While I wrote last week about the looming network infrastructure requirements of cloud computing I thought it would make sense to continue with this theme and offer a contrarian vision to the one championed by both Google and luminary Nicholas Carr; one that talks about critical missing ingredients that could mark significant barriers to entry for Google.

I think there are at least 4 ominous slices in Google’s pie in the sky for enterprise IT and Google: 1) Google and Carr’s vision significantly underestimates today’s state of the enterprise network; 2) Google insists for the most part on building everything internally; 3) the networking hardware players are established and better positioned to monetize the increasing demand for network intelligence; and 4) ASP2.0 has now morphed into a form of IBMs early “glass house” thinking.

Now that I’ve attacked the position of one of the world’s most successful technology companies and the author of one of my favorite summer reads allow me to make my case.

The Besieged Network

Over the last three decades we’ve seen the IP network grow from 56k links between thousands of endpoints to today’s gigabit network connecting hundreds of millions of hosts.  That level of scale alone is enough to suggest adoption beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, especially those involved in the ARPANET project. 

Add to that scale increasing complexity, as more than a hundred protocols/services (many of which were developed independently with no consideration of interoperability) are now traversing this network back and forth in between an exploding array of increasingly mission-critical devices.

I think this is level of complexity is what Carr doesn’t get.  It is one matter to get the water company to deliver a consistent pressure of water to a faucet, quite another to deliver various flavors on demand at various pressures at the push of a button.  With electricity there is a standard current in most countries, not the ability to customize on demand. Yet enterprise networks, devices and applications interact at a much higher scale of complexity and customization and authentication.

The following chart was inspired by an industry peer in the networking industry who had also noted today’s increasing gap between network demands and resources.  This gap could worsen if IT spending goes flat year to year:

Let’s give Google some credit and suggest that they can do everything they are suggesting they will be able to do; that is, deliver the data center in the cloud for enterprises and the general public.  We’ll concede Carr’s prediction that they will be able to deliver on the promises of a scalable, complex, dynamic cloudplex that can deliver robust, secure and highly available multi-host services to ever-changing populations of users and enterprises at a low cost.  We’ll also concede that Google can transform itself into a software company and threaten Microsoft.

If Carr and Google are spot on, then what happens to the trend lines above?  They get even worse.

If enterprise data centers shrink because more offerings come from the cloud there will still be more endpoints, more interoperability, more change, plus more traffic through the network at the “last block”.  Offloading applications to the cloud is likely to actually INCREASE traffic and complexity. 

As I mentioned last week, many of these protocols and services were never designed with the intent of interoperating with one another (unlike much simpler electrical currents).  Most of the people and resources in the network are preoccupied with delivering these services to the right location.  Cricket Liu (the author of O’Reilly’s DNS and Bind) has already said that core network services like DNS are "creaking a bit". 

In an upcoming bloxTV interview he talks about the need for increased flexibility in order to address new DNS security developments.  These new demands are bound to make network professionals jobs even more challenging in larger, complex networks that can encompass multiple sites, data centers, mobile users, partners and even factory floors.

The Smoking Gun or Carr’s Paradox

We’re now also seeing other signs of trouble in the network.  An October 2008 report(conducted in August/September and sponsored by Infoblox) of those managing these core network services (DNS, DHCP, IP address management, etc.) is reporting that the management cost per IP address actually INCREASES as networks scale to a certain size.  Larger networks were also less flexible, as they were slower in patching their DNS servers for the widely publicized DNS vulnerability.  I’ll be adding that report to Archimedius shortly.

Until this report I think many would have assumed that network infrastructure management would scale as each IP address would consume fewer resources per address, and more endpoints would obviously mean a lower (or at least static) cost per endpoint.  This wasn’t the case:

Enterprise organizations have higher costs per IP address, with an average of $9.19 annually. SMB organizations, on the other hand, report an average annual cost of $7.12 for each IP address. The overall annual average among all organization sizes is $8.10. – Computerworld MarketVibe Oct 2008

 

Computerworld Core Network Services MarketVibe Report

Again, this complexity tax could slow down the evolution to cloud, since rising management could offset tangible savings in electricity and real estate and perhaps hypothetical synergies enabled by the cloudplex.  I’m not disputing the eventuality of cloud computing; that would be silly since it’s already here.  I am disputing its rate of adoption, especially for robust enterprise apps and Google.

