Cloud Computing

You are currently browsing the archive for the Cloud Computing category.

BMC to acquire ProactiveNet

May 29, 2007 in Monitoring by admin | No comments

Today, BMC Announced the acquisition of ProactiveNet :

ProactiveNet provides a very pragmatic approach to root cause analysis by guiding the user along the process, reducing the knowledge required to diagnose events or alarms raised by various systems.

ProactiveNet’s patented Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is unique in its approach to data and event correlation. In the heart of this approach is the automatically learned and continuously refined understanding of what is normal and abnormal in the environment. ProactiveNet “learns” the normal operating behavior of an environment and creates dynamic “intelligent” baselines of the normal operating mode. The product then captures and correlates baseline abnormalities and dispersed data points that occur outside of that baseline.

On top of that, the integration of this product with BMC Service impact Manager, the Atrium CMDB, as well as other BMC products, is opening a wide range of exciting capabilities.

Opsware patent challenged

February 13, 2007 in Datacenter Automation by admin | No comments

Yesterday, the Public Patent Foundation announced that they are challenging patent # 7,124,289 issued to Opsware in 2006:

The challenged Opsware patent claims methods for automatically configuring or installing software on a plurality of computing devices having different respective sets of software and/or configurations of operating parameters.

In November 2006, Opsware announced :

The patent — number 7,124,289 — covers the cornerstone of Opsware’s technology, the ability to automate the management of servers and network devices across a data center through model-based control. This innovation allows models of granular configuration information about servers or networks to be stored as records in a database and, as changes are made to any aspect of a systems configuration model, to push those changes to any relevant servers or network devices. This technique supports automation for even extremely large and global datacenters, and it provides a fast, efficient and cost-saving approach to ensuring consistency and compliance.

It’s not clear why this patent is challenged now. The patent was filed on October 31st 2000, but the argument made by pubpat is that various open source project existed before the filling date.

Parallels acquired by SWsoft

January 22, 2007 in MacOS, Virtualization by jc | No comments

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.

Open Source Virtualization solution for OSX

January 15, 2007 in Virtualization by jc | No comments

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 :

vbox_osx_alpha

 

Service Containers in Sun Grid Engine

January 8, 2007 in Datacenter Automation by admin | No comments

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 ;-)

Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring survey results

January 5, 2007 in Monitoring by admin | No comments

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.

open source configuration automation

January 3, 2007 in Configuration Management by admin | No comments

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.

Compuware acquire Proxima Technology

January 3, 2007 in ITIL, Monitoring by admin | No comments

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.

OneCMDB : Open Source CMDB

January 2, 2007 in Configuration Management, ITIL by jc | No comments

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.

VMWare for Mac Beta has opened

December 22, 2006 in MacOS, Virtualization by jc | No comments

Today, the VMWare Fusion Beta program opened :

The new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion, allows Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. It is built on VMware’s rock-solid and advanced desktop virtualization platform that is used by over four million users today.

I’ve tried to start a windows 2003 VM Image that was created on a PC, without any problem.

fusion

« Older entries § Newer entries »