The Virtual Data Center

I’ve hinted in the past on my ultimate application virtualization scenario – where I want the market to be for deploying and supporting remote applications for clients in the future. I’m still working on that giant whiteboard architecture map in my basement on what AppVirt looks like from the DC computing side, but today I want to write about the client side of that architecture. And while brevity has eluded me in all parts of my lingual life recently, I’m going to try to be succinct here (expect failure).

I attended the first of a four-part series on Cloud Computing last night held by the WTIA, which included an excellent presentation by Aaron Kimball from Cloudera on the basics of the cloud from the data point of view. Having retired the engineer title for marketing a few years ago, it always makes me happy to see someone who spends their career designing complex systems stand up and give an intro presentation that also includes the business benefit. So often engineers address the How rather than the What and the Why, and Aaron did an excellent job with the latter.

His presentation, along with others last night, got me thinking about what application virtualization in the cloud would look like to the client (and I’m not talking about GMail here).  Let’s look at a real example:

I bought a Mac a few months ago primarily to run Lightroom, so I spec’d out the Mac to go high-end because it would be running a very beefy photo application (along with Photoshop in the future I’m sure). The machine also had to run VMware Fusion in parallel (no pun intended; sorry to my Parallel friends) - I have a photo stitching application that’s currently Windows-only. Standard operation keeps me stable at 75% RAM and 40% CPU on average.

But what if I didn’t need to buy local computing resources and everything was processed remotely? Let’s jump ahead 10 years (a big leap, I know) and look at how this could be different if client apps were in the cloud.

I buy a local processing machine that’s drastically stripped down from my current Mac. I boot this machine to a web browser, where I head over to Adobe and say “This is Alan; I need to run Lightroom.” Adobe says “No problem. Let me push down the secure Lightroom App Shell. Ok, now you’re ready. Here’s a list of your albums pulled from Amazon S3.” I say “I need to process the latest batch of Mt. Baker HDR images.”  HDR images take a substantial amount of computing power to process, so Adobe comes back and says “No problem. I’m going to need 2gig RAM and a dedicated CPU core for this, but your monthly subscription only covers 1gig and .5 core. I’ll charge you $0.021/minute if you’d like to burst.”  I say “Great, let’s do it.”

Amazon then pulls its own resources from AWS and start distributing my HDR processing over thousands of machines/cores/RAM, all controlled from my local Lightroom App Shell. To me it’s displayed as one 8ghz core (remember, 10 years from now:) ), but in practice that value is an aggregate of distributed resources pooled from thousands of machines.I process my HDRs, they’re stored back in my Lightroom library which is managed by Adobe.com, I take my tiny laptop over to the client’s office, rinse, repeat.

But what if I don’t want the processing done exclusively in the cloud? I mean after all the above scenario is very similar to what I can do today with a web browser. What if instead my local computing platform is moderately beefy and I process everything locally. But as my machine starts to bog down from stitching together HDR panoramas it uses the Lightroom App Shell to request raw computing resources from AWS, and I become part of the distributed cluster? I scale and process background tasks remotely and only use my local resources for rendering the images to my display. My machine is part of the cluster and the line between local and remote processing becomes blurred. That’s some cool client-based application virtualization. The application running state is spread across elastic resources, of which my local resources are a part of.

True application virtualization will be a huge undertaking and this is simply one part and one idea. But why not think big? Go for the gusto I say. Oh, and there’s more here, but I’ve long since crossed the brevity line. Maybe more later.

Wow, has it really been almost a month since my last post? Goodness…first and foremost, I should apologize. I have no excuse for the lag beyond being heads-down working and contemplating the virtual universe. No vacations. No burning the midnight oil for weeks at a time. Just working. Although I do love my job, so maybe I can just default to “Time flies when you’re having fun” and realize that I’m getting older and everything sweeps by faster now.

And during my silence, I’ve also been fighting with Vista issues across the board. Not all Vista’s fault, but still all Vista related. However, even though I may fault Vista for their heavy reliance on the GUI, my biggest problem these days is with VMware Fusion on the Mac (Why do these virtual platform vendors frustrate me so? Am I alone?). The thing that gets me is that I’m the target market for these products. The marketing and product is geared towards me, and yet they still can’t deliver a product for the professional IT administrator.

