CloudBolt Blog

The problem is consistent. Consistently difficult, that is. As an IT manager, how does one implement new technology in an otherwise running and static environment?  New technology decisions are not just difficult, but the range of questions that rise from thinking about implementation plans can seem daunting. 

Whether you’re talking about switching hardware vendors, or implementing something relatively new like network virtualization, how it’s implemented in your environment will often be more critical to the project’s success than the validity of the technology itself. 

Ideally, every environment would be brand new.  How many times have you asked yourself “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just scrap my current infrastructure and start over?”  Fundamentally, greenfield implementations like this are a good route to go for a number of reasons:

• They allow you to select the best-of-breed and most effective technology to solve the problem at hand
• You get the valuable opportunity to think about how the technology stack will scale in the future
• They allow for rapid change while the environment is being built
• Because there are few barriers, you have the opportunity to investigate other new and upcoming technologies, and you will have time to experiment 

A Cloud Manager provides significant value here.  Using one to unify the management of a lab environment allows the rapid integration of new technologies—technologies that your IT teams need to learn and gain experience with before implementing in the production environment.  Using a Cloud Manager eases the introduction of these technologies, and unified the management interface to make administration more predictable. These tools together help to mold processes and the IT organization into a more agile group.

In my mind, one of the core issues here is that too few IT teams are able to think outside of the box when it comes to implementing new tech. If greenfield implementations are easier than shoehorning new tech into your existing stack, why not give it a shot? Starting with a small base of gear and intelligently growing the installation over time is a great way to migrate capacity. I have an entire different blog post on how to migrate via attrition that is coming soon.  In the meantime, go ahead and identify a few pieces of hardware, install your preferred virtualization tool, download CloudBolt C2, and start piecing together your future architecture.  Once C2 is installed, you’ll be able to quickly layer in additional technologies like Data Center Automation, Network Virtualization, and even other virtualization or Public Cloud resources seamlessly.  

Happy integrating!

We're keeping busy over here at CloudBolt.  To prove it, our engineers have released C2 v3.6.1 with a bounty of new capabilities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS for the acronym-inclined) support continues to get better and better in C2.  We understand that many users will want to import the existing state of an AWS account, so now C2 will import a list of all the running virtual instances in a customer's AWS accounts.  

Happy that you're able to provision servers quicker than ever?  Want to brag about it?  C2 now presents users that ability to post a Facebook message bragging about how well your IT environment is run after they provsion a virtual machine using CloudBolt. Of course, administrators can toggle that feature on and off as needed/required.

What happens when something goes wrong with a VM deployment? v3.6.1 now gives you more information on the status of an order, and will tell you more about errors from the underlying virtualization or configuration management.

While we'd love to say that bugs never happen, the fact is that all software has bugs.  We grabbed our fly swatter and fixed a handful of issues in this release, including UI rendering fixes for Internet Explorer, situations where the remote console feature failed, and some corrected verbiage in various status messages.

Ready to upgrade?  Hit up our support portal (login required) for details.  Want to kick the tires?  Request a download now!

We're happy to announce the release of CloudBolt C2 v3.6.0!

Building on the ground-breaking Network Virtualization capabilites we released in v3.5.0, we've created the ability to directly manage network virtualization-provided layer 3 networking (i.e. routing) directly from C2.

C2 also now supports KVM-QEMU, further expanding the supported virtualization platforms that it centrally manages.

We've also added many more visual cues throught the user interface. You'll now see appropriate vendor icons for items including resource handlers like VMware vSphere and vCenter, AWS and QEMU, as well as Operating Systems, Configuration Management systems (Puppet, Chef, HP Server Automation), and Network Virtualization (Nicira by VMware).

Do you have a large number of users, but don't want to connect C2 to LDAP or Active Directory? Not a problem anymore, as C2 can now import users from a csv file.

From the beginning, CloudBolt enables plain old virtualzation environments to provide resources in a Cloud-ified manner: virtualization becomes Infrastructure as a Service and Platfform as a Service.  Strating with v3.6.0, we enable users to request multiple servers from multiple environments.  Previously, they could request multiple servers, but only from on envronment at a time.

We've also invested a bunch of time in performance tuning the UI, including adding capabilities to filter the server list by the OS family a server belongs to.

C2 can also now query a Configuration Management system to determine which virtual machines in your environment are also managed by a supported CM system so that C2 can enable more fine-grained application and life-cycle management of those VMs.

Ready to upgrade?  Hit up our support portal (login required) for details.  Want to kick the tires?  Request a download now!

