Define the cloud video
Saturday, August 29, 2009 Category : cloud 0
This was too good to not share. Video with people defining cloud computing.
Rodos
P.S. Thanks twitter fiends for pointing it out
Musings on areas of technology that effect the Enterprise. Focus on Cloud, Virtualisation, Storage and Data Center.
Home > August 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009 Category : cloud 0
This was too good to not share. Video with people defining cloud computing.
Rodos
P.S. Thanks twitter fiends for pointing it out
Friday, August 28, 2009 Category : VMware, VMworld 6
Okay, you are heading to VMworld and its your first time. You need to know how to behave in a crowd of over 10 thousand people and interact with the hoards.
Here are some of the possible questions/statements you might ask whilst you are there. There are also some things NOT to say.
The good ones are at the top, the fail ones are at the bottom, try to avoid the fail ones!
At the Australian Architecture Forum this week I asked the panel the following question.
Given the ease of singing up to Software as a Service Cloud offerings, combined with eager business unit managers with a credit card, does this leave any room for Enterprise Architecture within IT? Is the only role for Enterprise Architects to come along afterwards and clean up the mess?It was a leading question but I was surprised by the answer, the panel generally thought it was not that big a deal, EA would still be involved and they need to stay engaged with the business. However one of the panelists made the statement that the Cloud (and we are referring mainly to SaaS here) could be the new Microsoft Access of IT. I felt at the time the panel may have had their head in the clouds a little bit and not quite see the fearful reality of eager credit card holders within the enterprise spinning up new services because they could just not be bothered with Internal IT who always want to turn everything into a hard and complicated effort.
Is the #cloud the new MS Access of Enterprise IT? Crack for users to start with and final headache for Enterprise Arch in the end.
@rodos disagree if done properly, people need to architect first, build second vs. the typical opposite approach
@rodos make your own DB -> write your own reports -> create your own SharePoint site -> provision your own cloud server - god help us!
Tonight was the first Australian Cloudcamp. I rocked along not really knowing what to expect but with an open mind.
Here is a run down.
It was directed by Dave Nielsen who flew in for the day, great effort. It was held at the Google offices and was organised by Samuel Yeats of Rejila Cloud Services and Milinda Kotelawele of Longscale.
There was a bunch of Lighting Talks which occur for 5 minutes only. These were (in the wrong order)
Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Category : VMware 0
Reflex Systems have become the first vendor to achieve the technical certification for VMsafe.
Aaron Bawcom revealed the achievement on his blog and other details can be found in their press release.
Certification is important to such products. You do want that assurance that VMsafe integrated products have undergone a rigorous testing scheme and controls, after all they operate in a privileged manner underneath your workloads.
To me VMsafe brings two important things. First it allows security at scale, which may be critical for Cloud implementations. Second and more importantly, its yet another thing (and a big one at that) which make a virtual machine better than a physical machine. You can do things with VMsafe that are not possible with a physical server, making the virtual machine no longer the second class player of data center workloads. Now we are starting the see the virtual machine being the best and potentially safest way to deploy a workload.
I would recommend dropping by the Reflex System stand at VMworld and seeing what all the fuss is about, I know I am.
Rodos
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 Category : Cisco, UCS, VMware 7
Recored a video today of vSphere ESXi doing a PXE boot on Cisco UCS
Enjoy
Rodos
Friday, August 21, 2009 Category : cloud 0
As excited as I am that VMworld is only a few sleeps away a man has to keep the normal activities going. On Monday I am attending the Australian Architecture Forum (AAF) and on Thursday night is CloudCamp in Sydney.
Cloud camp is free so if you are in Sydney go an register and rock up. Its just for a few hours on Thursday night.
The main reason I am off to AAF is to hear Anna Liu again. She is giving the keynote. I have commented on her speaking on Cloud at a previous Cloud conference, back then she was at Microsoft.
Here are the sessions I am going to.
“Cloud computing: everyone wants to be in it, no-one knows what it means”That outline is very close to one of the presentations I give. This could go one of two ways. I am going to think its great and be able to borrow (okay steal with permission) some great ideas to enhance my messaging. Alternatively, I am going to be cringing at the wishy washy, difficult to catch, impractical messaging, without any concrete steps or metrics to walk away with.
- Gartner predicts that cloud computing is one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009.
