David Ziembicki on Infrastructure Architecture : Architecture

Private Clouds: Believe it or not?

davidzi — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:01:01 GMT

Recently there has been some healthy debate around the validity of “private clouds” and whether such a construct is new or just a different name for virtualization and automated provisioning, i.e. a marketecture. In this corner for the anti-Private Cloud sentiment, we have the 2009 Prediction – Rise and Fall of the Private Cloud which argues there is really no such thing as a private cloud and the concept will die quickly as everyone moves to the public cloud. There are some excellent points in this article, I’ll address several below. Take a quick read and come back, I’ll wait… In the other corner, we have Christofer Hoff from Cisco and his response. Finally, Reuven Cohen hits the nail on the head with his post A Public Cloud by Any Other Name is Private which basically states that this is all basically definitional dancing where people argue about concepts without defining any of the underpinning terms.

People’s opinions on this topic seem to correlate most with whether they believe the defining attributes of cloud computing are financial (only paying for capacity utilized, no capex, etc) or whether they believe the defining attributes are technical (shared infrastructure, scale-out architectures, dynamic provisioning). The folks who focus on the financial side tend to believe either there cannot be private clouds because all costs are still incurred by the organization or that there is no way a single organization will be able to drive costs as low as the large cloud providers can with economies of scale.

The folks who see cloud computing as more of an architecture pattern for applications and an infrastructure/operational model tend to believe that the approach is just as relevant for a public cloud provider as it is for a large internal IT organization.

I am firmly in the camp of those who believe private clouds are going to be an important part of IT for at least the next decade. I come to this view using my definition of a cloud which is: an infrastructure architecture, application development model, and operations management discipline that dynamically provide necessary services whenever and wherever they are needed while sharing costs between all users.

Using that definition, all manner of clouds including public, private, hybrid, etc. will exist. Will there be certain economies of scale that a Microsoft or Amazon with hundreds of thousands of servers will be able to achieve that a single business won’t? Of course. But there will also be a degree of customization and agility that private clouds will be able to achieve that large providers won’t.

The reason I believe that private clouds as a concept are something new is that this is the first time that all of IT (infrastructure, development, and operations) are being looked at holistically. This is much more than just being able to sling VMs about the datacenter. This about providing a cost effective infrastructure where code that addresses user needs, be it an app, a VM, or a service can be developed rapidly by using foundational services, deployed near real-time, scale as needed, and then be retired at the end of its useful life.

I’m excited by Microsoft’s opportunities along the full spectrum of the cloud. Azure is a very forward looking vision of the public cloud that I still don’t think most people are grasping yet. Likewise, Microsoft’s traditional on premise solutions are evolving very quickly toward both private cloud and public cloud implementations. To me the most important question that will determine our long term success is how well we are able to provide a seamless continuum between the Azure platform and our Server and Tools solutions as they evolve toward cloud services. I think we are targeting an end game that no one else is really going after from on-premise, through private cloud, to public cloud.

Cloud Computing: Taxes Analogous to Atmospheric Pressure

davidzi — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:11:23 GMT

In a blog posting earlier this week, the Azure team announced that they would be moving all Azure applications out of our “USA – Northwest” datacenter. I was fascinated by this given that the stated reason for this move is a change in local tax law which presumably make it less financially attractive to offer the services from that area. Mike Manos published a great blog post on the topic this morning called “The Cloud Politic – How Regulation, Taxes, and National Borders are shaping the infrastructure of the cloud”. Definitely worth reading and considering the implications.

So where will cloud infrastructure form? Consider the real thing in nature and substitute taxes for atmospheric pressure. Below is a paraphrased description from NOAA:

Wind is simply the air in motion … Pressure gradient is the difference in pressure between high and low pressure areas … What happens to the converging winds near a low? … It has to go somewhere so it is forced to rise. As it rises it cools. When air cools it can hold less water vapor so some of the invisible vapor condenses, forming clouds and precipitation … What about the diverging air near a high? … As air warms it can hold more water vapor, which means that clouds will tend to evaporate.

