As many of you virtualization and cloud experts know, VMworld is just around the corner - next week to be exact.  BlueLock is thrilled to be so involved with the event this year, especially with its heightened emphasis on cloud computing with the VMware vCloud iniatives we've already been hearing so much about. We've been beta testing one of their most talked about technologies (no I'm not telling what...) and we have a little product launch surprise of our own too. You'll hear all about the newest cloud technologies bright and early on the morning of Tuesday, August 31.

If you're attending the event, come check us out on the showroom floor at booth #639 or check out our cloud demos in the Cloud Pavilion.  Not attending? Register to see the keynote sessions for free here. Don't worry - we'll be tweeting and posting throughout the conference too! Just follow us on twitter at @bluelock to hear the latest cloud gossip from the show.

We're just as excited as all of you for this year's big VMworld event. Hope to see you there!

As I entered my career in the early 1990’s, software companies were making huge strides with the development of the Microsoft windows operating system.  As we began to reach the second half of the 90’s, internet-based companies were beginning to explode everywhere.  It’s an era that for many remember it being call the dot.com and later the “dot.bomb era”.  It was appropriately named as start-up after start-up software companies launched new products to market with monies invested by investors who thought they had found the next goldmine. Finding investment in your new dot.com was as easy as showing a demo to some investors (so it seemed). 
 
Rumors of start-up companies who had limited success and were purchased by another company for record returns, later motivated this frenzy between investors and start-ups.  Just as we experienced in the last few years with the real-estate market, the market in the late 90’s adjusted and record number of technology companies folded.  Investors got weary and companies over-spending habits caught up to them.  Customers got burned by buying underdeveloped/vaporware applications that were over-promised and under-delivered.  The market plummeted. 

4 years ago when BlueLock started this mission of offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS), they went to market there were very few companies nationally who were leveraging virtualization and providing cloud hosting services that leveraged OpEx over CapEx.  For four years BlueLock has worked with VMware to help aid in the development of this model.  Four years later, with many successes and even a few failures over the past few years, BlueLock is a smooth running machine and is feeling the rewards of being an early evangelist of IaaS.  

As the idea of cloud computing continues to go mainstream, history may be on the verge of repeating itself.  As in the dot.com era, everything was about dot.com and moving to the web.  Today everything is about cloud computing and making sure you are a cloud provider.  You can’t skip a rock without hitting a technology/colo hosting company who now claims to have a “cloud offering”.  Buy some licenses of VMware, put in two SANS, place it all in a rack, and VOILA - a new cloud provider! 

It is true that technically many of these companies are cloud providers, as equal as it was true that many of those dot.bombs were technically software companies.  As software companies in the late 90’s learned, it takes more than having a basic product and a good sales guy to sustain business.  Now the new “cloud” companies are learning the same.  I have talked to a handful of these new “cloud hosting” companies who after investing close to a million dollars in cloud infrastructure now realize that they can’t sustain the capital constraints. 

I am not stating that every company besides BlueLock who claims to be a cloud provider is falsely representing themselves.  There are some very good companies out there, who are doing this the right way.  I am stating there just aren’t many who are doing it right and may not survive.  The crux of this post is - be careful where your company invests its monies.  While the providers you talk to might all sound the same, look beyond the words and look at the core of the business to get to the real truth.  Is this “cloud” just a rack in their collocation business?  You might be putting your trust in the next dot cloud computing bomb. 

Tuesday (July 27) was the annual Indy VMUG Demo Days event, and BlueLock had a ball! Not only did we have some great cloud computing conversations at our booth, but everyone loved our flying cloud monkeys - they went like hotcakes. These two quickly found a safe place though:


Below Brandon Jeffress is taking the time to show some BlueLock fans the proper way to fly our monkeys.  Our new Orr Fellows, Brant Howell & Jon Corwin (pictured below as well) learned how to fly monkeys too, but they also learned even more valuable skills at the VMUG breakout sessions where they viewed VMware demos and learned about the virtualization technology that powers the BlueLock Cloud.

