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#Gartner report – How to Choose Between #Hyper-V and #vSphere – #IaaS
The constant battle between the hypervisor and orchestration of IaaS etc. is of course continuing! But it is really fun I must say that Microsoft is getting more and more mature with it’s offerings in this space, great job!
One of the things that I tend to think most of is the cost, scalability and flexibility of the infrastructure that we build and how we build it, I often see that we tend to do what we’ve done for so many years now. We buy our SAN/NAS storage, we buy our servers but lean towards Blade servers though we think that’s the latest and coolest, and then we try to squeeze that into some sort of POD/FlexPods/UCS or whatever we like to call it to find our optimal “volume of Compute, Network and Storage” that we can scale. But is this scalable like the bigger cloud players like Google, Amazon etc.? Is this 2013 state of the art? I think that we’re just fooling ourselves a bit and build whatever we’ve done for all these years and don’t really provide the business with anything new… but that’s my view… I know what I’d look at and most of you that have read my earlier blog posts know that I love the way of scaling out and doing more like the big players using something like Nutanix and ensure that you choose the right IaaS components as a part of that stack, as well as the orchestration layer (OpenStack, System Center, CloudStack, Cloud Platform or whatever you prefer after you’ve done your homework).
Back to the topic a bit, I’d say that the hypervisor is of no importance anymore, that’s why everyone if giving it away for free or to the open source community! Vendors are after the more IaaS/PaaS orchestration layer and get into that because if they get that business then they have nested their way into your business processes, that’s where ultimately that will deliver the value as IT services in an automated way once you’ve got your business services and processes in place, and then it’s harder to make a change and they will live fat and happy on you for some years to come! 😉
#Apache #CloudStack grows up – #Citrix, #IaaS – via @sjvn
On June 4th, the 4.1.0 release of the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform arrived. This is the first major CloudStack release since its March 20th graduation from the Apache Incubator.
It’s also the first major release of CloudStack since Citrix submitted the project to the Apache Foundation in 2012. Apache CloudStack is an integrated software platform that enables users to build a feature-rich IaaS. Apache claims that the new version includes an “intuitive user interface and rich API [application programming interface] for managing the compute, networking, accounting, and storage resources for private, hybrid, or public clouds.”
This release includes numerous new features and bug fixes from the 4.0.x cycle. It also includes major changes in the codebase to make CloudStack easier for developers; a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages; and completes the changeover to using Maven, the Apache software project management tool.
Apache CloudStack 4.1.0’s most important new features are:
- An API discovery service that allows an end point to list its supported APIs and their details.
- Added an Events Framework to CloudStack to provide an “event bus” with publish, subscribe, and unsubscribe semantics. Includes a RabbitMQ plug-in that can interact with AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) servers.
- Implement L3 router functionality for the VMware Nicira network virtualization platform (NVP) plug-in
- Support for Linux’s built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization with NVP L3 router
functionality. - Support for AWS (Amazon Web Service) style regions
What all this adds up to, according to CloudStack Project Management Committee (PMC) member Joe Brockmeier, is that today’s CloudStack is “a mature, stable project, [that] is also free as in beer and speech. We believe that if you’re going to be building an IaaS cloud for private or public consumption, you’ll be better served choosing an open platform that any organization can participate in and contribute to.”
Brockmeier concluded, “CloudStack is a very mature offering that’s relatively easy to deploy and manage, and it’s known to power some very large clouds–e.g., Zynga with tens of thousands of nodes–and very distributed clouds–such as DataPipe, which…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 