Michael Grant over at CloudScaling.com penned a pretty interesting article asking what CIOs can learn from Shadow IT.  Dave Linthicum came to a similar conclusion in a blog post back in August. I think that the most interesting part of the article is the claim that “Shadow IT is less a threat, but more of a positive force for changing the way IT is delivered in the enterprise.”

I’m not sure that many CIOs would tend to agree with that statement, if for no other reason that the risk to business be it real or perceived.  CIOs certainly see what can be done, but the implementation of a public cloud-like model often stands in juxtaposition from how their IT Organization was built to operate.  It’s not just a drastic change to the technology model, but also a groundbreaking adjustment to how the team operates on a day-to-day basis.  For that reason alone, it’s not as easy as just deciding to alter the resource provisioning and request model.  There are real tools that are needed, and few are able to effectively offer the needed capabilities without actually replacing existing technologies.

CIOs need to learn how to benefit from the decisions made by shadow IT.

As Michael correctly claims, strategic CIOs absolutely get that the opportunity for cloud computing lies not just with the technology, but also with the technology’s ability to enable IT organization transformation to be more responsive to the business. Organizations can even create new revenue opportunities.  Selecting the correct tools to enable this transformation is the key.

CIOs need to select the tools that allow them to both most fully leverage existing capabilities and expertise.  There is little value migrating away from proven technologies that organizations have already spent significant sums procuring and implementing.  Of course, I’m talking about a Cloud Manager here.  A good one needs to integrate with, not replace existing technology.  Once a Cloud Manager is deployed, CIOs will have the flexibility needed to make additional technology selections.  Want to implement OpenStack?  Want to pull in entire application stacks and present them as PaaS?  How about leveraging an updated configuration management/data center automation tool?  No sweat.  The right Cloud Manager helps CIOs get there.  

Finally, what I will agree with, however, is the notion that CIOs can learn from the delivery models of Public Cloud-based compute, in order to alter their way of doing business.  In fact, they have to.  IT organizations are under an amazing amount of pressure to perform.  Even in organizations that have effectively curtailed the usage of shadow IT, the IT organization just looks bad when it takes them three weeks (or more!) to deploy a server for use by someone in the business.

Linthicum sums it up pretty well: 

“I do not advocate that IT give up control and allow business units to adopt any old technology they want. However, IT needs to face reality: For the past three decades or so, corporate IT has been slow on the uptake around the use of productive new technologies." 

Cloud has the ability to drastically alter that model.  In a way, IT organizations can’t just get out of the way and let their users do whatever they want, but if they don’t learn from those cues, they’ll need to find other employment.

With an effective Cloud Manager, such as CloudBolt C2, CIOs can present the entirety of their virtualization resources as private cloud, and enable public cloud resource consumption as well, all while ensuring that IT management has control over governance, and total visibility into the cost impacts of various deployments.  For CIOs that wish to remain relevant, it’s a must.

Over at Information Week, Jim Ditmore discusses how advances in CPU power efficiency will eventually save businesses significant data center costs.

It’s certainly a compelling case, but there’s an assumption being made—that VM count will not grow at the same pace as the gains in hardware efficiency.

Many customers I speak with are certainly excited about the prospects of more efficient data centers, both in terms of CPU performance and efficiency.  One common problem they’re butting up against, however, is that of VM sprawl. Unused or under-utilized VMs in an environment have a significant impact on the overall efficiency numbers that an IT organization can expect to see.  If VM count increases at the same rate as the processor/efficiency curve, then the net result will be as it is now: the amount of required hardware to sustain the existing load will increase. 

To his credit, Jim comes close to calling this point out: 

“You'll have to employ best practices in capacity and performance management to get the most from your server and storage pools, but the long-term payoff is big. If you don't leverage these technologies and approaches, your future is the red and purple lines on the chart: ever-rising compute and data center costs over the coming years.”

Efficiency doesn't matter when VM Sprawl consumes additional capacity provided by more powerful and efficient CPUs.

But that’s still making the assumption that It organizations are well-prepared to effectively solve the issue of VM sprawl.  For many of the customers I work with, that’s a pretty big assumption.  IT Organizations are well aware of the impact of sprawl, but have few tools to effectively combat it in a reliable and consistent manner.  Additionally, the sustained effort required to maintain a neat-and-tidy virtualization environment (at least regarding sprawl) is often great, placing much pressure on an IT organization that’s likely already seen as lacking agility and responsiveness to the business.

