Virtualization

Overheard - VMware vs. Microsoft

“The video has ignited a longstanding debate within the partner communities of Microsoft and VMware over which company has the better approach to virtualization. In Microsoft’s view, virtualization is a feature of the operating system, while VMware represents an unnecessary — and expensive — extra layer. VMWare counters that Microsoft’s virtualization isn’t sophisticated enough for the needs of enterprises.” Kevin McLaughlin, VMware Apologizes To Microsoft For Hyper-V Bashing

Scott Drummonds, a technical marketing manager at VMware, admitted that he exercised bad judgment in posting the video and said he has removed it from Youtube. “Unfortunately, my intention to stir the pot with eye-poking banter has put my credibility and by association VMware’s credibility in question among some of you. For this I apologize,”

Skunkworks - Make it so

“Security consultants believe that the ongoing economic malaise is prompting many businesses to rush skunkworks server virtualization projects into production without thoroughly considering how these deployments might affect their overall security posture.” Heather Clancy, Tech Watch: Security pros want strong policy for virtualization

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is skunkworks.  A skunkworks is a small team that’s given magical powers (think “all the stuff they need”) to get a task done.   The good thing about a skunkworks is that nobody tells them “you can’t do that” or “we’ve never done it like that before.”  The bad thing about a skunkworks is that because they operate out there on their own, they may accidently break something that’s associated peripherally.

The term got its start at Lockheed.

Cloud economics - budgeting for the cloud

There are two key areas in which companies should consider the economics of cloud computing: (1) how much an organization can save if it consumes cloud computing as an outsourced utility computing service and (2) how much it might save if cloud computing principles successfully reformulate data center strategies. Tom Nolle, Gaining cost savings from the cloud

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is cloud computing.  In a memo  released last week, the Feds propose cloud computing and  telecommuting as ways to make the federal government leaner.

Cloud-computing and “work-at-a-distance” represent major new Government-wide initiatives, supported by the CIO Council under the auspices of the Federal CIO (OMB’s E-Government Administrator), and funded through the General Services Administration (GSA) as the service-provider.

It’s in this section called “IMPROVING INNOVATION, EFFICIENCy AND EFFECTIVENESS IN FEDERAL IT.”

Terabyte - two terabytes in the news

The National Archives lost a terabyte disk drive filled with sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures.  Had this data been on a self-encrypting drive, we would not have heard of its loss. Pete Steege, The National Archives lose a terabyte drive filled with sensitive data

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.

The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???

The Amazon announcement is another WTH.  The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)

A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth.  With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon.  Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service.  They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you.  It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.

And oh yeah,  you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.

VM escape - using the hypervisor as an attack vector

Granted, no virtual machine escape hacks exist today, but if the IT security experts are right and this type of attack is eventually developed, then virtualized servers in the DMZ are basically sitting ducks. Brien M. Posey, Virtual servers no escape from IT security management concerns

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is virtual machine escape.  In theory, an attacker could get access to the hypervisor (if it was mis-configured or had some other vulnerability) and use it to control all the other virtual machines on the host.

Bob Plankers explains more in What is VM Escape?:

Since the hypervisor controls the execution of all of the virtual machines, an attacker that can gain access to the hypervisor can then gain control over every other virtual machine running on the host. Because the hypervisor is between the physical hardware and the guest operating system, an attacker will then be able to circumvent security controls in place on the virtual machine.

Can you image the power of a zombie army that included an almost infinite number of virtual machines?  An army that once established, had the power to create new soldiers (VMs) which one click?  Holy moly.  Big money there.

Overheard - Virtualization sprawl is like ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’

“When we started out with virtualization, we thought, ‘VMs are easy and cheap, so let’s go. Let’s create as many as we need.’ We ended up with several hundred more machines than we actually needed.” Chuck Brust, as quoted in Virtualization users beware: Sprawl is real

Today’s Word of the Day is virtualization sprawl.   It wasn’t such an important consideration when VMs were just used for testing, but now that we’re finding VMs in production, vendors are scrambling to come up with tools that allow administrators to monitor and manage VMs more efficiently so that virtualization remains cost-effective. The holy grail? A tool that allows the admin to see and manage both physical machines and VMs from one dashboard.

Every time I read about virtualization sprawl, I’m reminded of the Start Trek espisode The Trouble with Tribbles. Click - new server.  Click- new server.  Click - new server.  Will the exponential propogation of VMs will eat any profits we might have gained from moving to virtualization?