How do IT administrators manage servers that have been migrated to the BlueLock Cloud?  Using either virtual private networking (VPN) or point-to-point network connectivity (MPLS, Metro Ethernet, etc) can make managing a cloud-hosed server virtually identical (no pun intended!) to managing a server that’s on-premise.  That's one of the benefits of working with a speciality vendor which provides Infrastructure As A Service offerings: custom networking requirements and dedicated wide-area connectivity needs can usually be accomodated rather easily.  Once connectivity is in place, administrators can use their existing tools (like Remote Desktop Protocol [RDP] for Windows) to connect to cloud-based server images. 

At the same time, what we’re also seeing in the market is a slew of new products and companies focused on this management aspect, providing a “single pane of glass” that allows things like provisioning/de-provisioning/management of systems to be seamless across not just a single cloud IaaS provider like BlueLock, but potentially between multiple cloud providers and between public/private clouds.  Jclouds is a good example: they provide an API that allows you to freedom to programmatically manage a large number of clouds including Amazon, VMWare (including BlueLock vCloud Express), Azure, and Rackspace.

This calls for a very special edition of Whiteboard Wednesday.

VMware Users' Group (VMUG) had their Demo Days in Indianapolis yesterday and set up Jake Robinson and me to do some cloud computing white boarding. We took questions from cloud experts, employees, and enthusiasts; then hit the white board. 

In this session, Jake and I take a look at connecting internal and external clouds -- the cloud with virtualized environments. Take a look:

 

Last night's episode of This Week in Cloud Computing features BlueLock's CTO and Co-Founder Pat O'Day. In the episode the subject of application & virtual machine portability comes up several times and Pat discusses one aspect of VM deployment: allowing several virtual machines to be deployed together as a singular, orchestrated virtual application solution. In VMware parlance this kind of logical grouping is considered a vApp, or virtual application solution.

The distinction between vApps and VMs can get a bit foggy and unclear at times. Things become a bit clearer when you take a look at the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification, which outlines the metadata that describes a vApp. In a nutshell: vApps are ultimately not definied by the virtual machines that run within them, but instead is a way of telling your infrastructure how VMs can play nicely with each other. Should the exist within an isolated network? How should IP addresses be allocated? Do you start the database server before the application server? Where did that other sock go? The OVF format lets your cloud infrastructure know all the facts necessary during deployments, shutdowns and re-starts.

This can be especially handy for disaster recovery. Imagine a meteor strikes your primary cloud hosting facility. Even though your operations staff now has super-powers, your data center is toast. Luckily you had the presence of mind to keep your vApps in an off-site data center that automagically activates when the primary data center goes offline. Thanks to the vApp's metadata, the disaster recovery site knows how to start an entire n-tier web application in an orderly fashion so that dependent services don't start out-of-order.

This kind of virtual application meta-data is being continuously extended to include service levels and quality of service data so that vApps can be deployed or even migrate to the most ideal resource pool either based on cost, performance or a mix between the two. This specification is evolving, and so are the use cases and technology stack that supports it. As the cloud ecosystem matures we will continue to see innovative ways to focus on not just the virtual machine, but the entire virtual solution.

The vCloud API is an emerging but already very useful standard for managing virtual infrastructure within a hosted environment. The API itself isn't VMware-centric (although VMware is obviously a huge fan), but instead it was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force for adoption as an industry standard. The plan is that a single, consistent, platform-independent API could allow a myriad of cloud technologies to effective talk to each other without much fuss or massive message transformation.

The API implementation itself is REST-based, meaning that transactions are stateless and submitted with XML over HTTP. The benefits of using a REST API isn't that it is cutting-edge tech, but instead that it leverages well-established methods for communicating over the Internet. Since REST keeps communication between components simple, poking holes in firewalls and hand-crafting messages can be done very easily.

Let's walk through an example to see just how easy this can be, using only the command line utility curl. Assuming you have a BlueLock vCloud Express account (and, let's face it, all the cool people have vCloud Express accounts) you can simply type:

 curl -u 'your_username:your_password' -v -d "" https://express.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/login 

And voila! The command line parameters you passed along simply tell curl to send your username and password as parameters to a HTTP POST at a given URL.