The default solution, which of course is rife with issues, to this struggle is well known, and relatively easy:  Throw more hardware at the problem.  Or push workloads to the public cloud.  Either way, it’s just a Band-Aid, at best and does nothing to contain costs into the future.

The only way for IT organizations to benefit in an ongoing basis from the processor performance/efficiency curve is to effectively control sprawl in the virtual environment.

And how does one do that?  With a Cloud Manager like CloudBolt C2.

I provided some background into how cloud models—be they public or private—break both traditional software licensing models, but in some cases, the software licenses themselves.  Despite the growing pervasiveness of cloud-based compute, I was amazed that there are not just cloud-incompatible license agreements, but also some licenses actually prohibit the running of certain software in the cloud.

There’s a term that’s applicable here: BYOSL (Bring Your Own Software License).  Vendors who understand a cloud-centric IT model understand that you need to be able to use their software in cloud-centric models if that’s what your organization wants to do.  However, many large vendors (it won’t be hard to find which ones I’m talking about here) take specific steps to limit BYOSL (just to name a few I came across):

• Require specific understanding of underlying hardware architectures or processor specifications
• Require licensing based on the physical, not virtual host
• Mandate customers run vendor-provided license tracking, further complicating multi-location or multi-environment installations
• Prohibit software from being virtualized
• Force purchase of higher-cost public cloud resources which rope in the underlying OS license regardless of customer license availability
• Force purchase of “License Mobility” options in order to run software in public clouds

In short, software license management in the cloud is a mess.  What’s really odd is that those large vendors also claim to know about cloud.  My resulting questions to you are simple:

• Are you relying on cloud strategy from a company that actively uses their software licensing to discourage or prevent you from moving to a more open cloud-centric IT model?
•  Are they leveraging their licenses to force you down the path they want you to?

My subtext:  If you’re listening to intently to those large vendors, the answer to both is “yes”.  Proceed with caution if your primary cloud strategy comes from your hardware, middleware, database, or even OS vendor.

Be sure to get the full story from vendors and how software licenses will work in the cloud.

In some cases, I can understand why these companies believe that licensing software based on the type of physical CPU, or the count of virtual CPUs, or even the type of cloud the application is running in.  However, more often than not, vendors are just trying to protect market share or revenue.  In other situations, perhaps there are other requirements, such as performance, or hardware that present troubles when run virtualized.  But that’s a support issue, not a licensing one.  Otherwise, their restrictions make little sense.

Vendor licenses that restrict where purchased software can and cannot run are incompatible with the current trajectory of IT.  Vendors need to understand that there is little fundamental difference between applications running on an Amazon EC2 instance in Virginia vs. a Google Compute instance in California, vs. a Rackspace instance in Texas vs. your own VMware-based vCenter cluster in your data center.  

Cloud management can help to solve this problem, too.  If software vendors are concerned about protecting revenue, they have no impetus to alter a license model in a way that will save customers money but be totally untraceable.  IT is absolutely heading toward usage-based accounting and costing of license usage, but currently, vendors possess no reliable way to effectively track that usage.  Cloud complicates that for them.  A vendor-agnostic tool that delivers accurate license usage counts in real-time ensures IT organizations remain compliant, and gives software vendors a little peace that they’re not missing out on revenue, but also provides IT organizations the tool necessary to much more effectively utilize software licenses. 

And for those software vendors that are behind the times?  They must adapt, or they’ll be (or rather, continue to be) pummeled out of existence.

I happened to catch Brandon Butler’s article talking about the replacement choices customers have now that VMware’s Lab Manager product is being discontinued.  There has been no shortage of vendors to quickly put their hands up with claims such as “no net new costs” or offering new cloud service provider options to help those customers move to something new and better.  Some of these solutions still require you to upgrade from vCenter 4 to 5.  Others are overly complicated, or require you to use something different than vCenter-based virtualization altogether.

Your Lab Manager installation will be far less functional (or colorful) in a few months.

Beyond self-service provisioning, this is a great opportunity for a VMware Lab Manager customer to extend their capabilities while:

• requiring a minimum of both effort and changes to their process
• allowing the organization the option of utilizing public cloud resources 

Too good to be true?  Hardly!

For starters, CloudBolt Command and Control (C2) is amazingly easy to install and configure.  Download the virtual appliance, import it into your vCenter cluster (it even works on version 4!), and you’re off to the races.  With most installation and configurations taking less than 20 minutes, CloudBolt C2 can start deploying instances in your vCenter environment almost immediately.  Not only can your users easily provision their resources using CloudBolt C2’s self service interface, but you’ll get the easy ability to seamlessly use public cloud resources, if desired. 

