During the vSphere 4.1 beta period, two of my clients were very interested in the new Host Affinity Rules for issues they were having.  The day vSphere 4.1 was released I had a call to discuss Host Affinity Rules with another client to explore issues they were having that host affinity rules could solve.  Each of these global enterprise clients are running 1000′s of VMs in production and each have different uses for Host Affinity Rules that the average user may overlook.

I was planning on providing a quick overview of the Host Affinity Rules in this post, but Frank Denneman already provided a great overview that I can’t really improve on.  Start with his post to to understand the basics of the new Host Affinity Rules.

A few Host Affinity Rule use cases:

• Physical server based software licensing:  As hard as it is to believe, some software vendors still tie their software to physical computers.  Using Host Affinity rules allow you to purchase licenses for a subset of your physical servers in your vSphere cluster. (typically 2 so you have HA).  By forcing the VMs running the software in question to run on specific servers, you can ensure compliance with the software licensing.
• Isolation for troublesome VMs: as with most troubleshooting processes, the newest thing in an environment usually gets the blame.  For one of my clients this means that new workloads moved into the vSphere environment that have performance issues result in the application owners blaming vSphere for the performance issues.  Even after using something like vCenter AppSpeed to show the user where the performance problem exists in their application, app owners still won’t believe it until their VM is running by itself.  With Host Affinity Rules, you can force the problem-some VM to run on a server that has nothing else on it.  (Take that non-believer app owner!)
• Another approach to host pinning and reservations:  Some clients use pinning and reservations to help ensure certain levels of performance for some of their end users.  Like any over-riding control, you can eventually end up with more of these rules than can be realistically managed.  Host Affinity rules could be used in their place by forcing a more large grained control.  Of course, the same rule sprawl can occur with host affinity rules.  So it’s best to use them sparingly at first and really make sure the end users really need them before using them.  After all, cloud computing is supposed to make things easier for both end users and IT administrators…fight the gravitational pull of end user special needs.  More often than not these needs don’t really exist.

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.)

There has been a number of announcements over the past few weeks in the area of Application Virtualization, most notably VMware’s release of ThinApp.  With the ability to wrap an application in a virtualization container and then run that virtualized application as a stand alone executable, virtualization has been taken to the next level.

As I have been talking to enterprises about application virtualization, a base understanding of why this is important is always needed.  The simplest example of where application virtualization can be used is when you think of the need to have two different versions of the same application.  Image you are a QA tester testing a web based application.  Usually, you verify that the web based application works with both IE 7 and IE 6 or now Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.  In the past, you had to have two machines (physical or ideally virtualized) with each browser installed since they can’t live together on the same machine.  Talk about overhead.  With application virtualization, each version of IE gets placed in the virtualized wrapper and becomes a standalone executable.  Allowing you to run both apps at the same time on the same machine.

Moving to a more complex example, think about virtualizing most of your core applications across an enterprise.  If each application is a stand alone executable, what happens when a user accidentally deletes one of the library files for the application?  First off, this wouldn’t happen because they are all placed in the virtualized wrapper.  But if it did, all IT has to do is tell the user to download the virtualized app again from a central repository.

The cost savings for IT administrators of the desktop can really start to add up.  These include:

• Less disk space requirements since the virtualized application is compressed
• Savings in admin hours just from not having to reboot Windows after an application is installed; virtualized applications don’t require a reboot to install, just copy to the machine and run it (or run it from a USB key).
• The elimination of the re-builds or re-installation of desktops due to user’s accidentally corrupting an application; the self contained virtualized apps can’t be corrupted like a natively installed one.
• A reduction in troubleshooting application conflicts since each application lives in it’s own virtualized world.

When you take each of these areas of time saving and extend this across 20k, 50k, 200k desktops the time savings starts to have huge impact to the efficiency of an Desktop IT organization.

Stay tuned as I get more real world examples…

(Disclosure: I am currently employed as a Global Accounts Solutions Consultant at VMware.)

One of the things that I have been working on recently is research for billing systems for SaaS companies. One project I have been working on recently has the eventual need for billing for the SaaS offerings they will be releasing soon. The challenge has been the multi-tiered nature of the billing solution that is needed. Becuase of that, we came up with a naming system to minimize the confusion:

• Patrons are the customers of the SaaS provider.
• Customers are the customers of the Patrons

Not only must the solution handle billing for the SaaS provider’s patrons, but also handle billing pass through for the patron to charge their customers. And that pass through billing could be services or product based with each patron having a slightly different product offering.

