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by jcannon on July 11, 2006 06:17pm
Part 3 – Adaptation and simulation of Heterogeneous environments under lab conditions
A simple question that has always perplexed me is how software and hardware OEM’s across the world simulate heterogeneous environments under lab conditions. I have witnessed several different approaches, practices and stages of this adaptation and each one of them is unique and correct in its right and merit. I guess, that leaves the “big” question which remains unanswered i.e., how do you bring a “real-life” scenario and manifest it under lab conditions. This is even more challenging because the average test lab for a medium to large organization is no match to the size and complexity of its elder sibling, the Enterprise Data Center, running its production systems, applications and operations. So why squeeze all that complexity into a smaller scale ? Is there one perfect method?– of course not, depends on what heterogeneity means to you/your business. Let’s look at this and why it’s necessary and also share some techniques that may be helpful.
Start with why it’s necessary to represent if not an equivalent amount of heterogeneity within a lab but a comparable one. Start with simple logic – why do we need a lab in the first place ? In most cases it’s an environment we can turn to and run processes, tests and simulations which we dare not try in a Production Environment. However, the caveat here is that if we do want to test a tool or an app that we’re about to roll into a production environment, our best bet is to test it in the lab with conditions mirroring as closely to the production environment as possible. It’s also a place where we can develop workarounds, fixes, documentation, implementation practices and as much supplementary support mechanism as we’d like before we bite the bullet and push the tool or app into production. The expectation we keep in mind when we do that is that results from the lab and production rollout should bear a resemblance like that of the “Partridge Family” and hopefully not of the “Manson Family”. Okay, bad joke but you get the point.
Now on to “Tips and Tricks” to help with the process of adaptation and simulation of a lab environment that mimics your production one. Here’s what I found useful:
And finally a small anecdote to help put things in perspective. In my past life, I remember several years ago when I was still on the east coast, I worked on implementing an asset tracking tool for desktops spread through the environment. We tested the tool on individual desktops and did not care about running the entire scenario using network connectivity across the simulation. We were told by the vendor that the tool uses less than 1% of CPU as negligible amount of memory. After random tests, we rolled out the tool and the purpose of the tool was to run a script and send the results back across the network. However, due to ACL’s in place, which we forgot to account for, and lack of validation of packet delivery, the desktops stopped responding. This was an expensive lesson in why we should test the waters to the best possible extent before setting sail.
Just a few thoughts and hope it triggers some more for everyone out there. As always, please do let me know if that has been useful and/or if you have a specific topic in mind you’d like us to write about.
-Kishi
by jcannon on July 07, 2006 02:41pm
It’s only been three months to the day since Port 25 launched. Exactly 73 interviews, posts and tips later we are only just getting started on delivering on our promise of technical and interoperability insight from the lab. The HPC clustering analysis project is well under way and I expect to have an overview post for that project in the next week. I’d like to see much more technical content on the site, but it is taking time to get our lab projects ready for public consumption.
For now, I'm excited to announce some site enhancements to how Port 25 allows you to interact, discuss & debate ideas, as well as - yes - consuming content via podcasting.
I’m interested in your feedback on how much you value the comments features – I’ve heard limited feedback in the last month but it varies from keeping things the same, removing the need for registration, to eliminating comments entirely. What do you think?
We're looking forward to continuing to grow our community with a set of content & usability enhancements over the coming months. For now, I hope these small changes are a good surprise. Have a great weekend.
Cheers, Sam
by jcannon on July 07, 2006 07:43pm
Our first podcast... This week, Sam talks with Fernando Cima from Microsoft Brazil's Security Center of Excellence about the challenges and progress being made in securing and maintaining today's mixed network environments. More specifically, the focus in this discussion is on Server and Domain Isolution. Before Microsoft, Fernando worked for the Brazilian government, as well as with Linux and FreeBSD security projects.
- Download the MP3 Directly - Learn more about Server and Domain Isolation.
Podcast Related Links: - Subscribe to the Port 25 Podcast Feed - Subscribe to Port 25 Podcasts in iTunes
by jcannon on July 06, 2006 03:06pm
Another guest blog this week from Identity Management Program Manager, Shamit Patel: ---------------------------------------------
Hi, Last week, we released two new utilities to help customers achieve UNIX / Windows Interop. The first is a set of utilities and the SDK for the Subsystem for UNIX Architecture (SUA) in Vista Beta 2 & Longhorn. For those unaware, SUA is a native subsystem residing on top of the Windows kernel, just like the Win32 subsystem. It provides the basic infrastructure to run UNIX-based applications and scripts on Windows Vista (Ultimate and Enterprise) and Longhorn Server.
We've also released the UNIX-side components for Identity Management with UNIX. This essentially provides the utilities which enable password sync between Windows and UNIX environments. These are the UNIX-based utilities to enable successful synchronization.
I realize many of you may not be testing Vista or Longhorn, but for those who are, or have corporate testing, we would love to hear your feedback on the product, scripts and documentation.