Microsoft is in no position to rescue the Google or Carr paradox either.  The current installed market of empowered endpoints with hard drives, etc. (other people’s money) allows them to monetize software and operating systems without having to invest in owning other people’s hardware.  They don’t need to buy servers; and they already have the applications and customer base.

Microsoft will likely use its position of strength at the OS and application level to deliver equivalent pre-enterprise cloud capabilities that simply add value to their installed base; they’ll simply out cloud Google.  This is a very similar strategy to the potentially lethal Hyper-V attack on VMware I’ve discussed at Archimedius.

At the end of the day Google is making the leap from monetizing browsers on other people’s hardware to delivering applications from their own server hardware.  Yet Google is neither an application nor a data center hardware company; it is a search and directory company driven primarily by ad revenues.  This has more significant implications because of other strategic decisions they’ve made.

The World’s Glass House

Google has a reputation for secrecy and building key technology inside.  By not effectively leveraging the power of existing off-the-shelf solutions they embark down a higher risk path and absorb more R&D expenses.  Given that they want to scale larger and deliver software at a lower cost than enterprises that have decades of data center DNA, it might take more than cheap electricity, real estate and VMotion to come anywhere close to the margins they get for search.

A weaker economy likewise could be disproportionately painful for their cloud strategy, because a bulk of their revenue is tied to more discretionary ad spending.  Building it from scratch might take longer and be more expensive than partnering more aggressively with other technology leaders who bring faster expertise that is already being monetized over a broader base of buyers.

As various enterprises move toward cloud computing via pre-enterprise vertical or horizontal applications with light and simpler throughput requirements, wouldn’t it make more sense for Google to return to its core vision and simply become a host for other people’s applications and use other people’s money? 

Within this scenario they could charge an application management and delivery fee and enable a new “lite” application service renaissance.  They become a service provider instead of a more classic ASP leveraging proprietary development.  They wouldn’t have to invest in application development and they could compete (with various partners) more squarely with the Microsoft ecosystem.  That might put them directly at odds with the likes of Verizon or AT&T and even Amazon, but it would allow them similar economies to the search business and allow for faster growth.

Infrastructure2.0

As I mentioned last week, I think cloud computing will require an unprecedented level of network intelligence.  If enterprises decide to cut spending on network resources, the pressures for automation will only escalate.  That’s why I think Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Riverbed, Blue Coat and others are in a stronger position to monetize the clouds. 

The network gear players have already established the infrastructure. Automation and management become another add-on, allowing them to continue their momentum in a weak or strong economy.  Google, however, is buying their own software and hardware footprint for the most part and is sensitive to advertising revenue trends which will likely make their ability to maintain revenue growth (and R&D investments) more dependent on a healthy economy.

Cloud computing may help trim some data center costs and move a few jobs (“up sourced”) to the clouds but that may be a much more discretionary decision than rising network strains and availability expenses.  Think of the network infrastructure as a kind of beach head for cloud computing.  Without a reliable, viable infrastructure the clouds will be out of reach of most potential customers.

Is the Cloud really ASP2.0?

We watched the dotcom bubble finance all kinds of eyeball valuations.  Google made the model work by monetizing eyeballs beyond anyone’s imagination; they made search the ultimate software-as-a-service and built an incredible product.  Their search engine is uncannily powerful and accurate. 

That being said, can they do for the ASP industry what billions in market cap and abundant expertise couldn’t when the bubble burst and market caps adjusted?

Google has a history of beating expectations and succeeding where others have failed.  Yet, at their core they are an advertising revenue-driven company that will likely continue to need to acquire software and data center technology expertise.  As the cloud vision gets closer will they realize that they were blinded by their own daunting success or will they fulfill Carr’s well-researched prediction?

All of these slices have brought me to recently question Google’s pie in the sky.  I think network intelligence and management will have to keep pace with the impacts of increasingly powerful and complex populations of endpoints, in addition to the competing flexibility, security and availability tradeoffs as TCP/IP spreads to new frontiers of connectivity.  These demands will require new breakthroughs in network management and automation.