- A recent paper published by ACM this year says that there are over 20 definitions of cloud computing on the Internet.
- What does cloud computing mean?
- What are the benefits and challenges for your organisation to adopt cloud computing?
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 Category : Cisco, UCS, VMware 0
Its not every day you get to see VMware running on a new bit of hardware, especially a new hardware manufacturer. There will be lots of VMware on Cisco UCS happing at VMworld in a few weeks but for those who can't wait to see some exciting new stuff, here is what it looks like.
The weirdest part is the splash screen as the blade boots!
Here is the BIOS page where various options can be turned on/off for the Nehalem 5540 processors.
One thing I have found so far is that the service profiles (the personality associated with a blade) does not include all of the BIOS settings, this is expected for the future. The service profile does currently include things like the versions of various firmware, boot order and local RAID settings. Therefore putting a new service profile on a blade will reconfigure the local RAID controller etc, but it won't update the processor settings in the BIOS. It has not caused me a problem yet but its something to be aware of because it could cause you some pain if an incorrect BIOS setting went unnoticed.
Here is what the summary page for the hardware looks like inside of vSphere.
Notice the hardware manufacturer is Cisco Systems Inc. Don't get confused by the model number being "N20-B6620-1", thats the actual Cisco part number for a "UCS B200 M1 Blade Server". If you look in the UCS Manager (UCSM) its the PID or Product ID for the device.
Here is what the Ethernet adapters look like.
By the time I get to VMworld I hope to have some further insights as to what its like to run VMware on UCS from a VMware administrator perspective. Maybe even some performance tests.
Category : Cisco, cloud, UCS, VMware 0
At CiscoLive early in July Padmasree Warrior detailed some of the cloud direction within Cisco. The Localtechwire site picked up on some more details given my Padmasree during the 25/7/08 earnings call.
Here is the transcript curtsy of SeekingAlpha.
Cloud as we believe is perhaps one of the most network centric architectural shift that we are going to see in the IT industry in a long time. And the reason we believe that to be the case is virtualization is going to be the foundation to drive that. And so UCS becomes a core element from an architectural perspective in how we can enable large enterprises to build their own private cloud as well as service providers to provide the capability of virtual private clouds to enterprises and small businesses. Our cloud strategy is to link from an infrastructure perspective what we are doing in the data center all the way to the application delivery through SaaS. With SaaS offerings that we currently have with WebEx conferencing, security as a service with IronPort and some of the other capabilities. The key differentiation that we are focused on with respect to the network enablement is in providing security, which is a key concern of most enterprises in the today architecture with cloud as well as enabling higher levels of service agreements and providing the interoperability between different cloud architecture.
What is the T-Shirt going to look like this year for VMworld? The graphics on the shirt have always integrated the theme and imagery used on the conference materials and visual elements. Remember the big cartoon wall in 2007?
I have been the past three years and still have the conference T-shirts.
Friday, August 14, 2009 Category : Cisco, cloud, VMware 1
An article "The tech jobs that the cloud will eliminate" has been getting syndication around the trade mags.
The gist is that its going to take a while for the large scale shift to Cloud having an effect on IT workers.
The summary on how to prepare at the end of the article is
So what should today's IT employee do to protect his or her career? "Look for the skills the company is going to need five years from now, not now, and start building them," advises Forrester's Schadler. "These include vendor contract management, integration with the cloud, analytics, rich lightweight Internet workforce applications, mobile applications -- these are all skills for the next decade," he says.
"Try to get work with an infrastructure provider rather than an internal company system," advises Terrosa's Terry. "Develop an expertise on a particular high-end technology environment, such as virtualization or storage area networking. Or get some experience managing a SaaS provider. Embrace the cloud, don't fight it," he says.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 Category : Cisco, UCS 0
There are a lot of things to write up from my UCS bootcamp last week. Over time I will post up many of the interesting bits and pieces. I thought I would start with something interesting, the indicator LEDs because everyone loves flashing lights.
So here you go, a short video of the chassis and blade locators turned on.
Now that we have your attention (sorry, that's a bad pun) a bit more details.
UCS has an indicator light on the top right of each chassis, shown below. Note the bit of masking tape which during shipping covers the button to protect it and prevent it snagging on things, very nice touch Cisco!
Very interesting to see Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware put out the announcement and details today of VMware's intention to acquire SpringSource.
