Sanger's WebLog : Infrastructure Architecture

Virtualisation: Its not all about virtualisation

Sanger — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:56:00 GMT

I've interviewed perhaps 30 people for senior virtualisation roles in the last few months and one theme keeps occuring; many virtualisation specialists either ignore the VM workloads or know little about the guest operating systems. This trend is a real worry, if you don't understand what the VM is doing, and have some idea how it works, how are you supposed to ensure it has the right resources, is located on the right cluster, has the right DR profile?

Sure, you can hide behind the "how many IOPS" or "how much RAM" questions, but thats equivalent to an arhictect asking you how many doors and what square footage does your building need without understanding whether its use is residential, office or industrial. OK, the analogy isn't perfect, but you get the point.

Now don't get me wrong, these people understand their particular vistualisation stack and its related software very well - and this is a good thing. But senior roles cannot be as narrow as this. I think the immaturity of the virtualisation industry is partly to blame here. Think back to the early days of Microsoft; very product focussed. Nowadays, Microsoft lead many conversations with customers at a business level. This brings up another bug bare; virtualisation is a technology like many others - its there to solve problems. Too many people are using it as the panacea, "virtualisation is the answer, now whats your problem?". Again, immaturity, and perhaps unbounded enthusiasm are major contributors.

So, a few words of advice for any who are going for a senior job as a virtualisation specialist (e.g. Virtualisation Architect);

Consider several alternative solutions to ensure you pick the right one. Its not always virtualisation
Understand the business and technical problem, before jumping to the solution
The guest OS and workload will impact how you configure and manage the VM - make sure you understand these
Get to know the three main virtualisation stacks, their strenghts, weaknesses, and tehnical differences so you can make an informed decision on which to use and where

Good luck, and I wish you success with you future virtualisation efforts.

Kevin

TechED ITForum Microsoft Virtualisation Presentation Videos now online

Sanger — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:53:00 GMT

A number of the Microsoft Virtualisation presentations at ITForum have been posted to TechNet Showtime. These provide a good overview of two virtualisation technologies (machine and application virtualisation);

An Overview of Microsoft's Vision for Virtualization
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/sessionh.aspx?videoid=337
Rajiv Arunkundram, Product Manager, Windows Server Marketing, Microsoft

In this session we focus on virtualization technology and we offer an introduction to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. We also outline Microsoft's vision for the technology over the next few years. This session provides a high-level overview of the different solutions that you can implement with virtualization.

Transitioning to Windows Server Virtualization
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/sessionh.aspx?videoid=343
Mark Kieffer, Group Product Manager, Windows Core OS Team, Microsoft Corporation

Join this session to learn more about Windows virtualization, a new technology in Microsoft Windows Server code-named 'Longhorn'. We introduce the key scenarios for Windows virtualization and new features and improvements in Microsoft Virtual Server, including better performance. Find out how you can start adopting Microsoft Virtual Server today and transition to Windows virtualization by leveraging the unified format.

How to Virtualize Infrastructure Workloads
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/sessionh.aspx?videoid=348
Robert Larson, Architect,Microsoft Services

Join this session to learn about virtualization of infrastructure workloads such as Active Directory (AD), file and print, Web servers and the benefits of mixed workload virtualization. We discuss details, tips, and tricks for creating an effective virtualization environment. During this session, we walk you step by step through the process of planning, deploying, and managing a virtual environment for infrastructure workloads.

Using Application Virtualization to Decrease Your Application Management TCO
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/sessionh.aspx?videoid=361
Bill Corrigan, Director of Project Management, System Center Marketing Team, Microsoft
Chad Jones, Group Product Manager, Windows Client Virtualization, Microsoft

This session will introduce the newly acquired SoftGrid, an exciting new technology that has proven to reduce customers' application management costs by upwards of 95%. This session will give the attendee a strong overview of the application virtualization and streaming technology and how it can be used to augment existing systems management infrastructure. We will share real-world case studies and demonstrate the Softricity products working in conjunction with other Microsoft technologies, including Active Directory, Terminal Services and Systems Management Server.