I also think that Google will need to adopt a more aggressive partnership and “best of breed” strategy.  Robust cloud apps threaten Microsoft if they can be effectively developed, delivered and secured.  Yet maybe Google should partner with specialized application players and deliver an ecosystem of lighter, mission capable applications that would monetize ongoing investments and expertise and supplement it with on the job training.  Nicholas Carr might view the cloud’s replacement of enterprise IT as inevitable; yet I think that power plants and data centers have about as much in common as grocery stores and Webvan.

I’m certain that cloud computing is already here and delivering lighter, pre-enterprise applications.  I’m also certain that they’ll continue to service low hanging fruit and generalist SMB needs.  Yet can Google beat Microsoft to this market?  I’m not so certain.

Greg Ness is a senior director at Infoblox.  He was formerly at Blue Lane Technologies, Juniper Networks, Redline Networks and ShoreTel.  He has been a blogger/columnist at Always On since spring 2004.  This blog does not constitute investment advice.  For a full disclaimer go to: About ARCHIMEDIUS.

It is possible, I will install eeepcxubuntu in a bootable SD 8GB card or even in SDA1.
I invested time and money in ASUS eeepc P900 and I feel it would be better to apply it in a normal 14 inches notebook, or better in a HP 12 inches, with windows Vista or XP.

Eric Reitz posted the following steps on his blog about how to connect to VMware Server with the VI Client.

1. You will need to install the Virtual Infrastructure Client (VI Client) 2.5.
2. You will need to have your ports open if you have your firewall up the defaults it takes are 8333 (SSL) 8222 (normal)
3. On the VI Client for server put in https://<servername>:8333 or http://<servername>:8222 or what ever ports you choose at install.
4. Then add your Admin account to the host for Username and Password

In the following screen you will see the VMware Server overview within the VI Client:

Bron: http://theregime.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/how-to-connect-vi-client-25-to-vmware-server-20/

I found that the standard printer in the virtual machine wouldn't work. I tried it in both VMWare 1.x and 2.x but without any luck. It did work ineffectively in VMWare 2.x but it embedded characters in simple documents that shouldn't be there. Finally, I pursued this course. It has the benefit of working like you'd expect! It lets you print your native Windows documents when you've configured the VMWare machine in NAT. The same steps work when you're using a bridged networking. In a bridged network, you don't have to share the printer on the Mac OS because it directly accesses it.

The first step requires that you share you printer setup on the Mac OS. You do that by launching System Preferences, then click on Sharing. In Sharing, you enable print sharing by chosing the network printer ...

After you've enabled sharing on the Mac OS, you can take the following steps in Windows:

1. Click the Start button, then choose Printers and Faxes. You'll get the following screen where you should click the link to Add a printer. It will launch the Add Print Wizard.

2. You should install the printer drivers if they're not already installed before launching the Add Print Wizard. You click Next In the first screen.

3. The default radio button is for a locally attached printer. Click the network printer radio button before clicking the Next button.

4. Click the Next button because the default browses for a network connected printer.

5. You shuold see the Microsoft Windows Network, and the default workgroup, Click on the Workgroup to display the possible machine names.

6. Click the appropriate machine that represents the hosting Mac OS (your machine that's running VMWare). After you click it, you'll see the target printers that are available through the external Mac OS connectivity and sharing. Click the Next button to proceed.

7. The last activity triggers a warning error. It asks you to confirm that you can trust your Mac. Click the Yes button to proceed (it's a boring message but click on it if you want to read it).

8. Choose the printer as a default printer by clicking the Yes button. You can choose the No button if you've got more than one network printer.

There are problems when you forget to install the hardware first, so make sure you get the hardware installed first.

The Elastic Computing Platform software -- not to be confused with the actual infrastructure offered by Amazon's similarly named Elastic Compute Cloud -- allows an enterprise to create a private cloud inside its own data centers. It can also be set up to automatically link a company's cloud with approved outside cloud providers if the enterprise suddenly needs more processing power.