You can read the details of SpringSource in the announcement as well as at the SpringSource website. Also some good cloud thinkers like Reuven have shared their thoughts on this acquisition.
Eight months ago I wrote about where VMware was playing in the various stacks of Cloud, Saas, Paas, and IaaS. I wrote how VMware fits into the SaaS through the virtual appliance market place and encouraging ISVs to create their wares as virtual machines for the Enterprise to run internally. The play for IaaS is obvious with what was then call the VDC-OS, now vSphere, being the OS for the Cloud along with vCloud.
PaaS was the interesting one. Here is what I wrote way back then.
The PaaS space is where VMware has the challenge. What VMware want here is everyone to build their systems on open standards. This allows them to be packaged into IaaS workloads that can be run anywhere (internally or externally) without lockin to propriety providers, such as Microsoft Azure. An example here is writing in Ruby and deploying in Ruby On Rails.With the purchase of SpringSource VMware have jumped boots and all into the PaaS space, filling a hole in their amour. They have gone beyond my view of Open Standards and decided that they want to control the market more, drive investment to create competition to what the other PaaS players are providing. I guess you can do that when you have big pockets, forget waiting for the market, make the market.
Thursday, August 06, 2009 Category : Cisco, UCS 3
Well, last day of the UCS bootcamp today. Tomorrow is a day full of labs. Its been great going through it all with some smart people to bounce things off, thanks guys!
At the end of the day I redrew by own version of how UCS hangs together that summarises a lot of the diagrams in the course. It makes it all a lot simpler. The main area of simplifcation is for what occurs inside the IOM inside the Chassis. This layout is something you could easily remember and whiteboard in front of someone. I doubt you could remember the ones in the course notes.
Here is the sketch I whiteboarded.
When I get some time I will put it into Viso and annotate it. However everyone in the class grabbed their cameras so some will try and beat me to it. I hope they do, will save me the effort.
I would like to add a little table that shows the pinning of the IO ports from the MUX to the blades dependent on the number of uplinks (1,2,4).
Hope you find it helpful.
For those UCS architects out there, if you notice any mistakes (we went through it quite a bit to make sure it was right) post in the comments.
Rodos
[UPDATE
Our instructor David Chapman drew this up in Visio this afternoon. We have a few changes but this is a long way along.]
[UPDATE 2 22/Sept/09
Now has the blade details. Need to make it look nice for Networkers next week]
Wednesday, August 05, 2009 Category : Cisco, UCS 2
There are a lot of terms to come to grip with when learning and talking about UCS. So many new TLAs. Here is a Dictionary to fast track your learning and give you something to quickly lookup.
- AG – Application Gateway
- BMC – Baseboard Management controller (on blade)
- Chassis - The enclosure (5108) that contains the one or two IOMs and the blades.
- CMC – Chassis Management Controller (in the IOM)
- CMS - Chassis Management Switch (in the IOM)
- CNA - Converged Network Adapter
- CLP - Command Line Protocol
- CMP – Connectivity Management Processor
- DCOS - Data Center Operating Center
- DCOS System Manager - starts and manages the processes in the UCSM Controller on both primary and secondary.
- DME – Database Management Engine (Primary Active)
- Expansion Module - Provides connectivity into the Northbound Ethernet LAN and FC SAN networks. There is a FC only, Ethernet only or a combo module available.
- FEX - Fabric Extender (now referred to as the IO Module or IOM)
- Fabric A/B -
- Fabric Interconnect - The head unit or switch which the Chassis all connect into. The UCSM runs within the Fabric Interconnect.
- FSM - Finite State Machine, logical abstractions in the information model for hardware, software and workflows
- GEM - General Expansion Module
- Group - A set of two Fabric Interconnects. Individually called a node and each is identified by a unique ID.
- I2C - Inter-Integrated Circuit (BMC)
- IOM - I/O Module (FEX)
- IO Mux - A part of the IOM which multiplexes the IO ports and BMC from the blades (8) along with the the CMS and CMC from the IOM into the North bound ports (1,2 or 4) going to the Fabric Interconnect.
- LACP - Link Aggregation Protocol
- Menlo - Code name for one of the Mezz adapters. A CNA with 2 10GE and 2 FC ports.