With the above command you are not only logged in to your vCloud Express account, you also get some advice on what URLs you can try out next:

< Content-Type: application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.orgsList+xml
< set-cookie: vcloud-token=1234567890abcdef; Domain=.bluelock.com; Path=/
< Via: 1.1 express.bluelock.com
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OrgList xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8
    https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/schemas/vcloud/organizationList.xsd">
    <Org type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.org+xml" 
        name="your_username" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/31415"/>
</OrgList>

Let's follow one of those links and see what we get. We can use curl to perform an HTTP GET on the link referred to as part of the Org element:

curl https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/824

<error message="Session Key is not found" 
    majorerrorcode="403" 
    minorerrorcode="Bad Request">
</error>

We encountered an error... basically vCloud Express doesn't know who you are. That's where the "stateless" aspect of REST comes into play... subsequent vCloud API calls don't remember who you are.

In the earlier login call we received an HTTP Cookie as part of the response. That "cookie" is a value that reminds the vCloud API of who we are and that we are actually legit, logged-in users. With every subsequent request we send we must also send along the cookie, as in:

curl --cookie "vcloud-token=1234567890abcdef" https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/31415

And now we receive back the response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Org href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/31415" 
    name="your_username" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8 
    https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/schemas/vcloud/organization.xsd"
    xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/catalog/0" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.catalog+xml"  
        name="System Catalog"/>
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/catalog/51413" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.catalog+xml"  
        name="your_username Private Catalog"/>
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/tasksList/123" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.tasksList+xml"/>
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/vdc/456" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.vdc+xml"  
        name="testvdc"/>
    <Description></Description>
    <FullName></FullName>
</Org>

More links for us to follow! Awesome!

The full vCloud API specification is available on VMware's site, and the 0.8 version of this API is available on BlueLock vCloud Express. REST easy!

As a systems administrator working the BlueLock Support Desk, I handle requests from a variety of clients. As a result, I have an opportunity to get to know our clientele better than other staff. It's a vital role and offers more challenges than standard help desk work. In a typical day, I will handle firewall change requests, virtual machine performance issues, IP address assignment, research, hard drive expansion and other tasks. No two days are the same and the level of activity varies from hour to hour.

Our primary goal is always to provide excellent customer service. One of my goals to that end is to be as pleasant and reassuring as possible. Though I may not be able to find a quick solution for a given issue, I have resources readily available to advance the process. Keeping the lines of communication open between involved parties is a special challenge. If a request is overly complex, I may need to involve the Engineering Team and administrative staff. The support desk acts as a coordinator for these tasks, ensuring progress toward an acceptable solution.

Virtualization and the Cloud are still a part of the wild frontier and I strive to help ease the transition for new adopters. Whether I'm explaining how VMware stores files or detailing the backup process, I consider the comfort level of my audience. I answer many questions over the phone, but others may require exchanging documentation. Our flexibility helps build goodwill and confidence in our offerings.

To help our clients achieve the true benefits of Cloud computing we have to bring something special to the table every day. These roles that I've detailed all go toward creating a special relationship. When a client signs on the dotted line with BlueLock we become a part of their organization start building that relationship immediately. By fostering that common connection we are making a serious commitment to success for all involved.

In a previous post, I talked about the challenges of sizing a cloud computing infrastructure, specifically one for running Microsoft SQL Server.  Because it's the back-end for many corporate IT systems and also serves as part of a lot of internet-facing applications, Microsoft SQL Server is certainly one of the more popular candidates for consideration when looking to leverage Infrastructure As A Service.  It's not the only one, however, so understanding how to properly size a managed cloud hosting VM is important regardless of the application being considered.  Luckily, it's easier than one might think.  

The key is almost always completely understanding how the application is performing today and what hardware (physical -or- virtual) it's running on currently.

