Archive
#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! 😉
Making #OpenStack Grizzly Deployments Less Hairy – #Puppet, #PuppetLabs
Today, I’m excited to announce a new module from Puppet Labs for OpenStack Grizzly. I’ve been working on this module with the goal of demonstrating how to simplify OpenStack deployments by identifying their independent components and customizing them for your environment.
The puppetlabs-grizzly module is a multi-node deployment of OpenStack built on the puppetlabs-openstack modules. There are two core differences in how it handles deploying OpenStack resources. First, it uses a “roles and profiles” model. Roles allow you to identify a node’s function, and profiles are the components that describe that role. For example, a typical controller node is composed of messaging, database and API profiles. Roles and profiles allow you to clearly define what a node does with a role, while being flexible enough to mix profiles to compose new roles.
The second difference is that the module leverages Hiera, a database that allows you to store configuration settings in a hierarchy of text files. Hiera can use Facter facts about a given node to set values for module parameters, rather than storing those values in the module itself. If you have to change a network setting or password, Hiera allows you to change it in your Hiera text file hierarchy, rather than changing it in the module.
Check out parts 1 and 2 of the demo, which walks you through how to deploy OpenStack with the puppetlabs-grizzly module.
Multi-node OpenStack Grizzly with Puppet Enterprise: Deployment (Part 1 of 2)
CloudPlatform – How to build a cloud from the ground up
Citrix has done a good job at explaining what they call the Cloud Fundamentals and how to build your own cloud using their and the Citrix partner products, the architecture behind it and best practises etc.
How to build a cloud from the ground up
Get up to speed on what it takes to build a cloud for your organization through this comprehensive library of educational videos and resources from Citrix and our partners. In Cloud Fundamentals, you’ll learn more about the building blocks of a cloud architecture and best practices to ensure you’re successful. When you are ready, explore how to Extend your Cloud and learn more about value-added Citrix partner solutions that will complement and extend your cloud.
Continue reading here!
//Richard
App Orchestration – Citrix Blog series
Ok, I know it’s just a re-post! 😉
But I must say that the blog series is good and gives a good explanation on what the Citrix view is.
The series consist of the following posts;
- Concepts
- Architecture
- Provisioning machines Part 1 & Part 2
- Managing Tenants
- Managing Advertisements
- Managing Subscriptions
- Patching Workload Machines
- Understanding Workflows Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- Troubleshooting (coming soon)
- Integration with CloudPortal Services Manager (coming soon)
I suggest you have a coffee and sit down and at least give the “Citrix view” a go!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 