The software includes security and compliance features necessary to make enterprises take it seriously. In addition, the licensing model allows business users to develop and change the open-source code for their own needs, without having to release that code back to the community. So far, Enomaly's Elastic Compute Cloud only supports open-source hypervisors such as Xen and KVM, so I'm not sure how many big enterprises, which tend to prefer VMware, will actually find it useful.

Reuven Cohen, CEO of Enomaly, says support for VMware is coming. The competition is offering similar promises, backing up the notion that, to gain enterprise adoption, management software will need to be flexible enough to handle multiple hypervisors and multiple clouds.

VMware heeft afgelopen vrijdag update 3 van VirtualCenter uitgegeven.

De resolved issues vind je hier: http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_vc25u3_rel_notes.html#resolvedissues

De release notes kun je hier vinden: http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_vc25u3_rel_notes.html

Klik op het plaatje om naar de download te gaan.

When I tell people that I spent £1,700 ($3,000) on a shiny new Mac Pro, there's usually a sharp intake of breath followed quickly by a "How much?!" and "You must be loaded!". The trouble is it's very hard to explain to these people where the true savings lie.

My Mac replaced a Windows PC that cost me in the region of £800 ($1,400) to build, excluding software. Add to that the Windows XP license, a copy of NOD32 Antivirus, ZoneAlarm Pro and Webroot SpySweeper which runs to another £200 ($355) remembering that with the exception of XP the other software carries a year on year renewal cost. Now we're looking at a more reasonable £1,700 vs. £1,000 in the first year, although that figure still seems heavily biased in favour of the Windows machine. So where does the Mac make up the difference?

Time. More to the point... My time.

You see I value my time. Like everyone I like doing the things I want to do, and not so much the things I have to do, and that's where Windows lets you down. Over the past seven months all my Mac has ever done is exactly what I've asked it to. On the other hand, my Windows PC has managed to consume countless hours of my time with various puzzles:

• One Windows PC won't connect to a share on another with a 'not enough memory' error, even though both machines have 2Gb. After much searching I find a registry hack is needed.
• ZoneAlarm dies after one particular Microsoft update, wasting hours before I have to finally back out the change and wait for a fix. (I've now switched to Eset Smart Security).
• SpySweeper flags some registry keys suggesting evidence of some really nasty trojan, prompting me to run full scans on everything only to find out it was a false positive.
• Every 2nd or 3rd reboot of the XP machines results in a blank desktop, prompting further reboots until it mysteriously returns.
• Outlook becomes unresponsive for no apparent reason and then refuses to load properly until the machine is rebooted. Ultimately I backup my mail, then uninstall and reinstall to try and fix the problem.

I could go on, but it's a list that is very familiar to tens of thousands of Windows users worldwide. Net result is that I spend needless hours nursing my XP machine along, not to mention the stress levels and over the course of seven months that more than makes up for the higher initial cost of the Mac. Don't get me wrong, Windows XP is the most stable version of Windows there is for a lot of people, and I dare say there are lots of you who could quote me stories of 'reliable' Windows machines. Truth is, I own one myself - it's a PC running Windows 2003 Server that sits in the loft and backs up my data. Yes I do have the intermittent connection problem where the shared drive on the server disappears from the OS X desktop, but aside from that it sits there and does what it does - helped a lot I'm sure, by the fact that I leave it alone. (I'm currently assessing MountWatcher as a solution to this random 'disconnect' problem).

My Windows XP PCs (yes there are others lurking in my loft!) are now switched off most of the time, and when I need to run a Windows program I use VMware Fusion to do the honours. In fact I could argue that my Mac Pro takes the place of several PCs - my XP 'leisure' PC, my XP work laptop, my experimental OpenSUSE PC and the dedicated PC I use for remotely supporting clients, as all those bits of hardware are now virtual machines on my Mac.

Now that's good value!

これは削除されない仕様なのか，不具合なのか。以下のディレクトリ（フォルダ）にたまっています。

ドラッグ＆ドロップ完了したら消して欲しいところです。

%HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\Temp\VMwareDnD

手で削除しましょう。

ホストからゲストへのドラッグ＆ドロップについては未確認です。

En este nuevo videotutorial vamos a ver como crear una pequeña red en la cual tendra un Servidor Web, con lo cual por medio de otras maquinas virtuales podemos conectarnos a ese servidor web y ver el contenido web del servidor, ya habiamos visto en videotutoriales como crear un servidor web ahora vamos a ver como configurarlo en Red por medio de VMware.

