The Virtual Data Center

For some strange reason I choose to work even when I’m not working and have what some could call two jobs (well, one real job and another job that supports itself, anyway). My day job is what you see here: helping to change the way people think about and implement virtualization in their data center. My moonlit weekend job that doesn’t quite pay any bills (yet) is professional photographer. To date, these two worlds haven’t had any relation or overlap at all (although I did take the main picture you see in the blog header, which is a shot of freshly installed data center racks, so maybe that counts). Last night, however, my separate professional lives collided in a storm I hadn’t witnessed before, and I felt rouge waves on both sides.

As has been widely reported, Amazon’s S3 service was down for a good while on Sunday, July 20th. I don’t personally or directly use their service (although I do know of individuals who are looking into it as a safe and secure backup system), however I do use SmugMug as my back-end photo “store” and processing lab for the pro photog business and (as I learned on Monday) SmugMug uses S3 for all of my valuable and (hopefully someday) bill-paying photography. I have my own local backup systems that I manage (more on that some other time) and I don’t rely on SmugMug as my content storage house, but I do rely on them to make my photography available for purchase (always available, always fast, and always securely). But I don’t want to know what they use in their data center or how they manage and store my content; I only want to know that my content is safe and available. And all was good in the fields until Sunday evening when S3 went down, and took SmugMug (and all of the pro photographers they support) down with it (details available here).

So on Monday morning I began looking into the S3 outage for the Day Job and just happened to see that my Night Job was impacted by the outage, and that got my head all spinning. It got me spinning primarily because this is the 2nd outage that S3 has suffered in the past few months, and that’s big business for a lot of people beyond SmugMug. For most normal enterprise IT shops that kept their storage in-house, a critical outage and unavailability of dynamic data twice in such a short amount of time would cause the higher-ups to start asking questions about what, why, who, and how to make sure this never happens again. I imagine those types of questions are happening for large-scale S3 customers, like SmugMug, all around the globe.

The other reason I got so spun up was the response, or lack-there-of, from Amazon. As far as I can tell, the first reports came into their public forum from customers in droves reporting a “Service Unavailable” error message. Shouldn’t Amazon have known before the customers, and shouldn’t they have done a better job (beyond posting a green/yellow/red dot on a service page) notifying all their customers? Does SmugMug really want to find out about a storage outage when they try to retrieve my galleries for perspective customer, or would they prefer to know before hand so they don’t let their app spin indefinitely? Or here’s a novel idea: Perhaps Amazon should architect their storage service in an HA/DR manner so that a customer never sees a “Service Unavailable” message, or more importantly so that their service never goes down beyond a simple blip while service requests are redirected. Highly available data centers ain’t rocket science, and since Amazon is building VDCs like nobody’s business, perhaps they should already know this…

I don’t want to be too short or critical here, but f anything, Amazon is blazing a trail in the Clouds on how not to build a production-class cloud service. The core requirement for offering a cloud service has go to be availability above everything else. Otherwise there’s no reason for a customer to trust the service with their mission critical data. My Night Job customer persona is hoping that SmugMug is really sticking it to Amazon for taking them down (and at the same time making sure all their own eggs don’t fall off the tree when the S3 nest crashes again).

I think I’m going to write Amazon’s regular storefront customer service and ask for a credit in their MP3 download store to compensate for all the money I lost by not being able to sell my photographs while S3 was down. Think they’ll go for it?

I just read an interesting post by Craig over at Cloud Security about Second Life avatars that can jump from one “grid” to another, and then watched Michael Thumann’s discussion on hacking the SL software and platform (which to me is somewhat different that using the built-in tools to escape the bounds of confined grids, but I’m willing to be wrong on that). Now I know virtually nothing about the architecture in Second Life, and I’d like to keep it that way. I have something in my core that fundamentally disagrees with Second Life so I stay away. However, voyeuristically it is interesting to read about people who don’t agree with my opinions and do play around with SL. Everyone has a hobby.

One of the interesting items from Craig’s post is the implied association he makes between SL and the cloud, linking the security of virtual worlds to cloud security. Maybe he didn’t mean to make this association (although the post is called “Collaboration in the Cloud,” so I have to assume) but I’d have to disagree with this association for a number of reasons, primarily the use of the term cloud in relation to anything consumer driven. I know, I’m a stickler for using the right word to describe the right thing; what can I say? Someone sitting down and logging into Second Life isn’t logging into the cloud, they’re logging into a MMOG to play a game, not to invoke a cloud-based service. This would be like saying every time I log into my online banking site I’m invoking Cloud Banking. I’m not. My banking site may be calling methods and functions from the cloud, but I don’t see that. I see a web page.  Or when I pull up my cable DVR’s “On Demand” option; this isn’t called the Cable Cloud or the VoD Cloud.  Just because it sends a packet outside my house doesn’t mean it’s a cloud service.

Maybe it’s took picky, but I think this is how technology terms are co-opted in the first place and become way too overused. Cloud Computing has a very specific definition, as does Cloud Security. But there is no such thing as Cloud Gaming (nor Cloud Banking), and just because an internet-based game has security flaws doesn’t mean that those are Cloud Security issues. They’re just security flaws in software. The first time an analyst asks me my opinions on how Second Life is impacting the cloud or Cloud Security, I’m going to literally blow a gasket, right there on the floor, and coredump screaming “Does not compute!”

Enterprises and Service Providers have a Cloud; consumers have the Internet. They’re not in the same ballpark, not even in the same freakin’ game. Let’s call a spade a spade and the cloud the cloud. Or maybe I’m just grump because it’s Friday afternoon and 72 deg outside in the Pacific Northwest and I’m inside reading instead of relaxing on the beach with my dog, picking out Cloud Animals.

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…