Parallels acquired by SWsoft
According to this article, Parallels was acquired 3 years ago by SWsoft:
The tectonics of virtualization are shifting. It turns out that Parallels is not such a little company after all. About three years ago it was quietly purchased by an enterprise-focused virtualization company called SWsoft, a fact that has never been publicly disclosed until now.
SWsoft is providing Plesk, HSPcomplete, PEM and Virtuozzo, which seems to be the only virtualization related technology. It will be interesting to see if SWsoft applies its expertise in Self Service, Accounting and Billing to the VM Management space.
Technorati Tags: mac, virtualization
Open Source Virtualization solution for OSX
Today, VirtualBox announced the release of their product in the open source, using the GPL:
Jan 15, 2007. InnoTek today released VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE), marking an important milestone in the development of PC virtualization software. VirtualBox OSE is the first professional PC virtualization solution released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). With VirtualBox, customers get the most versatile virtualization product on the market, both for enterprise and individual use. VirtualBox' open source license allows everyone to contribute to the development of the product and customize it to suit individual needs. Backed by Europe's largest team of virtualization experts, VirtualBox continues to be developed and supported.
Going through the screenshots, you can see that they have an alpha version of VirtualBox for OSX :
Technorati Tags: mac, virtualization
Service Containers in Sun Grid Engine
During SuperComputing 2006, Sun announced the open source release of project Hedeby.
This project introduce the concept of service container:
A Service Container is a container for a service, functionality or application which can act with a variable amount of Resources. The Service Container acts as the bridge between the Service and the Resource Provider, relaying Service needs to the Resource Provider and commands from the Resource Provider to the Service. The Service Container is responsible for tracking the state and the resource needs of the Service.
There is a one to one relationship between a Service Container and a Service. The Service Container handles the life-cycle management of the Service and provides an access point for communications from the Resource Provider.
This concept provides a nice way to abstract middleware applications which are providing some level of distributed resource management, like Grid Engine, but also other "new application".
Well done Grid Engine team (you have to work on those code names though ;-)
Technorati Tags: datacenter management, grid, service containers
Killer app for Palm : Google Map
I have been using my treo 650 for a couple of years now, and I must say that the early days were really bumpy. Lots of reset, freeze, and so on. However, recently, it has been really reliable (after exchanging it 3 times). Few months ago, Google released a Palm version of google map for mobiles. I use it daily since then. I get the traffic every morning on my way to work, and it has proven very reliable.
In this picture, you can see for example a congestion on the southbound 101, around San Bruno.
Or, I use it to find a restaurant or other business, I even get their phone number, and can call them from the same screen.
And you can even get turn by turn directions
If only it could tell me where I am right now ...
Anyway, it really justifies the cost of the unlimited internet connection I have to pay Cingular every month.
Technorati Tags: palm, google map, treo
Hat off to Bryce, the king of concept maps
If you want to see an excellent way to represent complex concepts graphically, look at the work of Bryce on flickr .This diagram represent, after heavy Gobbledy Gook, the concepts introduced during a project I was leading. I must say that this work really helped communicate all the different objects and concepts.
You can read here Bryce's version of Flickr user model, even better.
I've really appreciated working with you Bryce.
Technorati Tags: concept map
Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring survey results
Zenoss published the LISA 06 Survey Results on Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring:
The survey results included responses from over 100 LISA attendees both on paper surveys and via an electronic survey mechanism. Surveys were offered in the Zenoss exhibition booth, at the LISA Birds of a Feather Session: "Solving IT Management Headaches with Open Source Software ".
My main takeaways of this survey are:
- Most pressing issues faced by administrators are monitoring, configuration, Patching & provisioning.
- 65 % of the respondents plan to use OSS tools in the monitoring space and 36% for configuration.
- the most popular tools are Nagios, MRTG/RRDTool, Snort and Nessus, of which none are for configuration management.
Technorati Tags: configuration management, datacenter management, opensource
open source configuration automation
While looking at some open source projects in the area of configuration management and automation, I stumbled upon several projects and links, which I think might be useful to the community.