Visita http://www.biblio-web.org/aprendervmware/ para poder descargarlo.

Nasdaq Chart Shows Tech Stock Slide

Not that we in the technology industry haven't turned cautious on Wall Street. (But that is another story)

A wave of cuts to the growth expectations of technology companies, their earnings outlooks, stock ratings and overall market assessments appears to be building among Wall Street analysts as they take a second look at high-tech's ability to dodge the downturn and credit crisis. This comes even as the House of Representatives passed on Friday a Wall Street bailout package designed to flood the street with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Several major firms took aim at Google, for instance, pointing to a slowing online ad market, the economic weakness now spreading to Europe, bank failures, the credit crunch and the stronger U.S. dollar, Among them were Morgan Stanley, American Technology Research, Jefferies and Collins Stewart.

White-shoe firm Goldman Sachs cut its estimates on software maker SAP.

Meanwhile at Thomas Weisel, analyst Time Klasell downgraded the infrastructure software sector and cut earnings estimates on companies such as Citrix, Microsoft, McAfee, Red Hat, Symantec and VMware.

Pacific Crest even said India-based outsourcers including Infosys and Wipro.

Closer to home, Barclays trimmed its price target for Apple shares to $135 from $180, and UBS shifted its rating lower in Adobe, Salesforce.com, Intuit and Symantec.

The technology heavy Nasdaq market already has had a rough couple weeks. It fell another 29 points today.

with thanks to the great post on yellow-bricks.com

Simulare un ambiente Active Directory completo, ad esempio, richiede la configurazione di N° sistemi (1 o più DC, alcuni FPS, sites, etc.). E' impensabile comprare o reperire tutto l'hardware necessario perchè sarebbe, oltre che economicamente proibitivo, ingestibile all'interno di un ufficio o addirittura in casa. Fortunatamente la virtualizzazione ci viene incontro...

Come ambiente di virtualizzazione utilizzo l'ormai consolidato software della VMware. Dopo vari esperimenti, la combinazione hardware e software che mi permette di effettuare i miei studi e test investendo una cifra accettabile, si compone di un computer con un hardware robusto ed un OS Linux.
Naturalmente questa è la configurazione basata sulle mie esigenze e sul budget disponibile... si sa che la fantasia non ha limiti!

L'ambiente LAB che utilizzo è così composto:

HARDWARE

• Motherboard: Asus Rampage Formula
• CPU: Intel Q9400 Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz 8MB cache
• RAM: Kingston 8GB DDR2 800MHz high speed
• HDD: Seagate 2x750GB SATA II 32MB cache 7200 rpm RAID 1
• Video: Asus ATI Radeon HD3850 PCI-E 2.0 512MB
• Power: Enermax Liberty ELT400AWT 400W

SOFTWARE

• OS: Linux CentOS 5.2
• VM: VMware workstation 6.0.5
• SAN: Openfiler 2.3

Con questa configurazione HW/SW, riesco a simulare in maniera accettabile gli ambienti che più utilizzo:

• Microsoft cluster (1 SAN, 1 DC Windows 2003 Std, 2 FPS Windows 2003 Ent).
• VMware Virtual Infrastructure (2 ESX servers 3.5, 1 SAN Openfiler 2.3, 1 DC Windows 2003 Std, 2 FPS Windows 2003 Std).

Naturalmente il tutto deve essere inteso come un ambiente dinamico in continua evoluzione: l'hardware e il software cambiano ogni giorno e man mano che i prezzi si abbassano, i componenti hardware più performanti diventano accessibili senza svenarsi (si sa che l'hardware è già obsoleto anche dopo un solo mese!)...

- p@olo

Andare all'indirizzo http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ e cliccare su Download Now, creare un nuovo utente, se non se ne possieda già uno, terminata la registrazione controllare la posta e confermare la registrazione, segnare i codici di attivazione e procedere al download del pacchetto TAR per linux (non l'RPM!).

