberal Democrats of virtualization?
Pratt: In the market, there is obviously a big incumbent player, VMware, and Microsoft has a very basic product that covers the low end. And then there is XenServer, which is going head to head with VMware, with an enterprise feature set.

If you look toward the cloud, all the cloud vendors use Xen. It gets used in all the largest deployments, by folks like Amazon and other large providers, because of all the features it offers.

It is very hard to judge what the market share is. With VMware, you just look at VMware’s bank account.

But if you are looking at market share for Xen in general, you’ve got XenServer, Virtual Iron, XenApps, and products from other companies. And then there are all the Linux distributions that include Xen, most of which are free, and no one really has any idea of how many copies are in use.

Even with something like XenServer, because there’s a free version, we keep stumbling into customers–particularly people doing software as a service, where it all runs on XenServer Express Edition (the free unsupported version of XenServer).

They haven’t paid us any money as yet and they have thousands of servers running it. But we’d much rather they were running our stuff than VMware, because it’s an opportunity for us.

With the Cloud Edition we recently announced, there will be lots of people wanting to pay for support and get features added.

If cloud providers are mostly on the free XenServer, is this the whole reason for the Cloud Edition–to turn them into “real” customers and start getting some money in?
Pratt: Simon Crosby has this analogy, that Xen is an engine and needs a car built around it. (The point of the analogy is that the Xen hypervisor is open-source, with a GPL license, so users can make additional technology outside that hypervisor and keep it proprietary, building commercial products that work with Xen.)

If you are a cloud provider or a big software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, you can download the open-source engine and build your own car around it. That’s fine if you have the engineering resource to do that, but a lot of this stuff is going to become more commoditized. SaaS vendors don’t all have very particular needs. They don’t have to do this for themselves–they have just had to do it that way until now.

Cloud Edition gives them a standard framework, so they can just concentrate on the value-added bits that they are interested in.

So it’s just like many software developments in the past, where it’s become obvious that everyone is doing the same thing, and a supported version of that is produced?
Pratt: Yes. And they just switch over to the supported version.

So VMware is the big competitor, then. What is the state of things between you and VMware at the moment?
Pratt: VMware has been really successful as a virtualization vendor. But virtualization as a category will disappear. The basic use of virtualization–server consolidation–is now a commodity.

Virtualization will be included in every operating system and on every server. XenSource Express is built into every HP and Dell server, on a USB stick soldered into the box. Users can run multiple virtual machines on those machines out of the box.

This is the only thing VMware does, and it has 100,000 customers. VMware is preparing for this to happen, by building management tools. But this puts them in direct competition with huge established players, like Tivoli and HP OpenView.

Citrix’s approach is to concentrate on application delivery. The function of an IT department is to deliver applications, and we are doing it end to end, from the data center to the client device.

We don’t need to do systems management, and we don’t need to compete head on. It is all about application delivery. People won’t buy virtualization–but they will buy high availability and fault tolerance.

Citrix has 200,000 customers. That’s a pretty good beachhead to deliver more Citrix stuff to customers.

What is distinctively better about Xen’s approach compared with VMware’s?
Pratt: We don’t want to create a class of people called virtualization administrators who you need to manage your virtual machines. That’s how VMware works.

VMware is operating system virtualization–or hardware virtualization. That puts a lot of effort into a problem that is no longer there (since modern hardware from Intel and AMD has evolved to support virtualization).

What we did was to start out with the idea that hardware should support virtualization and the virtual machine should be aware. We call that para-virtualization, and Microsoft calls it enlightenment. That’s marketing.

If you employ virtualization to get a separation not just in the hardware layer, then you can compose things dynamically. That’s the way to bring down the real cost of IT.

We want to be as much of an appliance as possible. We’ve always seen Xen as an appliance that hosts virtual appliances. You want it to be an appliance and manage it like an appliance. It’s like a Netgear router–you just plug it in and go. Adding a new machine to a XenServer pool should be as easy as that.

It is also quite hard to establish the relative performance of VMware’s hypervisor and XenServer because of VMware’s licensing terms. Are you working on a way round that problem?
Pratt: The VMware EULA (end-user licensing agreement) prohibits the publication of any benchmark results to a third party. We tried to publish results in 2002, and that clause has been in the VMware EULA ever since.

As XenSource, we might have had fun and games around the policy, but as Citrix, we have to be more circumspect. It’s possible to publish comparisons against “Hypervisor A” and “Hypervisor B,” though.

How about comparisons with Microsoft? Pretty soon, Microsoft will be able to claim that all the people who have Server 2008 have Hyper-V, won’t it?
Pratt: Yes, but then there will be the question of how many people are using it, and how many people have the bits. If we wanted to measure Xen market share like that, we would be in great shape, because every Linux distro has Xen included in it.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/…is-amazon-ready-for-the-enterprise-26615.html

Author: ALISTAIR CROLL

Copyright: GigaOm
With a flurry of announcements in recent weeks, Amazon has extended its cloud computing lead. The beta label’s gone. It can run Windows applications. By investing in firms like Elastra, it’s tackling enterprise deployment. And there’s a 99.95 percent uptime guarantee.