CloudBolt C2 is much more capable than that, too…  but I’ll save the best for last after a recap, of course…

• You have VMware Lab Manager
• You have vCenter
• You need to rapidly and repeatedly provision instances

Of course, CloudBolt C2 do all of that, but we’ve got a special treat.  CloudBolt C2 Virtualization Edition is free to use for up to 100 managed VMs.  I’m not even saying no net new cost.  I’m saying no cost.  How’s that for an option? 

In a recent posting, David Linthicum discusses how a Gartner survey reports CIOs are saying more now than ever that cloud is a top priority.  He continues to say these same CIOs are at risk if they’re not moving their organizations toward Cloud Computing.  As he says “No surprise there.”

CIOs - Either figure out a way to leverage cloud technology, or get into real estate

I think that there are several thoughts worth digging into a little more:

• The average CIO’s IT organization is under a full-frontal assault by public cloud technologies which show users that a highly agile IT organization is not only possible, but it’s happening right now. 
• Even if a business is not investigating or actively using public cloud, internal users still understand how quickly they should be able to get new resources delivered.
• Groups that already have either public cloud deployments, or public cloud/other internal deployments, the IT organization’s ability to rapidly deliver new resources is key.  Over time, those organizations will look more like broker/providers as they gain significant agility from structural changes, and will be able to support both public and private deployments based on what’s best for the requested workload.
• Any realistic cloud deployment plan has to include updates to process and procedures—i.e. you have to modify the organizational structure to be successful. 

It’s great that CIOs are (again) making a verbal commitment to investigate and implement cloud technologies, but as Linthicum says, “I suspect some CIOs did not respond to the Gartner survey honestly and will continue to kick plans to develop a cloud strategy further down the road.”

So how do you even get started?  My recommendation to CIOs:  Start by identifying some low-hanging fruit.  Deploy a Cloud Management Platform technology that enables cloud services such as IaaS and PaaS using your existing technology pool.  Then, pick a particularly savvy part of your user base, and push them into a IaaS/PaaS model using a modicum of surplus resources and this new technology.  As you work out the kinks, expand the project to cover more groups and workloads.  It’s a winning model, and I believe that many of these groups will find it considerably easier implement or expand cloud implementations and projects. 

In the end, Dave’s got it right…  Cloud might seem difficult, but I’m guessing that the real estate market is tougher.

If I were to ask you how many copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux you had in your virtual and physical environment, would you be able to answer that?  Not running RHEL?  Then how many copies of Windows Server are you running?  Oracle?  What about SQLServer?  Or JBoss?  Furthermore, how many of those licenses are deployed on virtual machines that are not actually running right now?

License management in the cloud can feel like handcuffs if not done correctly.

To determine these numbers, you can go out and do a large survey across every environment you have, adding up the licenses as you discover them.  Next, manually consolidate that information from all your different teams, and you’ll end up with one or more large spreadsheets that have all of the information you need to properly handle license negotiations with your vendors. Your counts will be roughly accurate until your admins provision some more instances, de-provision others, or install additional software on existing VMs. In short—and let’s be honest here—you have very little knowledge of your exact license usage real-time, or control over who is using them. A spreadsheet created manually, even assuming it’s 100% accurate, is simply a snapshot in time that is subject to rapid deprecation.

License management in the cloud has two parts: 

1. You have to be able to identify, track, manage and control the licenses.
2. You have to account for the different ways in which vendors license their software.

A discussion about software license management has to address how to create a model that fully addresses the entire lifecycle of software licenses, from identifying and tracking them to managing and controlling usage. I’ll discuss how various vendors need to license software in a future article.

First, let’s talk about the method you use to track software licenses, account for variations and keep up-to-date snapshots. Essentially, how do you create a fluid model that validates accurate counts and identifies usage without an ongoing effort? Tracking, identifying, managing, and controlling usage of licenses becomes much more important in the cloud because inaccurate counts and loss of control over license usage can significantly impact license agreements and operating expenses. Additionally, working across multiple cloud implementations can require investing much more time to manually identify, track, manage and control usage of software licenses.

It is clear that tracking software licenses has to move beyond an Excel spreadsheet or other manual systems, especially in the cloud.