Preparare il sistema all'installazione di VMware

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential xinetd

Posizionarsi nella directory di download, nel mio caso la scrivania

cd /home/utente/Scrivania

Decomprimere VMware Server .tar.gz ed eseguire l'installer

tar xvfz VMware-server-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Durante l'installazione verranno poste delle domande per configurare VMware, scegliere le impostazioni predefinite escluse le seguenti:

The current administrative user for VMware Server  is ''.  Would you like to
specify a different administrator? [no]
rispondere yes

Please specify the user whom you wish to be the VMware Server administrator
nome utente
(ATTENZIONE, usare l'utente amministratore, in genere su Ubuntu è il primo utente creato durante l'installazione)

In which directory do you want to keep your virtual machine files?
[/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines]
indicare il percorso preferito (nel mio caso /home/utente/Virtual_Machines)

Alla fine dell'installazione viene richiesto il serial number

Please enter your 20-character serial number.

Type XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX or 'Enter' to cancel:

Inserire il serial number ottenuto durante la registrazione

Su VMware Server 2 la gestione è fatta totalmente via browser, si può accedere in locale o in remoto via HTTPS (https://<indirizzo IP>:8333) o HTTP (http://<indirizzo IP>:8222). Per accedere in locale scrivere nella barra degli indirizzi di un browser (nel mio caso Firefox) https://127.0.0.1:8333 o http://127.0.0.1:8222 (se si usa Firefox 3 e si accede tramite HTTPS apparirà un avviso della presenza di un certificato auto-firmato, basta accettarlo per poter procedere).
nella finestra di accesso inserire nome utente e password di sistema per accedere

Al termine dell'installazione è possibile rimuovere il pacchetto scaricato e la directory di installazione

cd /home/utente/Scrivania
rm -f VMware-server*
rm -fr vmware-server-distrib/

Per maggiori informazioni google is your friend

Bouke Groenescheij van www.jume.nl heeft een update van zijn removehba script online gezet. Met dit script kun je in een handomdraai op een linux distro een ESX cd zo aanpassen dat je tijdens de installatie van een ESX server de HBA’s niet hoeft los te koppelen.

"So I went ahead and made some changes to the script which pulls apart the extra files, edits them and repacks it all up in one go...

Thanks to both of you for your work. I've been using my updated install media now for http deployments for a while without any issues. Its a great install process not having to worry about the san being disconnected. using the nework boot iso and a kickstart file, I can have a host rebuilt in under 15mins. That includes a reboot and configuring all my networks, hp agents & tweaks etc."

De download vind je hier: http://www.jume.nl

A short time ago in a data centre, far far away.....

All the big players are setting out their cloud pitches, Microsoft are set to make some big announcements at their Professional Developer Conference at the end of October and VMWare made their VDC-OS announcements at VMWorld a couple of weeks ago, Google have had their App Engine in beta for a while and Amazon AWS is pretty well established.

With this post I hope to give a quick overview of each, I'll freely admit I'm more knowledgeable on the VMWare/Microsoft offerings... and I stand to be corrected on any assumptions I've made on Google/AWS based on my web reading.

So, What's the difference between them...?

VMWare vCloud - infrastructure led play

VMWare come from the infrastructure space, to-date they have dominated the x86 virtualization market, they have some key strategic partnerships with storage and network vendors to deliver integrated solutions.

The VMWare VDC-OS pitch is about providing a flexible underlying architecture through servers, network and storage virtualisation. why? because making everything 'virtual' makes for quick reconfiguration - reallocating resource from one service to another is a configuration/allocation change rather than requiring an engineer visit (see my other post on this for more info)

because VMWare's pitch is infrastructure led it has a significant practical advantage in that it's essentially technology agnostic (as long as it's x86 based) you, or a service provider have the ability to build and maintain an automated birth-->death bare 'virtual metal' provisioning and lifecycle system for application servers/services as there is no longer a tight dependency for everything on physical hardware, cabling etc

There is no one size fits all product in this space so a bespoke solution based around a standard framework tool like Tivoli, SMS, etc. is typically required depending on organisational/service requirements.

No re-development is necessarily required to move your applications into a vCloud (hosted or internal) you just move your VMWare virtual machines to a different underlying VDC-OS infrastructure, or you use P2V, X2V tools like Platespin to migrate to a VDC-OS infrastructure.

