Are you ready for Cloud?

Cloud

Are you ready for all that is cloud??  VMware recently released a cloud self-assessment questionnaire that walks you through your organization’s readiness in the following categories (from the site):

  • Strategy – Aligning business needs with IT capability.
  • Process – Streamlining and automating processes to achieve business agility.
  • Architecture – Establishing an enterprise architecture for this new IT infrastructure.
  • Technology – Designing and deploying your technology infrastructure from virtualization to cloud.
  • People and Governance – Creating the roles and  skills necessary to ensure company-wide adoption, and the accountability  framework and policies for stakeholder collaboration.
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@virtualjad
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Why Cloud for Existing Apps?

Cloud, VMware

The value proposition for a “green fields” cloud is reasonably clear — building new environment within vCloud’s framework helps enterprises add all the wonderful things above while streamlining:

  • Security – Integration and auto-provisioning of vShield Edge and multi-tenant security boundaries
  • Governance – Integration with Active Directory at the organizational level for tight security and control
  • Resource Allocations – defining resource allowances through the use of virtual data centers (ex: vDCs)
  • Agility / On-Demand Resources – utilizing vCloud’s allocation models to provide critical resources only as they are needed
  • Cost Transparency – Integration with cloud-aware Chargeback
  • Automation – using vClouds template libraries to rapidly deploy workloads within and across tenant clouds
  • Efficiency – further driving resource utilization using innovative technologies, automation, and governance
  • IT-as-a-Service – offering a highly automated, low-maintenance cloud infrastructure to consumers and allow IT to focus on delivering innovations that drive revenue growth
From a marketing perspective, we all know what cloud is expected to deliver — agility, security, control, etc — as well as the key characteristics of cloud computing — pooling of resources, elasticity, self-service, broad access, and automation.   But what does all this cloud talk mean to existing workloads?  I get that a lot, and most recently from a customer that forced me think about a good response (and not a packaged/salesy one). 
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Managing vCloud Resource Accounts

Cloud, VMware

Using dedicated resource accounts to authenticate server and network services has been a best practice for as long as I’ve been in IT. This guideline adds security, interoperability, and governance to your deployed applications, independent of standard user (or admin) accounts. We understand why it’s good to follow these guidelines but if you’re anything like me, maintaining all the resource accounts, passwords, and the services they run can become a bit challenging over time. Rather than create an account and unique password per service, some admins use the same one for everything – windows/linux services, logins, UI’s, connectors, you name it. Although this adds a bit of convenience, it’s a BAD idea from a security perspective. Here’s the real challenge – keeping track of all those accounts, where they are plugged in, and the password cycle they’re on. This can become quite the headache; especially considering an expired or changed password can result in a significant service outage…another reason to avoid a single service account (i.e. single point of failure).

I recently had a customer run into a very similar problem. This customer has 5 independent vCloud implementations across the enterprise, each environment with a single resource account used for the entire stack.
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Installing vCloud Director 1.x – Prerequisites

Cloud, VMware

There’s a right way and a wrong way to install VMware’s vCloud Director (vCD). Identifying the wrong way is quite simple — it just won’t work. There’s actually a lot more to that — caveats, best practices, redundancy, add-ons — which I will cover in the next post. For now, we’ll focus on what you need before the install.

Installing vCD can be a daunting task if you don’t have all the prerequisites in place prior to rolling out the goods. Below is a quick list of to-do’s and links to the associated resources. The actual install of vCD is the quickest part of this entire process assuming all these pieces are in place. Do this right and the rest will be easy as pie…

VM’s (OS Requirements):

VMware vCenter Server 4.1
OS: Windows 2008 R2 x64

vCenter on a VM is fully supported. There are some caveats to consider, but I’ll cover that in the next post. For starters, make sure the vCenter VM is utilizing a standard vSwitch vs. a dvSwitch for net connectivity. This can apply to the majority of your management (core) VMs.

vSphere 4.1
OS: ESXi 4.1 U1

Licensing at the vSphere Enterprise Plus level isn’t absolutely required, but highly recommended to enable the use of several vCD capabilities that otherwise would be unavailable (vCD-NI, I/O Control, etc).…

0 to Cloud in 6 Posts, Part 5: Delivering ITaaS with vCloud Director

Architecture, Cloud

Post 5 of 6: Delivering IT as a Service with vCloud Director

Building your cloud infrastructure is only half the battle. Let’s just assume the notion of ‘cloud’ is now defined and well aligned with your business requirements, infrastructure is in place, best practices followed, and you’re ready to power this sucker up. Then what? The presence of the hypervisor has been assumed throughout this series — much is gained with vSphere adding that prerequisite abstraction of bare-metal resources. But virtualization is only half the battle when the end goal is delivering a cloud — or IT as a Service (ITaaS). To get there, you’ll need to take a moment to understand what exactly you’re trying to accomplish. What does cloud mean to your organization in the first place? Are you looking to streamline your IT infrastructure internally (i.e. Private Cloud) or perhaps deliver next-generation IT services externally (Public Cloud)…or both (Hybrid)? No matter your flavor of cloud, one thing holds true — you will be successful only if you employ the right enablement tools and technologies. You should also step back and take a moment to understand the concepts. I made a decision to embrace these concepts and technologies a little more than a year ago.
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0 to Cloud in 6 Posts, Part 4: xBlock- Designing a Repeatable Architecture

Architecture, Cloud

Post 4 of 6: xBlock- Designing a Repeatable Architecture

I have lost count of how many pre-integrated infrastructure offerings are now available through the various software, network, storage, and compute partnerships out there – all competing for their stake as your cloud’s foundation (for those who still think ‘the cloud’ is a hardware offering with some antiquated management slapped on top, please reexamine the definition of cloud). A well-designed infrastructure is a great (and required) start, but software is where the magic happens…but I digress. Whether it’s a vBlock (EMC, Cisco, VMware), FlexPod (NetApp, Cisco VMware), Dell’s vStart, or any of the dozens of combinations out there worth mentioning, one thing holds true…all (well, most) are examples of what a robust reference architecture can do for your cloud. Sure each offering will add it’s special sauce as a value proposition – proven, pre-engineered, specialized, best-of-breed, etc. – but, more importantly, these solutions provide the core components for your cloud’s infrastructure – Storage, Compute, Network, and the glorious Hypervisor – and use the Lego approach for scaling the infrastructure out as needed.
Scale Happens.  Cloud infrastructures are meant to be elastic, agile, and designed to scale beyond your wildest imagination. [insert joke about the company that markets the “cloud in a box”]. 
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