Bottom line, cloud infrastructure will tend to emerge in low tax, low energy cost, high connectivity areas. This much is obvious and has been a key part of data center site selection methodologies as Manos alluded to. To date these have mostly dealt with “where do we plant these multi-hundred million dollar facilities to exist for at least 10 years”. As the move by the Azure team demonstrates however, what runs in these datacenters can be moved around at will. Is it running internal applications and thus maybe not taxable activity? Or is it running a revenue generating activity that may be taxed? If so, does the datacenter in the next state provide a lower tax environment? If yes, move the workload there, and so on.

With an ever growing percentage of computing likely to migrate toward the large cloud providers, small percent differences in the tax rate, cost of power, etc. can have a large impact on the profitability of providing cloud services. You see this today with certain localities actively shaping public policy around attracting datacenter construction.

Over time I think this will lead to several architectural trends. The first is that an ever increasing number of input parameters (tax rate, power cost, bandwidth, etc) will be utilized by cloud infrastructure software to determine where best to run customer workloads. Where today this occurs mostly during site selection, this will rapidly evolve to the point where it is near real-time and workloads will transparently migrate to follow low cost off-peak power, regions with lower taxes, etc. While workloads are easier to move than entire datacenters, even that is very likely to change given the numbers at stake. Most people have heard of Microsoft’s Chicago datacenter where the first floor is comprised of shipping containers and totals hundreds of thousands of servers. This capacity is obviously mobile but requires supporting facility infrastructure which to date is in fixed locations only. If you look at Microsoft’s Gen4 datacenter vision, you’ll see that eventually even most of the supporting infrastructure will be modular and mobile as well.

These trends will make for some very interesting infrastructure architecture challenges. The clouds will form near low pressure areas…

Completing 5 days of Forefront Protection Suite (Stirling) Training

davidzi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:12:00 GMT

Last week I came out to Redmond for 5 days of training on the Forefront Protection Suite, formerly Forefront codenamed “Stirling”. The final name was announced at the Worldwide Partner Conference:

Forefront codename “Stirling” - the next generation of the Forefront Security Suite for integrated, comprehensive protection across endpoints, servers and the edge – will be officially known as Forefront Protection Suite (FPS).

FPS will include the products in the current suite, plus the Forefront Protection Manager (formerly known as the “Stirling” management console) and the Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Security Service.

The training was pretty interesting. We covered most of the components of the suite, the console, and the integration between all the components. That integration is going to be the real differentiator. Client, Server, and Edge security can all be tightly integrated as well as Network Access Protection (NAP). The solution is built on top of PowerShell so there are significant automation capabilities even beyond the in box solutions.

With very capable component pieces and many integration points, there are a huge number of implementation scenarios and options. This can be very powerful but also a bit daunting until you gain experience with the products. The suite leverages the System Center infrastructure, particularly Operations Manager.

I came away from the 5 days pretty impressed with the suite and the scenarios it enables but also with a healthy respect for the effort required to implement the solution. If the appropriate time and resources are allocated, the end result can be a very robust security infrastructure and most importantly a single console providing situational awareness and reporting across the entire security infrastructure.

If you want to take a look at the suite yourself, the Beta2 release is available here both in installable form and in a pre-configured virtual machine.

Excellent Data Center Article in the NY Times Magazine

davidzi — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:46:00 GMT

The New York Times magazine has a very interesting article by Tom Vanderbilt on datacenters and the infrastructures that power today’s online services. Several Microsoft (and former Microsoft) execs were interviewed including Mike Manos, Debra Chrapaty, Daniel Costello, etc.

The article ends with a very insightful comment by Mike Manos:

“We’re at the beginning of the information utility,” he said. “The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow.”

White Paper: Comparing the Power Utilization of Native and Virtual Exchange Environments

davidzi — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:07:12 GMT

The Exchange team has published a whitepaper on TechNet comparing the power utilization of a typical 8 server physical Exchange environment compared to a a virtualized environment using the same number of logical processors but on only two Hyper-V host servers. The result: a 50% reduction in power usage (excluding storage). If storage is included it was a 37% reduction.