The first thing I did with the MacBook after it was up and configured was install Vista via Boot Camp, which kicked ass! The speed was amazing, and so far, everything has been running very smoothly (although I haven’t tested BitLocker yet, which is my next big endeavor and a requirement for me). The only downside is the dual-booting. My goal is to eventually go 100% MacBook, but my work environment has to stay MS focused. So dual-booting is an option, but not an optimal. Enter VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta, which can run a Vista Boot Camp partition in a VM environment. Good idea: I can keep my OS’ isolated but still access my work environment from any running state. If I’m working all day, Boot Camp; if I happen to be in Leopard but need to grab something from my work environment, no problem. But it just doesn’t work that way.

For one, Fusion doesn’t support 3D acceleration. Now this may seem trivial for the non-gaming work environment, but unfortunately Vista is so dependent on graphics for everything, having a less-than-stellar graphics driver in Fusion takes the entire VM down to a crawl, either when running in full mode or with Unity. Office 2007 applications take in the double-digits-to-minutes timeframe to launch. Using the Vista Performance Meter, all other hardware is on-par with the screaming Boot Camp install, so the video driver is responsible for slowing everything down. Makes it unusable. VMware’s marketing for Fusion 2.0 wants you to believe that you can run 3D games on multiple monitors, but not with Vista, only XP. And if I dual-boot into Boot Camp, I have to manually re-run the performance meter because it keeps the VMware driver score as the baseline, which takes my Boot Camp install down from a 5.2 system performance level to a 1.0. Re-running fixes that when the perf monitor loads the Boot Camp video driver, but it’s a manual process I have to do every time I dual-boot. Which leads me to…

And then the licensing issue, which to me is a huge one. Boot your Vista install as a VM and then boot it natively with Boot Camp and your install becomes unlicensed. Microsoft thinks you’re trying to steal money from their food fund, dogs start living with cats, the world is in chaos. You can re-enter your license key and it re-registers fine, but that takes time and requires you to keep a copy of your key handy just in case you need to hit Boot Camp for any reason (ie a presentation). This is supposed to be fixed by Beta 2 or RC1 so we’ll see.

So here I am, unable to reach my vision of running one platform for all my needs. Now I’ve talked here before about how I just want to run one physical machine and virtualize everything else, mainly my apps. I don’t want to have to choose between multiple OS’s, or Office 2007 running in a VM over Office 2008 on Leopard. I just want to boot then run. But all the local virtual environments I’ve tested so far have failed me. We’re just not there yet. VDI doesn’t help me here either b/c I can’t rely on an upstream connection. I want complete cross-platform virtualization locally. Is that so wrong?

So maybe that’s why I haven’t posted in so long…the virtual market is failing me and I don’t want to face reality. And now I’m depressed and need a minute. I’m going to mount my virtual storage NAS over my wireless VLAN and play Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song in hopes that someone else’s pain will make me feel better…

Two Disclaimers:

1. This is nothing more than an “I’m catching up with a ton of stuff after two weeks off the grid and I’m tired” rant, so you’ve been warned.
2. I’m not in the habit of slamming things. Everything has a purpose somewhere. More specifically stated, one of my rules with technology is “Don’t blame the technology because of the implementation.” This is not a slam, just a frustrated observation.

I truly do believe that Parallels is onto something with their technology. Virtual containers are going to fill the void between full OS virtualization and straight application virtualization (app hypervisors, streaming apps, SaaS, etc). OS virtualization is usually overkill (although still good for what it does when it’s absolutely needed; remember, I don’t blame the technology… ;). Having a stripped down portable virtual kernel environment is going to be critical for applications that can’t run virtual-aware. Sure, initiatives like Oslo are going to great for excavate and rebuild applications, but we all know that those aren’t viable alternatives for most apps (goodness knows that’s true in the security market, which is why we have WAFs today). So containers (or kernel virtualization as I usually refer to them) are a good alternative. And Parallels, with their acquisition of Virtuozzo, are primed to lead that front.

However (and it’s a big however), they need to get their marketing and publicity ducks in a row. To me, a company’s website is the de facto place for technical information about their solutions. Let’s face it: implementing virtualization is a technical task, not a marketing task. When I want to find out how Parallels has implemented kernel virtualization with Virtuozzo, I expect to find that information on their site. When I want to know, in under 3 minutes, why I should choose Virtuozzo over ESX or Hyper-V, I need to be able to read it on my own. I’m a big boy, I can make my own decisions; I don’t need someone from the company to call me and explain it.

