Enter the FrankenCloud: Or Do we really care about the Hypervisor?

There has been quite a lot of twitter traffic about the FrankenCloud recently: A cloud with more than one type of hypervisor underneath it. One example, is to build a cloud using Hyper-V three and vSphere, both managed through Microsoft System Center. Another example, is to build a cloud using Hyper-V, KVM, and vSphere all managed through HotLink. But is this a desired cloud topology?

Migrating to the Cloud: OpenStack or vCloud?

We, here at The Virtualization Practice, are getting ready to have a cloud presence. Since we ‘eat our own dogfood’ with a 100% Virtual Environment, we are gearing up to move some of those workloads into a hybrid cloud. We already use some cloud resources, but now is the time to look at other workloads. Why we are moving to the cloud is three fold: how can we write about various aspects of being a tenant in the cloud, if we are not one; a recent power outage at the grid level; and a upcoming data center move. Two of these reasons are all about business continuity with the first being what we do. While we already have a cloud running within our own environment, it is time to branch out.

OpenStack: What it is not….

The OpenStack conference 2012 is full of OpenStack fans, aficionados, developers, and companies making a business using the ecosystem. However, I kept hearing that openstack was a replacement for VMware. So why is this even a possibility, and why did Rackspace and now HP build public clouds using this technology? The easy answer is to save money. But is that the only answer? What is OpenStack and why is it becoming important?

Life without the Cloud or Reasons to use a Hybrid Cloud

The Virtualization Practice was recently offline for two days, we thank you for coming back to us after this failure. The reason, a simple fibre cut that would have taken the proper people no more than 15 minutes to fix, but we were way down on the list due to the nature of the storm that hit New England and took 3M people off the grid. Even our backup mechanisms were out of power. While our datacenter had power, the rest of the area in our immediate vicinity did not. So not only were we isolated from reaching any clouds, but we were isolated from being reached from outside our own datacenter. The solution to such isolation is usually remote sites and location of services in other regions of a county, this gets relatively expensive for small and medium business, can the Hybrid Cloud help here?

State of Secure Multitenancy Today

On 9/22 was held the Virtualization Security Podcast featuring Anil Karmel, Solutions Architect at Los Alamos National Library (LANL), to discuss their implementation of secure multi-tenant Cloud. LANL makes extensive use of the entire VMware product suite from vCloud Director down to the vShield components to implement their SMT cloud. They have also added into their cloud their own intellectual property to improve overall cloud security. It was a very interesting conversation about the state of SMT today.