The purpose of the test was to isolate on power consumption scenarios so other things like cooling and space savings weren’t considered but would also be measurable benefits. There is also a link to general guidance on virtualizing Exchange as it makes sense in a lot of scenarios but not all.

Updated: Introducing the Azure Services Platform

davidzi — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:24:42 GMT

The main introductory whitepaper to the Azure platform written by David Chappell has been updated. The main updates are around SQL Data Services and the move toward a more relational model and the introduction of something code-named the “Huron” data hub which uses the Microsoft Sync Framework to synchronize multiple databases (SQL, SQL Compact, etc) in a multi-master fashion. There will also be an SDK so that other databases can be synchronized as well. The document is well written and if you really absorb it you can start to see the scope and scale of the Microsoft vision for cloud computing.

Clustering SQL Server Virtual Machines

davidzi — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:00:07 GMT

When planning server consolidation initiatives, particularly if using a structured offering and tools like SVAM and MAP, underutilized database servers are a frequent consolidation candidate. Similarly, if you have already widely implemented virtualization, then virtualizing database servers for new software deployments is also a common desire. As you consolidate and create more VMs, high availability becomes a requirement, particularly for database servers.

Until recently, Microsoft did not support clustering virtual machines running SQL server. You could cluster the hosts underneath of SQL VMs but you couldn’t cluster the VMs running SQL and remain supported. Fortunately, after finishing a large amount of testing that was required, this support policy has been changed and you can now cluster SQL VMs on Hyper-V and SVVP validated virtualization platofrms. See this article for the details: 956893.

The change in support policy opens up many new consolidation and software deployment scenarios. We have a site dedicated to SQL virtualization here and a great whitepaper on virtualizing SQL 2008 here.

Given all that, does it make sense to virtualize SQL (or any database)? The answer is an absolute, definite, maybe! Virtualization fan boys (like me) will say yes in many cases. Traditionalists in high end applications (both Microsoft’s and others) in a lot of cases will say no as they bare the scars of implementations gone bad due to going cheap on hardware or underestimating demand. Their concerns should not be ignored as they are usually based on deep experience with their apps.

What I think is unacceptable are blanket statements that “Product X should never be virtualized” or “never virtualize the database for Product Y”. These are poor excuses for trying to skip proper architecture and design. Just as bad are the vendors that promote “virtualizing everything” without any regard for performance, licensing, cost, or support considerations. This is also poor architecture and design.

Using proper capacity and availability planning practices, it is not that difficult to get to fact-based decisions on whether to virtualize a server workload or not. SQL is one of the more challenging ones as the product itself provides substantial consolidation options by supporting multiple instances and multiple databases per server/cluster. Almost all of our product groups now are releasing specific virtualization guidance (SQL, MOSS, OCS, etc.)

One of the most important considerations in this design process is the maximum size of a single virtual machine supported by your virtualization platform of choice. This will be the scale unit against which your capacity and availability requirements must be compared. If your workload doesn’t scale out well and requires a large single database server with 32 cores, that will not be a good candidate (or even possible) to virtualize as the major hypervisors today only support between 4 and 8 cores per VM. If your workload is able to scale out then this limitation can be worked around by using a greater number of smaller VMs that total up to the required capacity but you must consider the cost and management considerations of doing so (more VMs to manage, more agents, more licenses, etc).

It seems to be my mantra lately but there is no one size fits all when it comes to infrastructure architecture. That’s the fun part of this line of work, the art and science of good architecture which is a process. Beware of architects and vendors showing up and declaring that there is only one true way…

Microsoft SDL: Get it to go

davidzi — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:02:09 GMT

Today Microsoft made available the Microsoft SDL Process Template. This was announced over on the SDL Blog. Roger has some comments on it as well.

