Musings of Rodos

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.

• Anna Liu, UNSW : Architecting cloud applications - the essential checklist
• Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft : Head in the cloud, feet on the ground
• Lincoln Cheung, Object Consulting : Cloud computing: everyone wants to be in it, no-one knows what it means
• Brett McDowall, Object Consulting : Cloud sounds great - but not at my company
• Matt Wright, Oracle : How to use App Grid to create a private cloud
• Tim Ruben, Oracle : Impact of the rise of the Cloud on Enterprise Architecture
• Radek Cerny, expanz : The ultimate cloud architecture
• Neil Belford, base2Services : HA and DR in the cloud

As a Cloud geek I am very keen to hear and critique the messages and ideas presented.

Be interesting to see what Lincoln presents for his session. The description is

“Cloud computing: everyone wants to be in it, no-one knows what it means”

• 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?

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.

You will be able to follow on twitter, follow @rodos or I will post on hashtag #aaf09. I will also try to write up a report with any really interesting stuff.

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.

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.

Some good themes emerge here.

Network centric. As I repeat often, cloud relies heavily on networking and there is lots for organisations and vendors to do here to make it effective, seamless and cost effective.

Virtualisation. Well virtualisation enables the cloud, as VMware have stated. However one must be aware of the distinction between IaaS and say SaaS. Virtualisation is a much stronger play in the IaaS. However lets not limit the term to just the server workloads, Network virtulisation is a strong element too, hence the reference to UCS.

Security. Always one to come up. When I was speaking at an event last week on cloud the Security question was raised, surprisingly it was not the first question. Looks like the Hoff (Director, Cloud & Virtualization Solutions @ Cisco) who has a strong background in security has his work cut out for him for a while. Not surprising that the strongest skill Cisco put into this key position was security.

Interoperability. Openness and flexibility are key elements that many in the industry are pushing as well as customers. Being able to have interoperability between different cloud vendors and architectures is key to wide adoption and a competitive market.

Interesting stuff. Good to see such core themes come out of a single statement. I suppose thats why Padmasree has the job she does, if it was easy any one could do it!

Rodos

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.

P.S. No jokes about a Foreigner theme? I will be there singing along!

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.

What's that? Develop expertise in virtualisation and SANs. I think they left out networking. Given the network centric nature of Cloud services I believe the management, availability and optimisation of networks will also be critical (keep those Cisco cert's up).

Sounds like all the people in the circles I travel in are well set in their career path for the next few years.

"Embrace the cloud, don't fight it."

Rodos