There are a ton of great tools out there to assist with these assessments.  Commercial tools such as Lanamark VReady, Novell Platespin Recon and Vizioncore vFoglight are popular candidates and there are many more where those came from.  VMware partners like BlueLock can even provide this information as a service offering using the VMware Capacity Planner tool which is an IT capacity planning tool that collects comprehensive resource utilization and compares it to industry standard reference data to provide analysis about what how much capacity is needed in a virtualized environment using Vmware Virtualization Technology.

One hidden gem that is often overlooked, though, is the VMware Guided Consolidation tool included as a feature of VMware vCenter.  Now a module within vCenter Server, it walks you step by step through the consolidation process  including automatic discovery of up to 500 servers, performance analysis, conversion and intelligent placement on the right host.  Even if you aren't planning on building your own private cloud and, instead, are looking to Cloud Computing Companies to run your virtualized workloads, the VMware Guided Consolidation tool can at least help you assess your current environment if you are a small or mid-sized business.  It has an easy to use interface and a more simplified approach than using hte full VMware Capacity Planner tool.

The BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys Use Case contest begins today!

Former, current and new BlueLock vCloud Express Beta users will compete for these prizes:

• The first ten submissions will receive a stuffed cloud monkey
  
• The top five finalists will receive a FlipCam which they will use (and keep!) to create a recognition video for the application to compete for the Grand Prize - an Apple iPad!
  
• The Grand Prize winner will receive the engraved Apple iPad!

Open for submissions by current, former and new Beta users, the contest runs from June 16 – September 6 and looks to surface the most innovative use cases of BlueLock’s vCloud Express.

During the 12-week contest, BlueLock vCloud Express developers enter by filling out a simple questionnaire on the BlueLock Web site between June 16 and July 7 2010 that includes a description of the BlueLock vCloud Express use case and why it deserves to win. Participants can promote their own use case through Twitter and other social media outlets. Submissions will be voted on by an open community of voters and judged by BlueLock and VMware on cloud applicability, creativity/innovation, time savings and cost savings to select the top five use cases. The first ten submissions will receive a BlueLock “Cloud Monkey” stuffed animal and the five finalists will receive FlipCams with the option to document their use cases in a two minute “Recognition Video.” Finalists who submit Recognition Videos will then be judged by BlueLock and VMware for the Grand Prize, with the winner receiving an engraved Apple iPad.

“The functionality of BlueLock vCloud Express has proven to be unique and of value to our clients, driving us to design some of the same features into our other solutions within BlueLock CloudSuite,” said Kim Graham Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, BlueLock. “We are excited to not only learn more about how developers have been using vCloud Express, but to also highlight the most unique and interesting use cases.”

“As a top VMware vCloud service provider partner, BlueLock has been able to help shape vCloud Express as it continues to demonstrate that they are ahead of the curve in understanding their clients’ needs in the evolving cloud computing space,” said Mathew Lodge, Senior Director-Cloud Product Marketing, VMware. “We are looking forward to learning about how beta users have taken advantage of the dynamic combination of the industry-leading VMware platform and BlueLock’s secure and reliable cloud hosting and infrastructure expertise.”

BlueLock vCloud Express is a reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure solution that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide. The technology allows users to create virtual machines as needed and add compute capacity via an online interface. Users pay only for the compute and storage space they use. Since being selected by VMware as one of only five companies worldwide to offer vCloud Express and launching in September 2009, BlueLock has reached 1,100 beta users of the product.

Participants can be past, current or new BlueLock vCloud Express beta users and can submit more than one application. For additional contest details, visit www.bluelock.com.

Track temperature was hovering around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the crowd of almost 300,000 race fans were settled into their sets with stocked cooler chests, and on Memorial Day weekend, Americans did what they do best, they evoked their freedom of speech; they broke into a chant… U.S.A. - U.S.A. – U.S.A…

On one of the hottest Memorial Day’s in history, you could not pay me enough to leave the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but for a fleeting moment I did think about work and how cool our server room is. When giving site tours to prospective clients and explaining the benefits of virtualization, I recalled stepping into the fully enclosed concrete room and getting hit with a blast of arctic air – man what a feeling.  In a blink of an eye, all thoughts of work past by me at 224 mph, like a burst of light, as 33 Indy Cars roared through turn one.

