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Blog Updates

July 29, 2008 1 Comment

It’s amazing how much time one can spend trying to get their blog to look just right. Tonight was one of those nights. I was able to cross a couple of to-dos off my list by migrating this blog to it’s new home as well as upgrading to the latest wordpress. You should notice a substantial improvement in responsiveness of the site on this new hoster.

I also used this chance to update the theme of the blog. This is the part that took the most time. Since the WP 2.6 upgrade, all the themes have to be updated and it’s amazing how few themes are in the official WP theme collection. So, sticking with my orange color combination, I decided on this one. I’m not 100% happy with it, but I have to move on to more important items on my not-done-yet list.

Let me know if you like or don’t like the new theme. I love feedback! 🙂

Next Level: Application Virtualization

June 23, 2008 Leave a Comment

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.)

Discussions with Healthcare Industry CTOs

June 12, 2008 Leave a Comment

Yesterday I spent half a day discussing virtualization strategies with a few CTOs from a $15B firm from the healthcare industry. It was refreshing to see the same glint in the eyes of these CTOs regarding virtualization’s potential to revolutionize their data centers as I saw before joining VMware. The key aspects of these discussions was how virtualization can help them reduce not only their capex but also their opex. They also saw the potential that virtualization provides in the areas of increasing their service delivery times (provisioning new systems for customers in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks or 2 months like they are used to) as well as enabeling a new way of thinking about disaster recovery.

Like most IT executives, these CTOs knew about virtualization from the aspect of the hyperadvisor; the core of virtualization that allows you to run multiple operating systems on the same computer at the same time (with each operating system thinking it’s by itself). This is just the start of the software computer revolution. Now that you have isolated the OS down to just a bunch of files that can be moved between physical computers transaprently, you have the ability to provision a machine in a short period of time. Create a base Virtual Machine image for each of your approved OS’. Next copy that base OS to create another image for each of your general application types. You now have a library of images that can copied within seconds to an existing physical machine, booted and viola, a provisioned server in minutes; substantially reducing opex.

Also, since the “data” that the enterprise is already backing up for disaster recovery now contains the applications and operating system, DR takes on a whole new meaning. (and not just DR, but resource “load balancing”, server maintenance, data center migrations…pretty much all the maintenance work that IT has to do.) You can take your old machines and deploy them to your DR site. Now use your existing data replication software to replicate the VM files. When your main data center goes down, just turn on your VMs in the DR data center and back to business. Sure, performance might not be the same, but the business is functioning; the key point of DR. And since you used hardware that you already own, your capex is reduced.

“Cloud Computing for the Enterprise”. That is what one of the CTO’s called virtualization. As someone who has been living in the cloud for years on the Web 2.0, this is not a shocking way for me to think. Cloud computing was easy for the web, where you had (or could build) apps out of standard web based (REST based) building blocks. But for an enterprise architect who has to deal with complicated software packages from properitary vendors that process Billions of dollars in orders, this was a refreshing thing to hear.

Could this type of statement indicate that virtualization and utility computing has arrived for the enterprise?

I think that’s a safe statement.