Bcfg2, developed in the Argonne National Laboratory. Licensed under 2-clause BSD-style license
Bcfg2 allows you to describe and deploy complex configurations across pools of GNU/Linux and Unix systems, leading to a consistent, reproducible, and verifiable description of your environment. Bcfg2's visualization and reporting tools aid in your day-to-day administrative tasks. Its unique analysis features help you cope with the ever-increasing complexity of your networks.
Cfengine developed by Mark Burgess from the Oslo University College, Norway. Licensed under GPL2
It is used to implement policy-based configuration management on open systems (Unix-like environments), through the interpretation of it's own declarative language.
The program focuses on a few key areas that scripts tend to mishandle. From a single configuration files (or set of files) you specify, using classes, your network configuration; cfengine then parses the file and carries out the instructions, warning you about errors (or fixing them) as it goes.
You can think of cfengine as a very high level language, higher than Perl or shell: a single command can result in many hundreds of operations being performed on multiple hosts. You can also use it as a net-wide front end for 'cron.'
Puppet developed by Luke Kanies, who founded Reductive Labs. Licensed under GPL
Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.
LCFG developed by Paul Anderson from the University of Edinburg. Licensed under GPL.
LCFG is a system for automatically installing and managing the configuration of large numbers of Unix systems. It is particularly suitable for sites with very diverse and rapidly changing configurations.
For a discussion of the merit of each, see this post on The Changelog.
For some more information on the Large Scale System Configuration Workgroup, see the lssconf website.
Or the following article: Automating Network Administration, by Luke A. Kanies.
Technorati Tags: bcfg2, configuration management, datacenter management, opensource, cfengine, puppet
Compuware acquire Proxima Technology
Compuware announced yesterday that it has acquired Proxima Technology.
Proxima is the maker of Proxima Centauri, a Service Level Management tool with interesting capabilities, specially in the way they aggregate key performance indicators into business service metrics.
Proxima has also a unique way to combine Six Sigma methodology and ITIL, to, for example, normalize the events generated by the monitoring of KPIs into Defects Per Millions of Opportunities, rolling them up into service metrics as Sigma numbers.
I don't know how Compuware is going to use this technology, but one issue with the Proxima approach is that the service impact relationships, defining how IT components are contributing to a service, is defined within Centauri, using rules instead of model relationships .
Without a tight integration with a CMDB, SLM/BSM tools are required to duplicate the CMDB items and relationships, sometimes using two different models, providing a weak synchronization.
As a comparison, BMC Service Impact Manager is using the BMC Atrium CMDB as the model repository, adding service impact relationships on top of the exiting items, making sure that there is a tight synchronization between assets and business services. And since Compuware does not have a real CMDB, or a discovery solution (they use the Collation/IBM solution), it's unlikely that they will be able to provide this level of integration.
Technorati Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, ITIL, M&A, SLM
OneCMDB : Open Source CMDB
In September 2006 Lokomo Systems announced the release of an open source CMDB called OneCMDB.
This is a very good start, but I would point to several issues, at first glance:
- The model used seems to be developed in house, without any link to DMTF CIM : Why re-invent a model which already exists elsewhere ?
- The reconciliation of discovered data with existing data seems not existent.
- The security model seems inexistent (or I did not find it): no role based access.
I don't want to be too harsh, but one thing I discovered when I joined BMC is that a CMDB is more than just a persistence store for an object model. It's actually very complex, specifically the reconciliation and federation of various information sources. The CMDB is a virtually centralized repository for information residing in many, many different locations.
Another key ITIL recommendation for the CMDB, is that all modifications of the CMDB should be performed under change management control. Therefore, configuration management and change management are really tied at the hip.
I'll try to play with this open source CMDB and explain in a bit more details the need for reconciliation, and integration with change management in some upcoming posts.
Anyway, thanks to Lokomo for releasing their sources under GPL.
Technorati Tags: CMDB, opensource