Event: Virtual Server - The Tip of the Iceberg

Sanger — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 16:40:00 GMT

On Tuesday 28th I delivered the 1st of my EMEA Virtual Server events, which will be touring to >25 countries across the EMEA region over the next 6 months. Sharing the presenting was Shai Ofek (Microsoft Corp, from Remdond) and David Miller (Avanade). I've posted the session titles and abstracts below, and linked to the PPT decks.

Microsoft Virtualisation: Today and Tomorrow

Virtual PC and Virtual Server have gained significant adoption in development and test environments, and are an important stepping stone to realising Microsofts vision of self-managing dynamic systems. Virtualisation technology is gaining a foothold in the data centre, enabling more efficient utilisation of hardware and helping IT react more quickly to changing demands. This session introduces the Microsoft Virtual Server technology, its capabilities, how its being deployed today and the benefits and challenges customers are seeing. We look at how Microsoft will evolve the technology with the introduction of Hypervisor in codename Longhorn Server. We’ll look at the steps Microsoft is taking to help customers and partners use Virtual Server effectively in heterogeneous environments. Finally, we’ll predict how virtualisation will change IT, from the data centre to the branch, servers to the desktop.

Managing a Mixed Virtual/Physical Environment: Tools and Techniques

Microsoft believes the management of physical and virtual machines should be largely transparent. The same tools and techniques should be used to deploy, monitor, maintain, and backup physical and virtual machines. For this to happen, tools need to understand the difference between physical and virtual, and automatically adjust the actions they undertake to accomplish the same task for physical and virtual. This session looks at System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Microsofts first product which bridges the gap between physical and virtual. We’ll look at the complete lifecycle, from provisioning, to backup, migration (physical to virtual and back) to monitoring, and how this fits into the management of the rest of the server infrastructure.

Microsoft Virtualisation Deep Dive

What is the Architecture of Virtual Server, and how will this change with the introduction of Hypervisor? How does host clustering work, what are enlightenments? This session starts with a look at the components which make up Virtual Server, covers the changes introduced with Windows Virtualisation (Hypervisor), and takes a detailed look how the virtualisation stack works. We cover the High Availability capabilities inherent in Virtual Server, investigate the benefits of AMD-V and Intel VT hardware virtualisation for non-Windows guests and cover some of the standards work Microsoft is pushing to improve the performance of disk and network for the virtualisation industry.

Avanade: Virtual Server notes from the field

If you believe the hype, you could be forgiven for thinking Virtualisation can solve most IT problems. In this session, Avanade will share the experience they have gained helping customers adopt, deploy and manage Virtual Server. We’ll look at typical workloads, why they’ve been virtualised, the challenges they needed to overcome to gain business benefits. And, of course what the business benefits were. Things like backup and recovery, load balancing and capacity management are all covered. In effect, the good, the bad and the ugly.

As usual, I welcome feedback.

DSI and Virtualisation at the Microsoft Technology Sumit 2006, Warsaw

Sanger — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:05:00 GMT

Microsoft Technology Summit is an annual Microsoft event held in Warsaw which this year attracted >2,500 IT Professionals and Developers. I was honoured to present two sessions in the Architecture track;

The DSI presentation was an updated version of the session I delivered several times earlier this year. Its been changed to reflect the fact that SDM has been renamed SML and has broad industry support.

The Virtualisation session was an overview of Microsoft's current technologies in this space (Virtual Server/PC, Terminal Services and SoftGrid). Both sessions had nearly full rooms and generated a lot of questions at the end. Application virtualisation had the most questions, two of which I couldn't answer on the day - so I promised to paste the questions and answers on the blog;

Q1) One Win2K3 Enterprise Edition license entitles you to run 4 guest copies of Win2K3 on the Enterprise Edition host. How does licensing work when you have an Active/Active Virtual Server cluster - do you get 8 licenses which can run on one machine in a failure situation?

A1) No, the licenses are tied to a physical machine. To run and Active/Active cluster with a total of 8 VMs, you'd need to buy an additional 4 licenses of Win2K3 Enterprise Edition or chose to use Win2K3 Data Center edition which allows an unlimited number of VMs. See this whitepaper which clarifies licensing with Virtualisation. This web page has additional information, including an FAQ.

Note: in the presentation I stated that Microsoft Licensing for our server applications needs to catch up with the OS licensing in terms of Virtualisation; the whitepaper shows this has already happened - for example a license for Exchange allows you to have multiple virtual Exchange machines on the physical host, but only 1 can run at any one time. See the whitepaper for all the details.