Overheard - Move over Second Life. Web Alive has come to town.

Lenovo unveiled a virtual world called eLounge, which is powered by Nortel’s recently announced virtual world platform, web.alive. Lenovo appears to be using this venue as a social and interactive platform for providing information on their products and services — notably, their laptops. Dennis Shiao, Review: Lenovo’s eLounge Virtual World

When I woke up this morning, I felt like I’d been out late to a party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (Unfortunately, I was still in upstate New York surrounded by snow.)

You see, last night I went to virtual trade show hosted by Lenovo. They are using a platform called web.alive. It’s Web-based and like nothing else I’ve experienced in browser-based virtual world software. I actually felt as if I had been at the conference, meeting people, looking at laptops and Lenovo’s new netbook. The only thing that was missing from the conference experience were the free pens and the chance to enter a raffle.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Second Life. I’ve probably installed it and uninstalled it at least five times over the past year. I’ve been to virtual events at Cisco and IBM. Second Life for business is interesting, but nowhere as exciting as what I experienced last night at Lenovo’s virtual store.

There’s something different about web.alive’ platform.  For one thing the navigation is intuitive and it only takes a first-time visitor a few minutes to figure out how to get around. You don’t see avatars standing around with their heads down and arms out — wiggling their fingers as they type on some invisible keyboard.  That’s what happens when you visit a business site in Second Life — everyone looks like zombies.

At Lenovo’s eLounge, however, you see energetic people walking around with their heads up. You can talk to the software developers, you can talk to the Lenovo sales representatives or you can talk to other people who’ve wandered in and are marveling at the experience of being in this rather wonderful virtual world. And if you’re not all that social?  You can just wander around and eavesdrop. The experience feels real.

I’ve been to other virtual trade shows on line. They’re interesting, but they’re flat.  Literally flat, clickable images. And the experience is flat.  Here’s a tour of AMD’s virtual trade show last year, for example. It’s nice, but it’s so…last year.

The architects at web.alive are on to something big. And they’re marketing it to the right audience — business people whose budgets are tight — who need to collaborate — who want to stay on the cutting edge.

If you have a few minutes today I strongly suggest you stop by Lenovo’s virtual store.  You’ll view the virtual environment as a Web page after you download and install a small browser plug-in.

I think you’ll be surprised, not only by the high quality graphics and the amazing audio, but by the real feeling of community you’ll experience.

Overheard - The cost of virtual server sprawl

Fundamentally, we believe virtualization sprawl can be a much bigger problem than physical sprawl. Thomas Bittman, as quoted in Virtual server sprawl kills cost savings, experts warns

Overheard - End of the IT department

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Nicholas Carr, Why IT Will Change

The corporate IT department has had a dual nature until now. One really important function has been the kind of technical expertise that keeps the computing machines running.

Over the next five or 10 years, the technical aspect of the IT department will become less important. It will slowly evaporate as more of those experts go outside onto the grid. But the information management and information strategy elements will become, if anything, more important. The ways companies take advantage of digitized information will become more important, not less.

The big question in the long run is, do those types of skills—information management and thinking—remain in a separate IT department or do they naturally flow into business units and other traditional parts of the business? My guess is that over time, they’ll begin to flow into the business itself and that will be accelerated as individual workers and business units get more control over the way they are able to organize and manipulate their own information. I would be surprised if maybe 20 years from now there are still IT departments in corporations.That doesn’t mean that the skills in those departments are going away. The more technical skills will probably move out into the supplier community and the strategic thinking, or tactical thinking about information, will flow out into the business itself.

Overheard - No LAMP in the cloud?

This generation of web services got their start from LAMP - a stack of simple, yet powerful technologies that to this day is behind a lot of popular web sites. The beauty of LAMP is in its simplicity; it makes it very easy to get a prototype out the door. The problem with LAMP is in its scalability. Alex Iskold, Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds

The first scalability issue is fairly minor - threads and socket connections of the Apache web server. When load increases and configuration is not tuned properly you might run into problems. But the second problem with LAMP is far more significant: the MySQL relational database is the ultimate bottleneck of the system.

Lately I’ve been reading about the future of the LAMP stack, which I always thought of as the poster child for Web 2.0. Alex got me wondering about the future of LAMP now that everything is cloud-colored. Will MySQL be the bottleneck?  But then I read this article about Sun Microsystems throwing “more chips into its “billion-dollar bet on the LAMP stack” with the recent launch of its MySQL Enterprise 2008” and now I’m not so sure that LAMP is on its way out.