The initial thought was that this would have to built internally, maybe using a combination of Sugar CRM and osCommerce. The problem was that we realized we would need to do too much meatball surgery on these systems to really get what we wanted. Also, we don’t need a full fledged CRM system, just a light customer database (at least initially, boiling the ocean was something we were fighting even though we could see the need for it down the road). Then on top of all this, we still needed to work with a payment system to run the transactions for us. We really didn’t want to store credit card numbers on the system as we wanted to avoid all PCI headaches.

What was needed was a service that would take care of all this for us!

Enter two SaaS based billing solutions Zuora and Aria Systems. Both companies generally do the same thing: provide a SaaS based billing solution that can be used by SaaS, subscription based companies.

Aria Systems has been around for a bit longer but been growing more organically and, I think due to their being based out of Philadelphia and not having expanded their sales force until just recently, not as well known. They have a much more mature billing service which can be co-branded or embedded via APIs into an existing SaaS service. The main downside that I see to their current business model is that they are only interested in doing business with companies that have an existing revenue stream. Primarily because of the high cost of configuring a client to use their system. They don’t appear to have embraced the SaaS model internally from the fact of allowing a small early grown company to sign up on a small pay as you go model and then enable that company to learn from self help documentation on implementing the system. Thus, I feel they are likely to miss the rising tide of young companies being successfully and riding that success.

Zuora recently came out of stealth mode to announce their offering. I know a number of talented people who have gone over to Zuora and from what I have learned pre-launch and since from their website, it looks like at the core they offer the same thing as Aria Systems. However, the company was founded by poeple who came from the SaaS space, they claim to understand the new and expanding needs that these companies have and will have. It appears that their system is designed to provide flexibility for the SaaS provider to adapt their service offerings as well as run analytics across it. Something that Aria Systems, doesn’t talk up very much. Since they are still fresh out of the gate, I don’t know if they suffer from the same problem as Aria: not focused on seeding the market with self service, pay as you consume offering that can be used by startups. Their “web 2.0″ feel definitely gives them an advantage from initial impression alone.

I’m anxious to learn more about Zuora’s capabilities and hope that it will be the silver bullet for the SaaS project I am working on. As I get more exposure to their offering, I will share my experience.

A while back I learned about an interesting company that was working to blanket San Francisco with free wifi access. Meraki and their Free the Net San Francisco campaign are using an interesting method, similar to open source, to provide free wifi to San Francisco. Anyone can sign up to get a free wifi providing station that can be plugged and placed near a widow or on a balcony and you’re instantly extending the base wifi signals that Meraki offers. So, rather than trying to build the complicated infrastructure needed with multiple stations providing the wifi signal, and coordinate leases for places to put these stations…they just give them away!

The stations appear to draw a small amount of power, so they shouldn’t cost poeple a lot of money to leave on all the time. And, like any ‘free’ service, there is supposed to be small adds that get displayed. I say supposed to be becuase I haven’t actually been in a part of San Francisco where yet where I could fine their network, but the Wall Street Journal article about them indicated the advertising.

Side Box: Speaking of advertising, looks like effects of News Corps acquistion of WSJ publisher Dow Jones is now evident. As I went to the WSJ while writing this article, I was litterally bombarded with advertising like I had never seen before on their site. Sad to say, that’s not the WSJ online anymore…and I’ll be sticking to the print version where at least the ads stay within their boundaries on the page…

Not surprising, Meraki is backed by Google. This could be Google’s way of helping to provide the ubiquitous free network access that keeps coming up from them every so often.

A big Thanks You! goes out to Steve Lacey, a Google employee who used his Google 20% time to build the one feature that I have been asking and waiting for from Google Reader. Thanks to Steve, you can turn any one of your Google Reader tags into a blogroll widget.

I have been waiting for this feature for a while now. I am constantly updating my blog reading list and with this widget feature I can now put a blog roll up that reflects my current reading. As I change my subscriptions, my blogroll will change automatically. I love widgets!

You’ll find two examples of this on the right hand side:

• My SOA-Related Blogroll: Blogs I follow related to SOA
• My SaaS-Web2.0 Blogroll: Blogs that I follow related to SaaS/Web2.0

If you use Google Reader, I think you will enjoy this new feature…make sure you tell Steve Lacey thank you!