In terms of limitations - apps can't necessarily scale horizontally (yet) as they are constrained by their traditional server based roots. The ability to add a 2nd node doesn't necessarily make your app scale - there are all kinds of issues around state, concurrency etc. that the application framework needs to manage.

VMWare are building frameworks to build scale-out provisioning tools - but this would only work for certain types of applications and is currently reactive unless you build some intelligence into the provisioning system.

Scott Lowe has a good round-up of VDC-OS information here & VMWare's official page is online here

Google AppEngine- pure app framework play

An application framework for you to develop your apps within - it provides a vastly parallel application and storage framework - excellent for developing large applications (i.e Google's bread & butter)

Disadvantage is it's a complete redevelopment of you applications into Google compatible code, services & frameworks. You are tied into Google services - you can't (as I understand it) take your developed applications elsewhere without significant re-development/porting.

The Google AppEngine blog is here

Microsoft Cloud Services Hosted Application stack & Infrastructure play

An interesting offering, they will technically have the ability to host .net applications from a shared hosting service, as well as integrating future versions of their traditional and well established office/productivity applications into their cloud platform; almost offering the subscription based/Software+Services model they've been mooting for a long time.

Given Microsoft's market current dominance, they are very well positioned to make this successful as large shops will be able to modify existing internal .net services and applications to leverage portions of their cloud offering.

With the future developments of Hyper-V Microsoft will be well positioned to offer an infrastructure driven equivalent of VMWare's VDC-OS proposition to service and support migration from existing dedicated Windows and Linux servers to an internal or externally hosted cloud type platform.

David Chou at Microsoft has a good post on Microsoft and clouds here

Amazon Web Services - established app framework with canned virtualization

the AWS platform provides a range of the same sort of functionality as Google AppEngine with SimpleDB,  SQS and S3 but with the recently announced ability to run Windows within their EC2 cloud makes for an interesting offering with the existing ability to pick & choose from Linux based virtual machine instances.

I believe EC2 makes heavy use of Xen under the hood; which I assume is how they are going to be delivering the Windows based services, EC2 also allows you to choose from a number of standard Linux virtual machine offerings (Amazon Machine Image, AMI).

This is an interesting offering, allowing you to develop your applications into their framework and possibly port or build your Linux/Windows application services into their managed EC2 service.

Same caveat applies though, your apps and virtual machines could be tied to the AWS framework - so you loose your portability without significant re-engineering. on the flip-side they do seem to have the best defined commercial and support models and have been well established for a while with the S3 service.

Amazon's AWS blog is available here

Conclusion

Microsoft & VMWare are best positioned to pick up businesses from the corporate's who will likely have a large existing investment in code and infrastructure but are looking to take advantage of reduced cost and complexity by hosting portions of their app/infrastructure with a service-provider.

Microsoft & VMWare offerings easily lend themselves to this internal/external cloud architecture as you can build your own internal cloud using their off-the-shelf technology, something that isn't possible with AWS or Google. This is likely to be the preferred model for most large businesses who need to retain ownership of data and certain systems for legal/compliance reasons.

leveraging virtualization and commercial X2V or X2X conversion tools will make transition between internal and external clouds simple and quick - which gives organisations a lot of flexibility to operate their systems in the most cost/load-effective manner as well as retain detailed control of the application/server infrastructure but freed up from the day-day hardware/capacity management roles.

AWS/Google are ideal for Web 2.0 ,start-ups and the SME sector where there is typically no existing or large code-base investment that would need to be leveraged. For a greenfield implementation these services offer low start-up cost and simple development tools to build applications that would be complicated & expensive to build if you had to worry about and develop supporting infrastructure without significant up-front capital backing.

AWS/Google are also great for people wanting to build applications that need to scale to lots of users, but without a deep understanding of the required underlying infrastructure, whilst this is appealing to corporate's  I think the cost of porting and data ownership/risk issues will be a blocker for a significant amount of time.