- Mezz - Mezzanine card within a blade that provides the IO interface to the IOM
- Mid-Plane - The element within the Chassis that the blades connect into to obtain power and IO connectivity as well as access to the SEEPROM
- MO - Managed Object
- Node - A node is one of your two Fabric Interconnects. The set of two are called a group. Each node is identified by a unique ID.
- NXOS - Nexus Operating System
- Oplin - Code name for one of the Mezz adapters. 2 10GE ports, no failover functionality
- Palo - Code name for one of the Mezz adapters. Not released yet. Provides up to 128 Ethernet vNICs or FC vHBAs (limits apply)
- Pin Group - If you are doing manual pinning of Northbound traffic (rather than round robin) through uplinks you can create Pin Groups which you can apply to multiple service profiles. So you are chosing which uplink or port channel will be used for the selected interface (vNIC or pNIC).
- PNuOS – Processor Node Utility Operating System, serves as a "pre-OS configuration agent" for the blade, now named UCSuOS.
- SEEPROM - Serial EEPROM, contain in the mid-plane, half of which is maintained by each IOM in the Chassis.
- SEL - System Event Log (BMC)
- Service Profile - represents a logical server and will be associated with one blade at a time. Contains Identity/Personality, LAN/SAN config and various policies
- SoL - Serial Over LAN
- Stateless Computing -
- UCSM - UCS Manager, the management service for all of the UCS components which runs on the Fabric Interconnects.
- UCSM Controller - a distributed application running on both th primary and subordinate UCSM and decides which is primary and which is subordinate.
- UCSuOS - UCS Utility Operating System, serves as a "pre-OS configuration agent" for the blade, previously named PNuOS.
- UUID - A 128-bit number to uniquely identify a component worldwide.
- vNIC - a software configured NIC which is presented to the OS as a pNIC on the blade.
- VNTag - A virtual network tag.
- vHBA - a software configured HBA which is presented to the OS as a pHBA on the blade.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009 Category : Cisco, UCS 1
Like Scott Lowe I am doing the Cisco UCS bootcamp. Scott did a nice writeup of his notes. I will also write up my notes but here is a summary of something that has been a bit confusing, so I wanted to put out some clarity.
There are the three types of adapter cards for the UCS blade. A Oplin, Menlo or Palo. The Oplin has no FC ports, it only provides two 10GE.
The Menlo card provides two FC and two 10GE and is currently shipping. The details of the card are :
The Menlo adapter is a converged network adapter (CNA) with 2 host-side 10GE ports and 2 FC ports to the backplane. The 2 network ports can run either native Ethernet or FCoE protocols and can be configured for failover. This failover is performed by the Menlo ASIC and does not require multipathing sofrware on the host. The Menlo ASIC is a Cisco-designed multiplexor and FCoE protocol offload engine with a 350MHz 24K MIPS processor. There are 2 versions of this card: Menlo-E (with an Emulex chipset) and Menlo-Q (with a Qlogic chipset), thereby supporting existing proven driver stacks to the customer.
Q: If the fabric extender is connected to fabric interconnect using 4 links and one of the links fail, what will happen?Also note that to restore connectivity you need to re-pin the IO Module that had a failed link. To do this you need to reset it. From the CLI it would look like this.
Ans: The server interfaces that are affected will either lose connectivity or fail over to another fabric extender, depending if interface is created as a HA interface. Menlo has the capability to fail over Ethernet interfaces if so configured. Oplin does not have this capability. Fibre Channel interfaces that are pinned to failing fabric extender link will just fail and their HA capability depends purely on host side multipathing driver. If HA/mutipathing is not configured for Ethernet/Fibre Channel then servers connected to the failed link will loose connectivity but the other three links will be working as usual. Remember that no automatic re-pinning will happen. You can manually re-pin the servers using two link topology, since three link topology is not supported.
However this is UCS and the GUI for UCSM is just as powerful as the CLI, so here is where you do it in the GUI.carrot-A# scope chassis 1
carrot-A /chassis # scope iom 1
carrot-A /chassis/iom # where
Mode: /chassis/iom
Mode Data:
scope chassis 1
scope iom 1
carrot-A /chassis/iom # reset
carrot-A /chassis/iom* # commit
carrot-A /chassis/iom #
The vHBA’s do not support the UCS fault tolerant feature and therefore a standard HBA multi-pathing configuration is still required in the operating system (ESX kernel) for Fibre Channel high availability.
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