Now that I am back in the office and out of the heat, I think back to Sunday and wonder how many business owners lost their servers on Memorial Day weekend due to lack of cooling.  I have been in several prospective companies that have server rooms with little or no cooling and the concept of a server room is simply a new designation for an old broom closet.  If your IT business plan does not call for raised floors, integrated connection of chillers, compressors, and air handlers, ask yourself this – Have I made the best investment in owning and operating my own equipment vs exploring the advantages of cloud computing?  Ask yourself, when my service contract is up or my servers need upgrading, should I consider outsourcing to a VMware infrastructure company like BlueLock or make the financial investment on a total data center upgrade? These are not easy questions to answer and may involve stepping outside the comfort of what many of us have done for twenty of thirty years.

For more information on BlueLock, visit our website or call me directly at 888-402-1980 ex. 127

Many clients we work with are running database servers in their existing environments so dealing with the performance and scalability of Microsoft SQL Server in the cloud, for example, is something that I end up assisting with on a regular basis.  In all, VMware vSphere does a great job of running Microsoft SQL Server in a virtualized environment but it’s still important to understand how to properly size and configure it for the virtual world.

VMware has published a lot of great technical content on the subject including this whitepaper which covers everything from CPU scaling to network performance.  One of the more common concerns I come across, however, is around memory.  Many clients have Microsoft SQL Server deployed on physical servers with 16GB or more of memory.  Should they just assume that that’s the amount of memory they’ll need in the cloud and provision it appropriately instead of starting small and growing as you need it - which is the promise of IaaS Cloud Computing to begin with?

Not without first understanding how SQL Server manages physical memory and whether or not they’ll need all that extra headroom.

By default SQL Server dynamically grows and shrinks the size of its buffer pool (cache) depending on the physical memory load reported by the operating system. As long as enough memory is available to prevent paging (between 4 - 10 MB), the SQL Server buffer pool will continue to grow and consume as much memory as the OS will hand over.  When sizing for the cloud (or any virtualized environment), it’s important to try to determine exactly how much RAM utilized is being used by SQL and whether or not SQL actually needs all of that memory.  You can do so by looking at these four SQL Server PerfMon statistics:

The Process: Working Set counter will show the amount of memory that the SQL Server process is actually using.  The SQL Server: Buffer Manager counters will tell us how efficient the buffer is and the SQL Server: Memory Manager counter will tell us how much memory SQL Server actually is trying to grab.  Observing the efficiency of the buffer manager can help you determine when and where to use commands such as “min server memory” and “max server memory” to control how thirsty SQL Server is for RAM.  Balancing performance (buffer manager efficiency) with the amount of RAM allocated to your SQL Server VM is the key to not over or under –estimating your needs.

There’s a great page on the Microsoft MSDN site which covers this in great(er) detail.  Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176018.aspx.

I remember quite vividly IBM's competition for SQL compliance on their AS/400 platform. 20-some years ago, databases had to be relational, tying together a vast sea of disparate columns. Relations between tables enforced a kind of consistency and normalization. No more brute-forcing random data into your corporate accounting system... now you had to obey the rules!

...or so the thinking went at the time.

Slowly, deep in the seedy database underground, seditious computer scientists sat stewing. They waited for the day when engineers realized that sometimes the process of normalizing data mutated it past the point of recognition. They knew one day some devious developer would see that relationships were too computationally expensive and slow. And one day... ah yes, one day... people would give up their crazy ad-hoc "Standard Query Languages."

While these computer scientists and software engineers were shoved to the margins by enterprise computing a few small companies took note of how well these rogue database systems scaled to the millions of users and petabytes of data. Lilliputian firms such as "Google," "LinkedIn" and "Facebook" started to lead a No-SQL revolution, running contrary to the dominant relational databases and instead storing mind-boggling amounts of data in non-relational tables and retrieving them faster than RDBMS' one-hundredth of their size.