Google Apps are a good entry point for the SME/start-up sector and startups, and could well draw people into building AppEngine services as the business grows in size and complexity, so we may see a drift towards this over time. Microsoft have a competing model and could leverage their established brand to win over customers if they can make the entry point free/cheap and cross-platform compatible, lots of those SME/start-ups are using Mac's or Netbooks for example.

I've had a problem recently with VM Workstation on my laptop, both with previous beta versions and the current RTM build. My Windows XP Virtual machine that I use to run Outlook via Unity (and indeed all VM's on my laptop) loose network connectivity via the host occasionally, this seems to affect VM's configured for both Bridged and NAT mode - they just can't ping anything. I do suspend/resume my Vista laptop quite a lot throughout the day, often with VM's running so I guess this is one of the main reasons it gets upset.

The only fix I've found so far is to restart the VMWare NAT Service a couple of times, and sometimes it won't stop so I have to kill the vmnat process via Task Manager (show processes for all users) and then restart the VMNat service via services under 'Administrative Tools' in control panel.

I've not managed to isolate this to a problem with specific VMWare or one of my 3rd party tools (AV/SSLVPN) yet, but will keep digging; let me know if you have similar problems.

I know of a similar, but different problem with the Trend OfficeScan Personal firewall service - but the workaround doesn't resolve the problem and seems independent of it.

Durante la fase di setup aveva infatti accettato il valore di default di 20gb e dopo un paio di mesi di utilizzo , non aveva più spazio per poter archiviare i files.

L'assistenza gli aveva prospettato come unica soluzione la distruzione della macchina virtuale ed una completa reinstallazione del sistema operativo hosted.

Soluzione inelegante.

Con una sessione di googling di appena 3 minuti ecco come ho operato per rendere Paco nuovamente felice.

Per prima cosa ho scaricato questo tools di sviluppo per vmware che si puo' trovare qui

Si tratta di una semplice gui per l'utility da riga di comando di vmware per il ridimensionamento e deframmentazione dei dischi virtuali .

Dobbiamo scegliere il disco da ridimensionare e lo dobbiamo cercare in user->documenti>macchine virtuali. Impostiamo la nuova dimensione del disco a 40 gb e lanciamo il tutto con il pulsante "go" . Il processo di ridimensionamento è un po' lungo e puo' durare fino a 20 minuti , è importante non spazientirsi e non spegnere il computer durante questa operazione.

Al termine dell'espansione avremo un disco di dimensioni maggiori , ma la partizione sarà sempre  della dimensione precedente.

Per ovviare a questo dobbiamo munirci di gparted , un tool open source per la manipolazione delle partizioni dei dischi .

Scarichiamo una live image a questo indirizzo .

Apriamo il pannello di controllo di vmware e configuriamo i seguenti parametri

Dobbiamo ora cambiare i parametri di boot della macchina virtuale ed è una cosa veramente difficile con vmware fusion 2.0 . Se con la versione 1.1.x era sufficiente inserire nel file di configurazione .vmx il parametro bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE" , questo parametro sembra non essere più riconosciuto con la versione 2.0 ( almeno a me non ha funzionato ) . Per riuscire a cambiare la sequenza di boot comunque basta avviare la macchina virtuale a pieno schermo , dare reboot e tenere pigiato fn+F2 .

Riavviato con il live cd di gparted ecco la schermata che ci appare :

La schermata ci mostra il disco principale /dev/sda1 e dopo aver premuto Ridimensiona/sposta la dimensione massima a cui possiamo espandere la nostra partizione. Con il mouse trasciniamo fino ad espandere la partizione sda1 al massimo consentito .

Al termine dell'operazione riavviamo la macchina virtuale e ci troveremo di fronte a questa schermata da panico

Ok niente panico . Rientriamo nel pannello di controllo di vmware fusion e selezioniamo come dispositivo cdrom il lettore fisico del nostro mac , inseriamo il cd di Windows Vista e facciamo il boot da cd .

Clicchiamo su next fino a fare apparire questa schermata

Scegliamo Repair your computer e a questa schermata :

Scegliamo Repair and Restart.

Windows riparerà il tutto ed al prossimo reboot il nostro windows virtuale sarà perfettamente attivo e performante , con tutto lo spazio di cui avremo bisogno .

Credits howtogeek e Only talking sense