The SDL Process Template is a free downloadable template for Visual Studio Team System that integrates the SDL directly into a customer’s software development environment. The template helps:

Installs SDL requirements as work items
Includes SDL-based check-in policies
Customizes security bugs and queries
Includes extensive SDL how-to and guidance documentation
Generates auditable Final Security Review report
Accommodates third-party tool integration, e.g. the SDL Threat Modeling Tool
Includes project plans and security risk assessment templates

Hyper-V and VMM: Scale Up, Out, and to the Cloud

davidzi — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:44:32 GMT

Between MMS and TechEd there have been a lot of announcements on the virtualization and cloud computing front. First, over on the Virtualization Team Blog, Jeff provided the announcement and details around some new capabilities coming in Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2:

64 logical processor support. A 4x improvement over Hyper-V R1 and means that Hyper-V can take advantage of larger scale-up systems with greater amount of compute resources.

Support for up to 384 Concurrently Running Virtual Machines & 512 Virtual Processors PER SERVER. We are increasing the maximum number of concurrently running virtual machines to 384 per server and the maximum number of virtual processors to 512 for the highest virtual machine density on the market.

Processor Compatibility. Processor compatibility allows you to move a virtual machine up and down multiple processor generations from the same vendor. This does not mean you can live migrate between Intel and AMD nodes, just between different generations from the same vendor.

Not to be outdone, the VMM team announced a bunch of new features that will be in their Release Candidate coming out in a few weeks:

Storage Migration
Queuing of Live migrations
Rapid Provisioning
Host compatibility checks
Support for 3rd party CFS
Support for Veritas Volume Manager

Combined, these new features from both teams enable some key scenarios at both the entry level and high end of the spectrum. One of the major advantages of our stack is that it is very approachable from an entry level since it leverages so much of what your administrators already know and beginning with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SKU, will be available with all of the high end features (Clustering, Live Migration, etc) for free. Within a couple hours a Windows admin can become proficient with the basics of Hyper-V and be up and running (for free!). Within a few days at most, the ability to implement basic clustering, HA, and Quick/Live migration can be achieved. At the high end, very advanced architectures can be implemented including VMM, OpsMgr, deep SAN integration, etc. This is where our technical guidance, solution accelerators, and service offerings come into play.

To see an example both of how this stack is being leveraged by commercial providers as well as an example use case for enterprises wishing to use the cloud as reserve capacity, check out the video below demoing a future version of VMM and how it will integrate private and public cloud capacity seamlessly:

Finding the Hidden Costs of VDI

davidzi — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:01:10 GMT

Brian Madden has an excellent post up today called The hidden costs of VDI. I’ve been working nearly full time the last two months helping to put together a Microsoft Services offering around desktop virtualization in general and VDI in particular so have spent a lot of time looking into both the technical and business considerations that must be taken into account. I’d summarize his post in three points:

TCO models, like statistics, can be made to tell any story you or a vendor wants
Cost models typically assume full replacement of legacy systems to show maximum benefit but his rarely occurs due to technical, political, or other unforeseen reasons
Since VDI is relatively new (compared to traditional desktops and Terminal Services/Citrix Server-based Computing), there are a lot of technical and compatibility issues and considerations that are not well understood outside a small group of experts

As a well known fan and expert on Server Based Computing (SBC), i.e. Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server/XenApp, Brian prefaced the article by saying that he likes VDI “where it make sense”. He correctly points out that nearly all vendors and TCO models show that Server Based Computing still provides the lowest TCO due to its high user density but that there are limitations which make other approaches such as VDI relevant.

That is where I’ll jump in with my thoughts because I completely agree with those statements and it has been the foundation of the offering I have been working on. It starts with the notion of flexible desktop computing and desktop optimization that Microsoft has been talking about for some time now. An overview of this approach is presented in this whitepaper. To summarize, there are a variety of ways that a desktop computing environment can be delivered to users ranging from traditional desktops, to server based computing, to VDI, with a multitude of variations in between with the addition of virtualization at the layers illustrated below:

Rather than selecting a one-size-fits-all solution, virtualization provides architects a new, more flexible set of choices that can be combined to optimize the cost and user experience of the desktop infrastructure. The following four steps lead to an optimized solution:

Define User Types: Analyze your user base and define categories such as Mobile Workers, Information Workers, Task Workers, etc. and the percent distribution of users among them. The requirements of these user types will be utilized to select the appropriate mix of enabling technologies.