Non-relational databases have become incredibly effective, especially when backed by a scalable pool of resources of a cloud computing provider such as BlueLock. If one takes a look at Redis - a powerful key-value store that can scale to a massive size - such a sense of scale quickly becomes apparent. By removing constraints one can get rid of building a huge number of indexes and instead deal out content quickly and efficiently. Craigslist has already leveraged Redis to an exceptional amount, and VMware sees quite a future in it as a platform as well.

If we take a step beyond we can see an entire landscape emerging: key-value stores such as Redis, Voldemort or Cassandra, hierarchical stores such as Zookeeper and tuple stores provided by JavaSpaces and Apache River. The number of choices seems to grow every day, and without a farm of servers it becomes quite a daunting task to evaluate which one fits your project best.

My recommendation is to take a step back and see which solution best fits the problem you are working within. Re-evaluate your needs and objectively ask yourself:

• What business or logic problem am I really trying to solve?
• How large is this data going to scale within a year? Are we talking about megabytes or petabytes?
• How fast does the data need to be retrieved?
• Do I really need to perform a bunch of ad-hoc queries? Or am I just looking up values based on their primary key?
• Which solution is easiest to deal with? Which makes the most sense to me?
• Do I need relational data? Do I need hierarchical data? Do I even care?

Once you build a matrix comparing each solution you will find some implementations quickly sink to the bottom and others become very tempting choices. Once you have determined a top list of possibilities, it is best to fire up a data store and write a few quick proof-of-concept test applications. A convenient way to do this is to login to your BlueLock vCloud Express account, spin up several virtual machines and load up an array of Linux boxes to test each solution out. Measure how easily the product can be installed and test how easily it can be scaled to multiple servers. Do some performance testing against sample applications on your own fenced network and watch your local resource utilization.

Very soon after you use your vCloud Express account to test the top candidates you should be able to feel one or two "fit" in a much more natural way than other solutions. For example, Zookeeper may be the natural fit for someone wanting to house a slew of centralized configuration data. At this point you can take the next step and test this alongside your web applications and judge more accurately the level of effort to get things running.

If at the end of this arduous process you still can't decide between a couple of top candidates do what I always do: pick the project with the best mascot. You simply can't go wrong.

Don't forget - once you select a data store implementation you can have your own scalable, elastic cloud to grow into. BlueLock can not only help you horizontally scale your data tier, BlueLock can also help design server layouts that best fit the sometimes eclectic world of non-relational databases. Whether it be heaps of disk or mountains of RAM to remain resident within, the BlueLock Enterprise Cloud can help your cabal of data power the next big thing.

Looking to quickly get your application into the cloud? Want to build it on a cloud computing infrastructure powered by VMware?

vCloud Express allows you to quickly, easily, and inexpensively deploy your application to a VMware-based public cloud. In fact, right now it's free and you can get started on vCloud Express at the BlueLock website in a matter of minutes.

In this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, Jake Robinson and I discuss the architecture of the vCloud Express platform and how you can spin up your own virtual servers -- in an instant! If you're a developer, researcher, software tester, or just a technology and cloud computing fanatic; this video is for you.

Be sure to comment below and ask any questions you might have, so we can try to answer them for you in next week's Whiteboard video. 

In this series of posts (see Part 1 of the series), I'm looking at moving applications to the cloud and the scalability concerns around that. 

The interesting part is that these problems aren’t unique to cloud computing at all.  On one end of the spectrum, the promise of cloud computing and its expansive computing capacities has led customers to believe that simply moving their application to the cloud is going to solve all of these problems.  On the other end, clients who have very important applications running on-premise are concerned that when they move their applications to the cloud they’ll have to share all that wonderful computational goodness with hundreds or thousands of other clients and their applications’ performance will suffer.  Regardless of which perspective you may be coming from, there are two things to focus on when looking at moving to the cloud.