The cloud causes us to rethink IT management as we’ve come to know it. To do it effectively requires advanced management tools—tools that solve problems in a manner that is conducive to your technology and process—but that also open the door for your IT teams to be more agile, and more responsive to the business that your team serves. Effective license management in the cloud is one specific area where most every Virtualization or Cloud Managemement (we just call it a Cloud Manager) vendor will totally fail you. Only one Cloud Manager product can effectively track those resources as they’re provisioned and decommissioned, and still allow you to dynamically adjust the method in which those licenses are tracked.

CloudBolt Software recognizes that software licenses only provide value when they’re running. CloudBolt C2 is the only Cloud Manager that provides a means to leverage utilization of licenses by accurately identifying, tracking, managing and controlling usage. For example, does a provisioned license on a stopped VM count against the pool total? C2 lets IT admin set those set or change those software policies, and control usage of software applications, and licenses. C2 can be used to control everything in the resource pool on demand, and fully manage the entire software license lifecycle: identify, track, allocate, provision, recycle or decommission.

Built-in license management in the C2 Enterprise Edition makes it possible to seamlessly and effortlessly track license usage across environments and clouds.  You will know immediately what your provisioned and actual turned-on license count is whenever you check. You can even enable the tracking and usage of different software versions in your environment. With a powerful and customizable tool like C2, the possibilities are limitless. Don’t fly blind with your license usage. With CloudBolt C2, you’ll finally have complete situational awareness, and will be flying blind no more.

Up next:  Software license agreements (SLAs) from different vendors have a big effect on how you track those licenses and how you use them in the cloud.

Call it what you'd like: Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Manager, or even a Virtualization Manager, but one fact remains-- technology that unifies the management and provisioning of your IT environment is here to stay.  If you're not already looking at one to help reduce I&O expenses, you should be. 

At a high level, Cloud Management Platforms such as CloudBolt Software's Command and Control (C2) provide a layer of management on top of existing virtual environments.  We drive a greater value from existing virtualization and data enter automation/configuration management tools by unifying the management and visibility.  A world-class Cloud Management Platform provides visibility and control of your IT environment mapped to your business via a single pane-of-glass.  That sort of cohesive internal management makes IT more agile and can lower costs.

Of course, we can't stop there.  In a recent Gartner poll, 47% of IT groups planned to have some type of hybrid cloud deployment by 2015-- so any reasonably capable Cloud Management Platform must also provide the same level of management and oversight over public cloud instances and deployments.

Together, these capabilities allow IT line of business owners to rapidly transform their organization into a more agile part service-provider and part cloud broker.

This, according to Gartner, is the likely path of successful IT organizations that are under a near-constant assault from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.  There is no area of business IT that is safe from this attack.  Public cloud vendors in the US and other countries are even now racing to stand up government-only environments, which meet the copious requirements—which often amount to pages of standards required to host many government applications.

Transformation must happen.

To me, the conclusion for any business leader in IT seems to be crystal clear:  transform or be transformed.  This is where effective cloud management comes into play.  By all reasonable accounts, you're either already virtualizing, or have virtualized most workloads capable of being hosted in this model.  The task does not end there.  You must transform your IT organization to be more agile-- more able to respond to the needs of the greater business in less time, and lower cost than the big public providers are able to accomplish.  The only path to this situation is effective cloud management.  

It's a little more complicated than just providing a self-service portal to your users.  There is still significant amounts of policy that need to be updated and adapted to a cloud-enteric world, be it private, public, or hybrid.  You need to continue to provide end-to-end life cycle management, and must be able to deliver the applications that end users need, while doing so in a manner that is controlled and well understood.  

Our recommendation?  Layer in a cloud management technology that will work with what you have in place today.  This way, you have the ability to adopt new technology and adjust your processes gradually, and as it makes sense, vs. the infrequently successful and high cost approach of large infrastructure deployment and vendor lock-in.  Gradually molding your business processes into a cloud-centric model produces a higher success rate, as it provides you the ability to gain immediate benefit: getting resources to users more rapidly, but while also allowing you to plan how best to further implement your newfound flexibility.  This approach solves many common needs:

• Move dev/test to public cloud resources?  
• Implement resource quotas? Modify approval processes?
• Make more public cloud resources available as needed?
• Implement charge or show-back accounting for resource consumption?   

Have a look at our Cloud Management Platform.  We think you'll find it not only has industry-leading capabilities, but will be easier to use and integrate into your existing processes than literally anything else out there, and at a CapEx and OpEx that cannot be beat by anyone in the industry.  But don't take our word for it-- download it for free and get started today.