Q2) How do customers purchase / obtain SoftGrid?

A2) If you're a Microsoft Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreement customer, contact your account team. Other customers will be able to buy SoftGrid through the Microsoft Partner / reseller channel from January 1 2007. I'll update this post later on how you could buy/try SoftGrid before January 1.

Infrastructure Public enemies: 1, 2 and 3

Sanger — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:07:00 GMT

Thinking about the challenges I've faced on projects over the last few years, I've noticed they broadly fall into three problem areas;

Security
Identity Management
Operational Management

I doubt anyone is surprised by this list. Security is easily the most painful topic whilst its difficult to prioritise the other two. Initially, I thought the prioritised order would change throughout the lifecycle of a solution. Operational management isn't an issue during the design phase right? But when you think about it, you need to design operational management; you need to get the dev team instrument code appropriately, you need monitoring services, deployment services, configuration management services, reporting services etc. So whilst the activity related to each of the three areas above will vary across the lifecycle, I feel the areas are still the most prominent problems Infrastructure teams face. If you have a different view, drop a comment.

I find its quite useful to know these three areas are the biggest problems; you can focus extra effort and resources on them. You can look for best practices around them. For example, during design and implementation phases of my last project we set up teams broadly aligned with these problem areas and integrated them with teams focused on particular products. I think of these as horizontal teams focused on (primarily) non-functional areas and vertical teams aligned with functional areas, as shown in the diagram below (liked here, this image is stored on a public dogfood server, so it may not be available at all times).

Drop a comment on these trends; do you agree? Is something else causing you sleepless nights?

These trends help to focus my attention – is there a deficiency in a Microsoft product which is causing the issue, or is it a result of poor process, internal company politics or something else?

Architecture sessions @ IT Forum

Sanger — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:21:00 GMT

Infrastructure Architects are not very well served by the industry (including Microsoft), so I'm testing an Architecture track at IT Forum this year. I've allocated 5 session slots and will be watching carefully to see how well they are attended and how...(read more)

Pakistan Developer Conference '06 Sessions

Sanger — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 16:29:00 GMT

It was my pleasure and honour to present the 3 sessions below in both Lahore and Karachi this week at the Pakistan Developer Conference '06.

Being my first visit to the country, I was surprised not only by the passion and thirst for learning but also the great questions each session generated.

Session 1: Bridging the Gap between Development and Production

Integration and test are perhaps the most painful phases of the solution lifecycle for an Architect. Its the crunch point where application meets infrastructure; data centre constraints are first encountered and security policies are applied. Its also the phase where significant time and cost overrun often occurs. Taking an Infrastructure Architects perspective, this session will show how treating infrastructure with the same discipline as development results in a smoother transition from coding to deployment. We will see how today's tools are starting to bridge the gap between development and infrastructure, and look at what the future will bring.

Download PowerPoint Deck

Session 2: Model Based Management and the Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI)

When starting a new project, Solution Architects agree a set of functional requirements with the business. These requirements are often used as the solution success criteria; delivering 100% of the functional requirements = complete success. And herein lays the problem. Without the successful deployment and operational management, the solution is next to useless. Analysts estimate on average 70% of the lifetime solution cost occurs in the deployment and operating phase, so why aren’t a set of non-functional requirements (e.g. manageability, availability and security) agreed with the functional requirements? The Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative will provide the tools which enable Architects to design-in management, security and more. This session will explain the DSI vision, look at model-based management and show you how you can build some of these concepts into your solutions today.

Download PowerPoint Deck

Session 3: Service Oriented Infrastructure, a new way of thinking

Most companies have grown their infrastructure organically; a new application here, a new service there. The result is a set of stove pipes, infrastructures within infrastructures, each with its own user directory, security policies, and operations teams. This makes identity management, end-to-end security and portfolio management difficult and costly. Many companies are looking at consolidation and virtualisation as the magic combination which will solve these problems, but these alone are not enough. You need to apply Service Orientated thinking to the enterprise infrastructure. In this session we look at what a Service Oriented Infrastructure might look like, the benefits it might bring and the challenges you'll face getting there.

Download PowerPoint Deck

Enjoy, and please comment if you have questions or simply disagree with some of the ideas.

Kevin