So what am I getting at (I’ve almost forgotten in my spun-up rant state)? Parallels has, IMO, mislead me twice now on what their technology does (or rather what their technology doesn’t do). Both of these events have stopped my testing dead in its tracks:

1. Virtuozzo Containers only runs on very specific Linux distros and Windows platforms. You may be thinking “hey, that’s no big deal,” and I would mostly agree with you. But they don’t mention that on their site. No kidding, I had to call them to get a list of which distros would work. To boot (no pun intended), they do a terrible job of separating technologies based on host platforms. I run a data center, I want to know what software will run on which host platforms immediately. I don’t have time to download, install, and try only to find out I have to repeat that process because they don’t document their running environment. Just tell me up front so I don’t waste my time. If you have to run on Win2003 because you own the kernel and you can’t run on Vista with 2003 support enabled for the binaries, or you don’t like the I/O kernel patch I installed in my RHEL farm, then just tell me.
2. Parallels Server Beta 4 won’t run Leopard virtually on a Win platform but will on a Mac. Ok, again, I’m sure there are good technical reasons for this. But for the love of all things holy, please don’t send me an email that generically says “now runs Leopard on Leopard!” and a link to download a Windows binary without an explicit explanation.

I can find a podcast on their site on how to protect my business in 3 clicks. Why can’t I find a quick list of what they do and what they don’t do, what they support and what they don’t support? What are they trying to hide? Sure, if I’m a Service Provider CIO and I tell my IT staff that I just head about this Parallels thing and want to find out if it will work for our customers, great. But I’m not. Like the IT staff, I dig through the weeds to test this technology, and after today, I think I’m done with Parallels. Fool me once, you’re fault; fool me twice…

Nothing gets me more frustrated than bad marketing; it’s not rocket science. They’re already fighting a huge uphill battle. Why do they sink to these levels?

And please remember: this is just one person’s tired and frustrated opinion. It’s entirely possible that in my excitement to test these new technologies that I glossed over some disclaimer text about platforms, but I know that Hyper-V requires Intel VT-x enabled to run, and that ESX won’t run on laptop SATA drives. How do I know? Because the vendors clearly state it in their marketing and on their websites. So when I build an ESX box, I make the correct choices from the get-go. Don’t make me jump through hoops and waste time to test your software; tell me how you work out of the gate. Otherwise I get frustrated and write a blog rant about it, although I still know how to be up front with disclaimers.

Tomorrow: My thoughts on the MMS keynote announcements.

I know, it’s been quiet around here lately. What can I say? Pitching the VDC message and the future of the data center has kept me very active lately (it’s a great time to be focusing on what I focus on). Now if people would just listening to me when I rant and rave about the problems with silo’ing virtualization technologies in the data center and the problems with software switches today, I’d be such a happy person.

Speaking of happy, the MacBook Pro arrived a few days ago. Man, does Apple know how to package or what? I’ve always wanted to live in a retro-future house; you know, like the one that you used to ride through in Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center at DisneyWorld in the 80’s (long before the 90’s remodel that included the futuristic Internet). Every childhood summer included a trip to Disney, and as a budding technologist, Epcot’s vision of the future was always my destination of choice. Forget Magic Kingdom; I wanted to play in the Imagination science lab and eat exotic Japanese food. Some 70’s children grew up obsessed with Star Wars, I grew up obsessed with the lifestyle of the future.

So my first thought when unpacking the MacBook Pro was something like “It’s silver, it’s white, and it glows when I turn it on!” You guessed it, they had me at “Designed in California.” Now this is old news for the millions of people who already have a MacBook, but coming from the world of Linux, Dell, and Vista (btw I love Vista as a powerhouse production Operating System), just opening the box instantly took me back to the retro-future, and I immediately ran upstairs and looked for my ultra-sonic dishwasher. But alas, it’s only 2008 and we’re still using water and chemicals to clean our dishes.

And before we even talk about the tech details, I have to take my hat off to Apple for combining lifestyle with technology, something sorely missing from other technology companies. We all have computers, we all have HDTVs and 6.1 surround systems, and yet there is so little work in the personal technology sector (IMO) on form, it’s all function with very little thought about How it’s used vs. What it does (more on that here).

As I write this, the MacBook Pro is sitting across from me on a chrome and glass table in my very modern-looking office, lid closed, with the pulsating “I’m sleeping” white light phasing in and out on the front, sitting immediately next to a replica antique soapstone and slate Chinese chess set. I’m struck by the beauty and juxtaposition of each of these tools, each centuries apart, yet both do exactly what they’re designed to do and both look amazing.

And beyond looks, the damn thing actually works like a champ. But no time to write about that now, maybe later. Right now, I have to go do that cool magic trick where you can lower your hands above the MacBook speakers and magically turn on the keyboard light…