The first is raw computing capacity.  At BlueLock, we’ve chosen to build our cloud computing platform on VMware virtualization technologies.  One of the benefits of virtualizing applications on VMware is that multiple workloads (running within virtual machines) can be configured to run on very high-end server hardware and storage architectures – perhaps mutli-socket, multi-core server hardware with 32GB or 64GB of RAM and high-performance SAN(s).  Those physical hosts can then be combined into clusters and that computing capacity can be even further aggregated.   It’s important to understand how that computing capacity is assigned to your application(s).

Is infrastructure being “over provisioned”?  Since it’s possible to abstract the underlying hardware from the workload running within a VM it’s also very easy to do things like allocate more memory or compute power to the VM than is actually available on the underlying physical hardware. 

Can computing power be scaled (up and down) if needed?  As the business grows, the demand on application performance may grow with it?  It should be easy to assign and re-assign things like CPU and RAM resources.

How high can the underlying hardware platform scale?  Different IaaS and cloud computing models are based on different technologies – VPS (Virtual Private Servers), dedicated physical hardware and virtualization platforms like VMware all work differently, for example.  How much CPU and RAM in total (usually different based on the underlying model being used) can be assigned to the application(s) has an impact on the decisions you make about scaling.

Within the BlueLock IaaS Cloud, compute clusters are carefully divided into building blocks called “cores” and these cores are assigned to customers – never assigning more “cores” to a computer cluster than are actually available.  This goes hand-in-hand with dedicated versus shared computing models – just throwing everyone in the computer pool without regard to expected performance isn’t a good idea.  It’s important to ensure that the capacity to application(s) is both dedicated and somewhat dynamic.  At BlueLock, once one or more of these “cores” is assigned to a client they are combined together into a resource pool.  This pool of CPU and RAM can then be divided among one or more virtual machines, assigning priority to different workloads if necessary and providing the ability (if needed) change how much of the resource pool each VM is allowed to consume.  Behind the scenes, cool features of VMware’s virtualization platform like VMware DRS move VMs around from one physical host in the cluster to another without taking VMs offline.  This ensures that a particular physical host is never over provisioned and that, if needed, the amount of CPU and RAM assigned to a particular VM is always available to it.

This model of cores and dedicated resource pools, along with the abstraction of physical hardware from the resources assigned to a virtual machine, allows clients to provision (and pay for) only what they need.  As their needs change, additional cores can be added to grow resource pools and add to their application’s overall computing capacity.

In the next post, I'll look at the second item to focus on - application architecture.

In this series of posts (see Part I and Part II), I'm looking at moving applications to the cloud and the scalability concerns around that.  The interesting thing to notice is that these problems aren’t unique to cloud computing at all.  

On one end of the spectrum, the promise of cloud computing and its expansive computing capacities has led customers to believe that simply moving their application to the cloud is going to solve all of these problems.  On the other end, clients who have very important applications running on-premise are concerned that when they move their applications to the cloud they’ll have to share all that wonderful computational goodness with hundreds or thousands of other clients and their applications’ performance will suffer.  Regardless of which perspective you may be coming from, there are two things to focus on when looking at moving to the cloud.  

In the last post, I looked at the first issue - raw computing capacity.  A second thing to consider is the application architecture itself.  As Mr. Golden highlighted in the CIO.com article, one could even argue that this is more important than the scalability of the underlying cloud computing platform.  The reason is that there is always a limit to the hardware (virtual or physical) that can be thrown at an application and a lot of applications aren’t even designed from the beginning to scale in this manner.  With VMware a maximum of either 4 or 8 vCPUs (virtual CPUs) can be assigned to a VM depending on the version of ESX being used.  There are even good reasons why arbitrarily assigning the max number of vCPUs to a VM isn’t the best course of action.  

More importantly, if the application (and underlying OS) wasn’t built to support SMP and multi-threading, adding vCPUs will have no effect whatsoever.  If scalability is a concern, ensure that all of the applications components can take advantage of a large number of CPUs and can address > 4GB of RAM.  This is known as a “scale-up” model.