Much of this is a pre-emptive strike at Microsoft’s upcoming cloud offering. Microsoft has a huge advantage: It owns the stack from OS and virtual machine through to application. Amazon wants to compete on reliability and performance, rather than software suites and licensing. But there are still some things missing before enterprises will really embrace it.

Back in May, most of the people we asked were more likely to trust Amazon than Microsoft with their enterprise applications. But while enterprise customers are using Amazon already, in many cases that use is limited to a department or a short-term project. If Amazon wants to capture entire IT departments, it needs to prove it’s as good or better than in-house infrastructure. And that means delivering responsive, highly available applications, not just an SLA.

To accomplish this, Amazon needs to tackle performance and availability at an architectural level. When companies build their own applications, they rely on building blocks like load-balancing, WAN acceleration, managed DNS and redundant data centers. Fortunately, this is where much of Amazon’s roadmap leads.

• Network performance: Amazon’s CDN will get static content closer to users. With availability zones, Amazon can also get computation near the edge. All of this reduces the time it takes to deliver bits to users. But it can be faster still: Modern enterprises squeeze every millisecond out of the network. Amazon should also add route optimization, HTTP and TCP optimization to really address network delay.

Amazon’s plans for integrated scaling, monitoring, and load balancing in EC2

• Processing performance: Internet architects improve server performance with load-balancing. First send the request to the fastest data center, then send it to the fastest machine in that data center. If there aren’t any fast machines, the newly announced dynamic scaling will make new ones. All that’s missing (though hinted at) is the ability to measure user experience so EC2 knows when to add new servers. Amazon needs a complete load balancing/monitoring/scaling strategy — with proper controls so IT staff can manage it — to make elastic computing a reality. While they’re at it, a performance SLA would be great, too.
• Network availability: Those same load balancing technologies improve uptime, using DNS or BGP to bypass unreachable data centers. Amazon needs to launch a SimpleDNS service, tied to availability zones and performance, that gives operators more control. It’s going to have to deal with DNS when it launches its CDN anyway. This looks less like managed DNS (Amazon uses UltraDNS already) and more like products from F5, Citrix or others. Amazon also needs to open up about its carriers and peering arrangements for enterprises to feel comfortable.
• Processing availability: Big Internet sites don’t achieve high uptime with machines that always work. Instead, they monitor for failure and then have the load balancers take out bad servers. That way, overall availability can be high, even when individual components are broken. Amazon should add load testing and profiling capabilities – particularly since EC2 doesn’t give users deep visibility into the platform — to ensure that applications work worldwide under stress.

As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out, enterprises like cloud computing for its economics, its elastic capacity and its ability to deliver high reliability. With this roadmap, Amazon goes after Microsoft’s weak spots. But it’s not there yet.

Source: http://www.ddj.com/web-development/211201818

The Cloud Computing Adoption Model

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Think of any historical IT transformation and you’ll likely recall the pain associated with change. For large organizations, change isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t occur overnight. It requires a finessed combination of planning, validating, selling and a fair amount of political cajoling to get people signed up for the change. It also requires an incremental, stepwise progression that yields benefits along the way — without this, stakeholders become fatiqued, enthusiasm wanes and projects lose steam. When merchandised effectively, these incremental wins become the kindling that stokes the fire, building the enthusiasm, conviction and confidence required for transformation.

This was true for ERP and SOA projects in years past, and it’s true for cloud computing projects today.

Cloud computing promises to reduce operating costs by increasing infrastructure utilization and reducing server sprawl; to reduce the cost of software consumption by allowing business lines to align cost with value received; and to dramatically improve business agility by compressing deployment cycles and time to value for application functionality.

It’s no surprise that cloud has attracted dozens of new entrants and forced incumbent vendors to articulate their own cloud strategy. This heightened level of interest has both advanced the thinking in this space and added to the considerable confusion today’s enterprises face. If history is any prologue, this confusion will only continue and compound. The forecast for cloud: strong chance of fog.

This certainly doesn’t help matters as organizations try to sort out their own cloud strategies.

For any large-scale IT transformation, the question becomes: How do you eat the elephant? The answer, of course, is quite simple: one bite at a time. This is the explicit goal of the Cloud Computing Adoption Model — a graduated, stepwise approach for the adoption of cloud technologies. It helps to cut through the hype and lay out a clear game plan, incrementing toward cloud without putting projects, budgets and even careers at risk.

Loosely modeled after the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, the Cloud Computing Adoption Model proposes five steps:

Level 1: Virtualization. The first level of cloud adoption employs hypervisor-based infrastructure and application virtualization technologies for seamless portability of applications and shared server infrastructure.

Level 2: Cloud Experimentation. Virtualization is taken to a cloud model, either internally or externally, based on controlled and bounded deployments utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for compute capacity and as the reference architecture.

Level 3: Cloud Foundations. Governance, controls, procedures, policies, and best practices begin to form around the development and deployment of cloud applications. Initially, Level 3 efforts focus on internal, non-mission critical applications.

