SURPRISE !! VMware Will Join OpenStack

Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members.

Just in time for VMworld, VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold member, along with Intel and NEC, according to a post on the OpenStack Foundation Wiki. The applications for membership are on the agenda of the August 28 OpenStack Foundation meeting.

A year ago, a VMware-OpenStack hookup would have been seen as unlikely. When Rackspace and NASA launched the OpenStack Project more than two years ago, it was seen as a competitive response to VMware’s server virtualization dominance inside company data centers and to Amazon’s heft in public cloud computing. Many tech companies including but not limited to Rackspace, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft saw VMware as a threat and were bound and determined to keep the company from extending its virtualization lock into the cloud.

But, things change. VMware’s surprise acquisition of Nicira and DynamicOps last month, showed there might be a thaw in the air. For one thing, Nicira is an OpenStack player. By bringing Nicira and DynamicOps into the fold, VMware appeared to be much more willing to work with non-VMware-centric infrastructure, as GigaOM’s Derrick Harris reported at the time.

This is a symbolic coup for OpenStack and its biggest boost since IBM and Red Hat officially joined as Platinum members in April. And it’s especially important since Citrix, a virtualization rival to VMware undercut it’s own OpenStack participation last April by pushing CloudStack as an alternative open source cloud stack.

OpenStack Gold members, which include Cloudscaling, Dell, MorphLabs, Cisco Systems, and NetApp, pay a fee pegged at 0.25 percent of their revenue — at least $50,000 but capped at $200,000 according to the foundation wiki. (VMware’s fee will be $66,666, according to the application, submitted by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, which is linked on the wiki post.) Platinum members — AT&T, Canonical, HP, Rackspace, IBM, Nebula, Red Hat, and SUSE – pay $500,000 per year with a 3-year minimum commitment.

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Original Source : Gigaom.com

Introduction to Virtualisation - VMware

This video webcast is designed to help those with little to no virtualization experience understand why virtualization and VMware are so important to driving down both capital and operational costs


Introduction to Virtualisation - VMware


View the slides here


SOURCE : Infoworld Newsletter

 

AWS Cost Allocation For Customer Bills

A good new feature by AWS to help customers keep control over costs and well put blog by Jeff...

Growth Challenges

You probably know how it goes when you put AWS to work for your company. You start small -- one Amazon S3 bucket for some backups, or one Amazon EC2 instance hosting a single web site or web application. Things work out well and before you know it, word of your success spreads to your team, and they start using it too. At some point the entire company jumps on board, and you become yet another AWS success story.

As your usage of AWS grows, you stop charging it to your personal credit card and create an account for your company. You use IAM to control access to the AWS resources created and referenced by each of the applications.

There's just one catch -- with all of those departments, developers, and applications making use of AWS from a single account, allocating costs to projects and to budgets is difficult because we didn't give you the necessary information. Some of our customers have told us that this cost allocation process can consume several hours of their time each month.

Cost Allocation Via Tagging

Extending the existing EC2 tagging system (keys and values), we are launching a new cost allocation system to make it easy for you to tag your AWS resources and to access billing data that is broken down by tag (or tags).

With this release you can tag the following types of AWS resources for cost allocation purposes:

• S3 buckets
• EC2 Instances
• EBS volumes
• Reserved Instances
• Spot Instance requests
• VPN connections
• Amazon RDS DB Instances
• AWS CloudFormation Stacks

Here's all that you need to do:

1. Decide on Your Tagging Model - Typically, the key name identifies some axis that you care about and the key values identify the points along the axis. You could have a tag named Department, with values like Sales, Marketing, Development, QA, Engineering, and so forth. You could choose to align this with your existing accounting system. You can use multiple tags for cost allocation purposes, each of which represents an additional dimension of usage. If each department runs several AWS-powered applications (or stores lots of data in S3), you could add an Application tag, with the values representing all of the applications that are running on behalf of the department. You can use the tags to create your own custom hierarchy.
   
2. Tag Your Resources - Apply the agreed-upon tags to your existing resources, and arrange to apply them to newly created resources as they appear. You can add up to ten tags per resource. You can do this from the AWS Management Console, the service APIs, the command line, or through Auto Scaling:
   
   
   
   You can use CloudFormation to provision a set of related AWS resources and easily tag them.
   
3. Tell AWS Which Tags Matter -Now you need to log in to the AWS Portal, sign up for billing reports, and tell the AWS billing system which tag keys are meaningful for cost allocation purposes by using the Manage Cost Allocation Report option:
   
   
   
   
   You can choose to include certain tags and to exclude others.
   
4. Access Billing Data - The estimated billing data is generated multiple times per day and the month-end charges are generated within three days of the end of the month. You can access this data by enabling programmatic access and arranging for it to be delivered to your S3 bucket.

Data Processing

The Cost Allocation Report will contain one additional column for each of the tag keys that you selected in step 3. The corresponding tag value (if any) will be included in the appropriate column of the data:

In the Cost Allocation Report above, the relevant keys were Owner, Stack, Cost Center, Application, and Project. The column will be blank if the AWS resource doesn't happen to have a value for the key. Data transfer and request charges are also included for tagged resources. In effect, these charges inherit the tags from the associated resource.

Once you have this data, you can feed it in to your own accounting system or you can slice and dice it any way you'd like for reporting or visualization purposes. For example, you could create a pivot table and aggregate the data along one or more dimensions:

 

 

SOURCE

 

Identifying Workloads for the Cloud

Superb Information by Rightscale... Read on...


Identifying workloads to move to the cloud can be tricky. You have dozens or hundreds of apps running in your organization, and now that you’ve seen the operational efficiencies and agility available to you in the cloud, you’re tempted to move as many of them to the cloud as quickly as possible. As you’ll see in the examples below, cloud computing is indeed a good fit for many common workloads.

I firmly believe that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is for every organization, but not for every application. The reality is that some applications just aren’t a good fit for the ephemeral and dynamic environment of the cloud. Still others have very specific environmental requirements that make them ill suited. Read on as I explore more about what you should consider before earmarking a workload for the cloud.

3 Quick Criteria for a Good Fit

While each application is unique, and it’s important to apply your own lens when evaluating your cloud strategy, there are some rules of thumb that should help identify applications that are winning choices for cloud:

Unpredictable load or potential for explosive growth: Whenever your app is public facing, it has the potential to be wildly popular. Social games, eCommerce sites, blogs and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products fall into this category. If you release the next Farmville™ and your traffic spikes, you can scale up and down in the cloud according to demand, avoiding a “success disaster” and never over-provisioning your infrastructure.

Partial utilization: When traffic fluctuates – say with daily cycles of playing or shopping, or with occasional, compute-intensive batch processing – you can spin up extra servers in the cloud during the peaks and spin them down afterwards.

Easy parallelization: Applications like media streaming can be scaled horizontally and are generally a good use case for the cloud, because they scale out rather than up.
Finally, keep in mind the ideal of cloud computing as a way of using multiple resource pools – public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, your internal data center – not choosing one over the others. RightScale lets you see and manage all of them through one interface with a single set of tools and best practices.

3 Ideal Cloud Workloads