latoga labs

I’ve been discussing destkop virtualization a lot lately with customers, so when I can across this Dilbert cartoon it brough the paradigm shift caused by virtualized desktops to the forefront.  (More desktop virtualization discussion in the future…once I find the time to write again…)

As virtualization becomes more and more pervasive across the data center, many of my customers are now considering their vCenter Server as a tier 1 application.  This means more focus is being places on maintaining the availability of vCenter Server.  To quote Gene Kranz:

“Failure is not an option.”

vCenter Server is central to the following aspects of a virtualized data center:

• provides DRS & DPM monitoring and host load management
• enables vMotion (central to both DRS and DPM)
• centralized management portal for all VMs and ESX server running in a cluster (ESX and VMs still run without vCenter, but management become much more cumbersome)
• feeding data from VMs and ESX to other IT management platforms
• hosts SRM plugin for VM business continuity between data centers
• provisions desktops for View (desktop virtualization)

There are a number of different strategies that can be taken to provide availability of the vCenter Server, these typically fall into one of two categories: a cold standby server or a warm standby server.  Since the time needed to manually bring up a cold standby server for a large vSphere deployment can easily reach into the hours, most large organization tend toward a warm standby scenario and leverage some software automation to trigger the fail over.  There are many options here that fall into the general categories of clustering or host replication.  These tend to be complex and not always application specific.

To fill this gap and provide the monitoring and fail over needs of running vCenter Server as a teir 1 application, VMware recently released vCenter Server Heartbeat, which provides monitoring and automated fail over of both the vCenter Server and (optionally) the vCenter database.

Key aspects of Center Server Heartbeat:

• Monitors application (vCenter Server and optionally vCenter Database), network, and OS
  • underlying technology licensed from NeverFail for vCenter Server and SQL Server awareness and fail over
• Supports VM or Physical deployments of vCenter Server
• Uses replication engine to replicate data and transactions to standby server
• fail over of vCenter and Database across wan or LAN
• Protects from Split Brain scenario if a network outage were to occur
• Fail over of IP address so all hosts/VMs continue to function with vCenter normally
• Easy to configure, auto cloning of vCenter Server VMs (if deployed virtually) to create stand by server

vCenter Server Heartbeat Diagram

My recommended approach to providing Tier 1 availability of the vCenter server

• Ideally: run your vCenter server as a VM and utizliae vCenter Server Heartbeat to monitor and fail over vCenter.  All accomplished with the minimal amount of configuration due to vCenter Server Heartbeat’s VM cloning capabilities.
• Minimally: run vCenter server as a VM and configure a HA pair for that VM.  vCenter HA operates independantly of vCenter Server and will function even when the vCenter serer fails.  Becuase it is designed to provide general HA for a wide variety of situations, it is not application aware like vCenter Server Heartbeat.  Also, many architects don’t prefer this solution becuase the fail over is being provided by the tool that you are trying to protect.  But, it is better than no fail over solution for vCenter Server.

Here is a nice little Friday treat, VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti introduced vCenter Mobile Access today.  Were you ever on the road, or just out to lunch (physically) when you needed to check something on your VMware infrastructure?  With vCMA you would be able to do that from your mobile phone.  Check out the demo video:

vCMA will be available as a technology preview sometime in April. You will need to install a virtual appliance to run the vCMA server and connect it to your vCenter.

Yesterday I logged in to check out Yammer, the Twitter for Business.  What Yammer has created is the innovation that Twitter was not able to:  a way to create social media tool for businesses and come up with a business model to charge for the service.

Yammer is essentially a channel-ized twitter.  But the channel is only other people in your business; they force that by using the domain of your email address to create or add you to a channel.  Now, your status updates are only seen by your co-workers.  And if you start to carry on a conversation in your channel, you can view messages based on threads.

Where I think it gets interesting is their business model.  Offer the service for free, but then charge the company for an Admin privileges on the channel.  An Admin can brand the channel for the company, control members of the channel and even provide security by restricting the channel so you can only log in from the corporate network.

The problem with Yammer?  It’s yet another social communication channel.  The whole social networking services have become way to fractured.  Too many places to network.  Not enough time accomplishing anything.  To use the phrase “social not-working” is getting more an more applicable. (on that point, Yammer was developed by the Geni team…how’s that for not working.)  The advantage of a service like FriendFeed is that it is one place to check all your social networking feeds, even if you can only reply back via FriendFeed.

The openess of the web needs to be extended so that something like Yammer can be a piece of infrastructure that can be plugged into multiple other services.  One think I like about Twitter is that there are 3rd party interfaces.  I have enough web browser windows open on my desktop as it is, I need less not more.  As fredrickvan tweeted today, the key is keeping your social touch points in control.  While Yammer figured out a way to make money off of the status message, it’s just another social touch point that we have to manage.

Tonight on my drive home, I heard an interesting radio program on my local NPR station (KQED).  They were airing part of the Asia Society’s U.S.-China Green Energy Conference, a segment about Fueling a Clean Energy Future.  The introduction was from one of the partners (I think he was a partner) from NEA.  Most of the discussion that I heard (recording wasn’t posted at the time I am writing this) was about the energy needs of the world and the possible energy generation alternatives.

NEA is a venture capital firm.  So the types of investments that they are looking at are the ones that will score huge payback.  If the opportunity won’t turn into at least a $100M+ business, they usually aren’t interested.  So it makes sense that they would be investing huge in the power generation side of the planetary energy coin.

However, on the drive home, it struck me…what about the flip side of that coin?  If the estimated future power consumption for the planet is measured in the 10’s of Terawatts of power and if the power needs are increasing as developing nations raise their standard of living to match the developed nations standards, why isn’t there as much attention given to saving power?

Are we focused to much on addressing the symptoms and not enough on the cuase?

I remember years ago hearing about a company that was working on a power transformer that would allow devices to go into standby mode and consume fractions of a watt of power instead of 10’s of watts of power that is the norm now (see my previous post about Results from Monitoring the Meter).  About a year ago I tried to find that company, doesn’t exist any more.  Transmeta was another company that was focused on the power savings, but dropped off the radar and is a IP management shell employing more lawyers than engineers right now. The only company that I can think of immediately that is both above the radar and impacting huge power savings directly from their technology is VMware.

There are huge areas of waste that we can still address. Image how much of a dent we could put in the future consumption if our focus on how not to use as much electricity expanded beyond CFLs?  I hope there are more companies out there than I know of working on conservation technologies, but I guess I find myself a bit annoyed by the lack of focus that seems to be applied to them.

(Disclosure:  as of this writing I am employed at VMware as a Solutions Consultant.)