Thanks all, Shamit
by jcannon on July 03, 2006 02:30pm
I see my last couple posts were about ambiguity, so I thought today I’d blog about something, IMO, that is not ambiguous at all—and the topic would be a fitting hat tip to Sara and Korby and all the folks involved with CodePlex. Brief background: We had to buy our own combination padlocks on our lockers in my high school. I used to forget the combination all the time (—I still have nightmares about that). I finally solved this by writing my combination in hex on the back of the lock. (I figured there was only one other kid in my class who would know what 0F was in base-10, so if anything was ever missing, I’d know where to look. ) I tell this little anecdote because it made me think about the lack of a community of folks with similar interests in my little world back then. The only reason I knew hex* went back years earlier to a similar lack of community: I couldn’t get a game I was writing on my Commodore 64 to do some things fast enough in BASIC, so I asked my Dad what else I could do and he explained what Assembly language was, and from then on there were lots of nights when I was supposed to be asleep, sitting there in my pajamas, banging away in 6502 Assembly land—by myself. This was long before the concept of a home modem would have ever occurred to us, never mind the modern Internet’s enablement of community and collaborative development--but I can’t help but wonder what a difference it might have made to me (never mind the quality of that game!) if there had been a more readily accessible community of folks interesting in collaborating and mentoring at that time. What does this have to do with praising open source developers? This week, inspired by CodePlex, I was looking back at two of the most important studies of the motivations of open source developers. In the two studies (Ghosh in 2002 and Lakhani (PDF) in 2004—both are available online), although slightly different sets of questions were asked, by a notable margin the leading responses were “Learn and develop new skills” and “Share knowledge and skills” (Ghosh) and “Code for project is intellectually stimulating to write” and ‘Improve programming skills” (Lakhani). What’s even more striking about this is comparing these types of motivations—about learning and sharing—with more “confrontational” motivations. Developers could choose multiple answers in both studies, and, for example, in the Lakhani study four times as many volunteer developers chose “Improve programming skills” as a reason for joining an open source community than “Dislike proprietary software and want to defeat them.” To be clear, anybody’s reason is valid to them--but I am a person who would rather learn than win. That’s true when I write code, it’s true when I play soccer; I think that is a good way to view the world—and from all the research I’ve seen, the evidence is compelling that folks who voluntarily participate in open source development communities place very high value on learning and sharing their knowledge with others. I don’t have comparable data at hand, but I’m willing to believe it is well higher than the average person in the population at large. And for that—kudos. I think that means there are far more opportunities for kids like I once was not just because of technological advances, but because of people—maybe people like you reading this post. *I actually can’t remember if I stumbled across hex first in Traveller, where, as I recall the descriptive strings for character attributes and planets where in hex—come on, don’t snicker, you know you played it too…
by jcannon on July 05, 2006 03:17pm
Free open source management projects have existed for years, as illustrated by nagios and webmin, and exist as BYOC (bring your own console) free alternatives to commercial management systems from HP, BMC, CA, IBM and Microsoft. In the last few years, we've seen a rise in commercial software companies moving to support Linux and heterogeneous environments - including but not limited to Centrify, Vintela (Quest) and Centeris, three vendors with whom we've worked in the lab.
It makes good economic sense to make money managing a free product - after all, Microeconomics 101 will tell you that commoditizing your complements maximizes revenue. Sell a database? Then make the operating system and application server free. IBM's move into open source can be seen in this perspective (free operating systems on for-profit hardware and services) as can HP's (with management software revenues thrown into the mix). The same logic should apply to management, especially given the relative lack of enterprise-class open source management software. While nagios is impressive, the fact that it has been used to manage 5,000 node systems alone does not make it enterprise-class.
Recently the Open Management Consortium was founded to unite free/libre open source management projects around a common vision for what management systems should be capable of, and under a common philosophy of open source software. Founders include Qlusters, EmuSoftware, Zenoss, and Ayamon. They also have a list of OSS management projects. Notably, they don't mention OpenSSI as a cluster management technology.
Open Source can be taken to apply to management in several ways:
Each of these layers is open to displacement by open source software, some more easily than others. Agents and adapters seem to me to be the best fit for the typical open source development model - where it's easier to serve the long tail of different endpoints than under standard commercial rules. Consoles and monitors, while at the most basic levels of logging, parsing, alerting, and displaying are well-understood, are areas of deep research and increasingly rarified technology. The developments in the area of event aggregation and scalable management UIs require significant directed investment (and Matt Asay has disagreed with me on this before) in which commercial software companies have an advantage.
A few Port 25 readers have contacted me about building open source integrations between Microsoft products and OSS management technology - as well as OSS projects and Microsoft management technology. For both of these categories, it makes good sense to me and I'd like to see them developed at www.codeplex.com, where we've built an infrastructure for the community to build open source projects.
In the management arena, where we spend significant time in the lab testing different approaches, I'd be happy to spend money and time helping to test or develop projects on Codeplex. Drop me a note if you have something cooking and would like some help or direction.