Define Desktop Architecture Patterns: Each architecture pattern should consist of a device type (thin client, PC, etc) and choice of:

OS execution (Local, Desktop Virtualization, or Server Based Computing)
App execution (Local, Application Virtualization, or Application Remoting)
Display (Local or Presentation Virtualization)

For each pattern, determine which user types it can be applied to. For example, with mobile or potentially disconnected users, presentation virtualization alone would not be applicable as it requires a network connection. Power users may require a full workstation environment for resource intensive applications but may be able to leverage application virtualization for others. These are just a few examples where different user groups have different requirements.

Determine TCO for each Architecture Pattern: Use a recognized TCO model to determine the TCO for each pattern. Minor adjustments to these models can be made to account for specific technology differences but most include TCO values for PCs, PCs with virtualized apps, VDI, and TS/Citrix thin client scenarios. Be wary of vendor provided TCO models. To Brian’s points, be sure to gain a full and complete understanding of the chosen TCO model and what does and does not include. Consistent application of the model across the different architecture patterns is critical for relevant comparisons.

Model Desktop Optimization Scenarios: With the above data, appropriate architecture patterns can be selected for each user type by choosing the lowest TCO architecture pattern that still meets user requirements. By varying the user distribution and selected architecture patterns, an optimized mix can be determined. It is tempting to simply choose the lowest TCO architecture pattern for all users but this can be very dangerous in that it will typically impact your high value, power users the most if their requirements are not accounted for.

A one-size-fits-all approach would result in either a large number of PCs if not using virtualization, a large number of servers if virtualizing everything, or failure to meet power user needs if using only server based computing. An optimized solution is one which utilizes the right mix of technologies to provide the required functionality for each user type at the lowest average TCO. Combined with a unified management system that handles physical and virtual resources across devices, operating systems, and applications, substantial cost savings can be realized.

As I mentioned at the top, a lot of the concepts in addition to very detailed architecture and implementation guidance are part of the Microsoft Services Core IO offerings. For the last two years, in addition to my customer work I have been deeply involved in the creation of the Server Virtualization with Advanced Management (SVAM) offering. The work I mentioned above around VDI architecture will complement that and be available later this summer. Finally, specific to desktop imaging, deployment, and optimization, there is also the Desktop Optimization using Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office System (DOVO) offering. Taken together in concert with the underlying product suites, these illustrate Microsoft’s “desktop to datacenter” solutions and how to plan, design, and implement them.

Are Solid State Drives in your Windows 7 Future?

davidzi — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:15:13 GMT

The E7 blog has an interesting article on SSD performance and optimizations made in Windows 7 to take advantage of them. The E7 post also links to an in depth AnandTech article that goes into more detail on SSD’s and has some benchmark comparisons between various drives. I’m definitely planning to get an SSD drive when I get my new laptop in a couple months. I’ll likely be getting one of the large workstation class laptops like the Dell M6400 or the Lenovo W700. The only thing that might make me wait longer is if we get a release schedule from Intel on their Clarksdale mobile processors which are basically mobile Nehalems for laptops. I’m leaning toward the M6400 since it has dual internal hard drive bays and supports up to 16GB of RAM which is insane for a laptop. With the two drive bays I figure I’ll run an 80GB SSD for the OS and get a large 7200 RPM SATA for the other bay. I’ll go with 8GB of RAM initially for budget purposes and expand next year when the prices come down. I’ll be dual booting (or booting from VHD) between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. With the OS and Apps on an SSD that setup should really fly.