Level 4: Cloud Advancement. Governance foundations allow organizations to scale up the volume of cloud applications through broad-based deployments in the cloud.

Level 5: Cloud Actualization. Dynamic workload balancing across multiple utility clouds. Applications are distributed based on cloud capacity, cost, proximity to user, and other criteria.

For each level, the Model outlines the strategic goals, key investment requirements, expected returns, risk factors, and readiness criteria for graduating to the next step.

At the end of the day, architectural innovations like cloud have transformational potential for enterprises. But the reality is that transformation can’t happen overnight — and it certainly can’t happen without a plan. While the Cloud Computing Adoption Model may not represent a panacea for enterprise cloud computing, it does provide a context for thinking strategically about the pace, pattern and sequence of investments and returns that will set organizations on a pragmatic path to cloud.

Source: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/./l-cloud-computing

Author: M. Tim Jones, Consultant Engineer, Emulex Corp.

Click the source URL to view the original article. I brief some key points with diagrams

Figure 1. Cloud Computing migrates resources within internet

Figure 2. Virtualization and resource use

Figure 3. The layers of Cloud Computing

Figure 4. Cloud Computing landscape

Linux and open source in the Cloud

Software-as-a-Service

SaaS is the ability to access software over the Internet as a service. An early approach to SaaS was the Application Service Provider (ASP). ASPs provide subscriptions to software that is hosted or delivered over the Internet. The ASP delivers the software and charges fees based on its use. In this way, you don’t purchase the software but simply lease it on an as-needed basis.

Example SaaS An interesting example of traditional versus SaaS applications is the application life cycle management tool from SoftwarePlanner.com. This company offers their tool using the traditional model, where customers host the application suite within their enterprise, or as SaaS, where customers host the application suite and make it available over the Internet.

Another perspective on SaaS is the use of software over the Internet that executes remotely. This software can be in the form of services used by a local application (defined as Web services) or a remote application observed through a Web browser. One example of a remote application service is Google Apps, which provides several enterprise applications through a standard Web browser. Remotely executing applications commonly rely on an application server to expose needed services. An application server is a software framework that exposes APIs for software services (such as transaction management or database access). Examples include Red Hat JBoss Application Server, Apache Geronimo, and IBM® WebSphere® Application Server. Many other application servers exist, and an extensive list is included in Resources.

Another recent example of SaaS is Google’s Chrome browser. The browser is an ideal environment as a new desktop through which applications can be delivered (either locally or remotely) in addition to the traditional Web browsing experience. (For more information, see Resources.)

Platform-as-a-Service

PaaS can be described as an entire virtualized platform that includes one or more servers (virtualized over the set of physical servers), operating systems, and specific applications (such as Apache and MySQL for Web-based applications). In some cases, these platforms can be predefined and selected; in others, you can provide a VM image that contains all the necessary user-specific applications.

One interesting example of a PaaS is Google App Engine. App Engine is a service that allows you to deploy your Web applications on Google’s very scalable architecture. App Engine provides you with a sandbox for your Python application that can be referenced over the Internet (and additional languages will be supported in the future). App Engine provides Python APIs for persistently storing and managing data (using the Google Query Language, or GQL) in addition to support for authenticating users, manipulating images, and sending e-mail. The sandbox in which the Web application runs restricts access to the underlying operating system. Although App Engine limits the functionality available to your application, it supports the construction of useful Web services. Check out Resources for more information.

Note: Deploying applications in App Engine is free within certain bandwidth and storage constraints. To build production Web sites with App Engine, usage fees are assessed.

Another example of a PaaS is 10gen, which is both a cloud platform and a downloadable open source package for creating your own private cloud. A software stack similar to App Engine, 10gen provides similar functionality to App Engine—with certain differences. With 10gen, you can develop applications in Python as well as the JavaScript and Ruby programming languages. The platform also uses the sandbox concept to isolate applications and provide a reliable environment over a large number of computers (built, of course, on Linux) using their own application server.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

IaaS is the delivery of computer infrastructure as a service. This layer differs from PaaS in that the virtual hardware is provided without a software stack. Instead, the consumer provides a VM image that is invoked on one or more virtualized servers. IaaS is the rawest form of computing as a service (outside of access to the physical infrastructure). The most well-known commercial IaaS provider is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In EC2, you can specify a particular VM (operating system and application set), and then deploy your applications on it or provide your own VM image to execute on the servers. You’re then billed simply for compute time, storage, and network bandwidth.

The Eucalyptus project (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is an open source implementation of Amazon EC2 that is interface-compatible with the commercial service. Like EC2, Eucalyptus relies on Linux with Xen for operating system virtualization. Eucalyptus was developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the purpose of cloud computing research. You can download it from the university’s Web site (see Resources), or you can experiment with it via the Eucalyptus Public Cloud with certain restrictions.

Another EC2 style of IaaS is the Enomalism cloud computing platform. Enomalism is an open source project that provides a cloud computing framework with functionality similar to EC2. Enomalism is based on Linux, with support for both Xen and the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). But unlike other pure IaaS solutions, Enomalism provides a software stack based on the TurboGears Web application framework and Python.