Thursday notes

Sorry the last few notes have been so dry.  I wanted to get the notes out there as quickly as possible.  Thursday morning I went to 3 sessions in a row on moving from virtualization to private clouds.  The afternoon was spent in the exhibit hall.

The sessions I went to helped me finally really understand the difference between virtualization and a private cloud.  A private cloud is virtualization with good management tools sitting on top of it.  In a lot of ways it's more a change in business practices than in a difference in technology.  The provide cloud provides a catalog of standardized VMs and storage options that can be deployed very quickly.  The business side of this comes in the standardization of the images and the life cycle management of those images.  It's the automatic updating of those images and the agility this provides to the company.  You want a LAMP server, boom, here you go.

Here is the progression from virtualization to private clouds:

1. Server virtualization and consolidation
2. Infrastructure optimization -- both storage and network
3. Management and automation
4. IT as a service ==> private cloud

There are a lot of tools out there from many different vendors.  They are getting better over time.  The tools are also becoming cross-platform, meaning that one tool can be used to manage private clouds and public clouds from multiple vendors.  Many of these tools deal with the concept of a Service Catalog.  This is basically a menu of VMs, storage and networking choices.  They are standardized for fast deployment and easier management.  As part of the life-cycle management a good CMDB tool is needed.  This will help reduce VM sprawl.  

There was some discussion of the latest version of VMware and some of the tools that are available with it.  This version has some significant improvements in iSCSI performance.  It was also stated that moving to using the VMware backup client instead of individual backup clients on each VM can make a huge difference in backups.  If you are backing up the entire VMFS volume at once, the backup software can do a lot more de-duping.

Applications need to become cloud aware.  How many apps have IP address built into them or their configuration files.  What does F&M need to do to make this happen.  Zimbra is a terrible example of this.

It was suggested that we should put a price tag on the services we provide, even if we don't actually collect money.  It will help our clients realize the cost of what they are asking for.