In highly scalable application deployments, though, a “scale-out” model is usually more appropriate.  Applications that are designed to spread load across two or more hosts allow you to add compute capacity simply by adding additional servers.  On the back-end, adding additional database servers and using horizontal scaling relational database tricks like database shards allow you to remedy DB bottlenecks without implementing huge SMP systems to accommodate query load.  The added benefit of this “scale-out” approach is that you get higher availability of the application for free.  You can take one application server offline for maintenance while not affecting the other servers in the application farm.  In addition, if one application instance experiences a crash other users on other instances of the application continue to function normally.

In the on-premise, physical server world both the “scale-up” and “scale-out” approaches I’ve discussed was usually very costly.  4-way or 8-way servers with gobs and gobs of RAM are an expensive way to grow vertically and add performance and though smaller systems used as part of a horizontal scaling approach are less expensive initially, they add a whole new level of complexity and expense in terms of ongoing maintenance.   What’s more, during non-peak times all this compute infrastructure sat largely un(der)-utilized. 

What is exciting about cloud computing IaaS – especially the 100% virtualized IaaS which BlueLock has built – is that this computing model is perfect for these kinds of scalability needs.  For scale-up applications, clients can start small and grow into things.  For scale-out applications, new VMs (running additional instances of the application) can be added and managed much more easily than they can in the on-premise world.

For more info on BlueLock or scaling your application in the cloud, contact us.

BlueLock and LOGiQ3, a BPO service provider to life insurance and reinsurance companies, have been working together for a couple years now.  When LOGiQ3 came to BlueLock, they were looking for a secure, compliant and scalable cloud hosting solution.  The company had an aggressive go-to-market strategy and they had limited time to build and implement their IT infrastructure, let alone ensure it was compliance and bullet-proof. They didn't want to spend the capital on the equipment, labor and expertise needed to get to where the were going, so they chose to outsource their IT infrastructure needs.  

Why did the cloud (specifically BlueLock) make sense for LOGiQ3?

• No upfront costs or lengthy contracts
• The BlueLock Cloud is based on VMware virtualization technology
• BlueLock is well-equipped to handle their enterprise-level production needs
• The security is solid
• The data center is SAS 70 Type II
• 99.99% uptime guarantee
• Geographically diverse data centers for redundancy and disaster recovery needs

To learn more about the solution BlueLock put in place for LOGiQ3 download the case study.

Jake and I are back with another Whiteboard Wednesday lesson in virtualization. After our last video on virtualizing with VMware Player and the VMware appliance marketplace, we had some inquiries about how storage is architected into a cloud computing solution. 

So, in this video, you'll learn about storage area network and how it can be implemented to create a more redundant, virtualized environment.

I been having some good discussions with a few people on twitter about getting started with cloud computing and virtualizing servers with VMware. There seems to be a lot of curiousity about how to implement your own virtual server and get in the cloud, so I got with Jake Robinson (one of BlueLock's implementation specialists) and we did a short whiteboarding session with the flipcam.

In this short clip, Jake and I discuss the basics of virtualization as well as some of the first steps for those who want to virtualize their own server. We talk about some of the industry's most popular tools, like VMware Player and the VMware Appliance Marketplace. Enjoy!


Let us know what you think. Is the video helpful? What other things would you be interested in learning in a whiteboarding session?

See you next time.

Over the past two years, BlueLock and Apparatus have built a strong and dynamic partnership with their complimentary virtualization and data center expertise.  By joining forces, the teams are able to work together to wrap services around BlueLock's cloud hosting solutions to better serve clients.

Due to our great success together, VMware asked BlueLock (a VMware Hosting Provider) and Apparatus, to take the stage during the keynote session at this year's VMware Partner Exchange to share our story in front of 2500 conference attendees. The VMware Partner Exchange is an annual partner conference dedicated to educating and enabling partners for success with VMware. 

Brian Wolff, VP of Sales at BlueLock and Casey Watson, Chief Evangelist at Apparatus went on stage and showed the virtualization community at the Las Vegas conference what Indiana's technology Community is all about - innovation, trust and execution.  That's right, Indianapolis is a virtualization hot-bed.