A new scenario that may be interesting (and demo a good chunk of our virtualization and VDI capability would be to set up a full Windows Server 2008 R2 / VMM 2008 R2 infrastructure on this machine. Basically run 2 – 3 VMs for the infrastructure to present a Windows 7 VDI client virtual machine. Then from the physical OS use Remote Desktop Services to access the Windows 7 VM. With Aero remoting I should get a near desktop like experience.

Back to SSDs, in addition to desktop/laptop scenarios, I’m hearing more and more about them in enterprise storage scenarios. A lot of the big vendors have really evolved their architectures over the last five years to take advantage of and virtualize different tiers of disk architectures and SSD are getting slotted in as the next tier closest to the cache in a lot of cases. From a virtualization perspective this will be interesting as I think SSD’s will be an enabler for somewhat better density and a lot better performance. Since I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with Hyper-V and Citrix’s Provisioning Server, I’m especially interested in seeing how VDI performance on pooled (shared virtual disk) scenarios is improved using Windows 7 VMs and SSDs on the Provisioning Server.

New VDI content on Microsoft.com

davidzi — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:11:40 GMT

There is updated desktop virtualization content at www.microsoft.com/vdi There are a couple of whitepapers and guides to help understand the various approaches and components of a virtualized desktop.

Over the last few months VDI is an area I have been spending a lot of time in, particularly around the joint Microsoft and Citrix VDI solutions.

One of the more interesting aspects of VDI is determining the right mix of technologies to utilize. For large organizations it’s rarely the case that virtualizing all desktops makes sense. At the same time, providing a full PC to all users also doesn’t make much sense if users don’t need it.

The right answer is to find the optimized mix that makes sense for a given organization. Getting there involves understanding your users, your users requirements, the TCO of the various options, etc. With the ability to virtualize the OS, applications, and presentation, the most cost effective solution can be provided to each user group (ex. task workers get a TS/Citrix session and power users get a full PC with apps coming from APP-V, etc)

Over the next couple weeks I’ll be posting more content on this approach as I am in the middle of documenting both the approach and technical guidance for proofs of concept as part of work I am doing for an MCS solution offering.

Microsoft Research: Peering into the future of Cloud Computing

davidzi — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Microsoft has created a new group within Microsoft Research called Cloud Computing Futures headed by Dan Reed, who has a long history in academia and is a former director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. An interview with him about the new group was recently published here:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/ccf-022409.aspx

The group will be focusing on research around large scale datacenters, networks, sotware architectue, etc. This passage describes it pretty well and has a great analogy at the end:

"Building data centers using standard, off-the-shelf technology was a great choice in the beginning. It let the Internet boom race ahead without the need to develop new types of computers and software systems. But the resulting data centers and software were not designed as integrated systems and are less efficient than they should be. One common analogy is that if one built utility power plants as we build data centers [today], we would start by going to Home Depot and buying millions of gasoline-powered generators.

Quite an interesting read and links to a bunch of research efforts.

Azure Services Training Kit - February Update

davidzi — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:32:00 GMT

Following up on yesterday's post, today an updated Azure Services Training Kit was released:

The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. The February release includes the following updates:

19 demo scripts that walkthrough several of the services
10 presentations covering the entire Azure Services Platform
3 additional hands-on labs for Live Services

This technical content covers services including: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

Download Here

Getting Started with Azure and Microsoft Cloud Computing

davidzi — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:22:00 GMT

Here are a couple resources for getting started learning about Microsoft's cloud computing strategy:

"The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud operating system and a set of developer services."

http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/4/3/e43bb484-3b52-4fa8-a9f9-ec60a32954bc/Azure_Services_Platform.pdf

Getting Started with Microsoft Cloud Computing Tools

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/cc972640.aspx

Windows Azure

Windows Azure is the development, hosting, and management environment of the Azure Services Platform, which enables you to run applications at Internet scale while leveraging the skills and tools you use today.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running, and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure.

Live Framework

The Live Framework is the uniform way for programming Live Services from a variety of platforms, programming languages, applications and devices. With the Live Framework, you can easily build and deploy applications in the cloud that sync across multiple devices.