AWS or Know your enemy - published on TheVirtualist.org

This article was first published on TheVirtualist.org

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure crown VMware as undisputed leader in 2014:

Source: Gartner (July 2014)

In the leader quadrant, VMware (ESXi) is followed by Microsoft (Hyper-V), all others being either challengers, either niche players.

If we are talking about Cloud Infrastructure As A Service 2014, the crown belongs to Amazon Web Services:

Source: Gartner (May 2014)

Looks an AWS vs. Microsoft battle, with AWS winner. VMware is still Niche Player despite the launch with fanfare of vCloud Hybrid Services last year.

Interesting fact, AWS uses Xen, an open-source hypervisor. Xen /ˈzɛn/ has been supported originally by XenSource Inc., and since 2007 (after the acquisition of XenSource) by Citrix which claims that Xen Project and XenServer power over 80 percent of public clouds today. Beside Amazon which uses Xen Project Hypervisorfor the AWS platform, the XenServer service provider customers include Rackspace, 1&1 Internet, SoftLayer and Korea Telecom.

Interesting as well is who is using AWS? A lot of start-ups as well big names like Adobe, Citrix or Novartis. OnAmazon’s Case Studies page, we can see also Netflix, Expedia, Reddit, Pinterest.

That being said, it makes sense to describe AWS as “overwhelmingly the dominant vendor” by Gartner.

So, what is AWS?

Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.

In other words, AWS is a cloud services platform that offers over the internet compute power, storage, content delivery, and others.

There are two well-known products at the core of AWS:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud
• Amazon Simple Storage  Service (S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

To help new customers get started, AWS offers a free usage tier. The free tier can be used one year for: launch new applications, test existing applications in the Cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

Let’s get it started

It takes less than 10 min to set-up an AWS account. Then, with magic and five clicks in another 5 min you get a new Windows 2012 R2 Server:

Viability assessment – RAID log

Good design is good business - Thomas J. Watson

In IBM’s method Team Solution Design, Viability Assessment is intended to record the Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies (hence the acronym RAID).  
In other words, we document the findings, risks and recommendations as a result of Viability Assessment. A finding (and the associated risks) could be anything that is likely to influence the delivery of the solution such as:

• The ability to meet the solutions requirements. 
• The availability of the right skills. 
• The stakeholder acceptance of the technical elements of the proposed solution. 
• The ability to meet the schedule and budgetary constraints defined for the solution. 
• Lack of reusable elements in the solution. 

Usual an ISSUE is closed / removed in viability assessment process by raising it as a RISK or as a Change request.

The result can be documented as an excel file which can be sorted and filtered on needs. 
This approach helps the reader to understand the common pitfalls of designing VMware vSphere based solutions, as well to cross-check solution activities and design elements that must considered in order to avoid risks.

Now let’s give some examples: 

• Risk:

R/A/I/D	Risk
R/A/I/D ID	RAIDnnn
R/A/I/D Name	Having too many clusters
Description	Specific requirements force to have multiple clusters with very few workloads.
Priority (H/M/L)	M
Impact (H/M/L)	H
Raised by
Responsibility / Owner
Mitigations / Comments	In typical virtual environments, workloads should have different profiles and be as mixed as possible to yield the best consolidation ratios, and thus to minimize the number of hosts. Make sure you have clear defined requirements for having multiple clusters and that everybody understands the consequences (more hosts = more costs)
Review date
Closed date

• Assumption:

R/A/I/D	Assumption
R/A/I/D ID	RAIDnnn
R/A/I/D Name	Host profiles
Description	The solution uses host profiles which assume all host hardware is the same.
Priority (H/M/L)	L
Impact (H/M/L)	L
Raised by
Responsibility / Owner
Mitigations / Comments	Using host profiles might create issues if hardware configuration (PCI allocation) or cabling and connections to network switches and storage devices are not consistent. Precautions during build phase of new hosts. If configuration not consistent, use separately host profile for each host type.
Review date
Closed date

• Dependency:

R/A/I/D	Dependency
R/A/I/D ID	RAIDnnn
R/A/I/D Name	VMware tools
Description	Use only supported guest OS and have up to date VMware tools version running. Many features, as well the performance are depending on VMware tools.
Priority (H/M/L)	L
Impact (H/M/L)	M
Raised by
Responsibility / Owner
Mitigations / Comments	Most common OS used are supported. That means also VMware tools can be installed. Having VMware tools up to date is a must.
Review date
Closed date

Why another blog about virtualization?

With my friends Bogdan and Aylin at VMworld 2013 

The inception was at VMworld 2013 in Barcelona after a memorable encounter with VMware guru - Duncan Epping.

I know that blogging was the trend few years ago, but with the rise of Twitter and Facebook, it’s fallen out of favor. Still, I think there several good reasons to maintain a blog:

- memento to myself. Found out today how to do something cool? In a year, I won’t remember how to do it … but I might remember it enough to know what to look for. 

- share and give-back. If I found out something, why not share it and save time for other people who might run into the same problem?

- professional resume. It shows what I am passionate about ... right, virtualization. Even if this blog will be just a collection of links and pictures, will show my interests and beliefs. 

- keep in touch with friends. I have 100+ friends on Facebook and Google+, 400+ connections on LinkedIn and not enough time to keep up with everything. So please, my friends, do me a personal favor and blog – I want to keep in touch with you!