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The Cloud Management User Interface Last Mile

Posted by Justin Nemmers

8/19/13 8:26 AM

Cloud Manager User interfaces are difficult to create.  Not only does every vendor out there have their own ideas, but the sheer number of UI toolkits available mean that even if two vendors have similar ideas, the end result will look totally different based on the underlying technology.

UI elements diverse use

This issue only exacerbated when you start to look at the various management tools in use by the typical IT management environment.  An IT admin will often interface with half a dozen systems on a daily basis, each with its own UI, its own way of doing things, and its own workflows that must be separately understood.  It’s complicated.  And it just makes supporting a persnickety pile of users that much more difficult.

The user interface last mile is the point at which a cloud manager’s user interface effectively abstracts the various underlying technologies it manages.  The broader the supported underlying technologies are, the better the UI needs to be at presenting those capabilities in a sane, predictable manner.  Connecting with numerous different types of underlying technologies only makes the problem more difficult.

Creating a User Interface is hard work.  Creating a good User Interface requires even more significant effort, training, and understanding of how the design of the interface relates to the problem it’s trying to solve.  Form follows function, but in order to effectively create something, one must really understand the function.

Different designers, different perspective

Understanding the function alone isn’t really enough, though.  Different UI designers might perceive the functionality in different ways, creating significant difficulties for how the UI is implemented.  For starters, the designer’s level of experience with the target environment is an issue.  Terminology is another area that can cause difficulty.  Different designers may have a different understanding of what the commonly accepted terminology is- for instance, the difference between software licenses being “used” vs. “deployed” is pretty important, as they’re two different things.

Where the designer’s primary experience originates from also makes a difference in the UI that they will produce.  Without the credibility and experience in the data center, the resulting UI can be confusing. 

Vendor Bias

An infrastructure or other large software vendor might very well use the UI as a tool to bias the end user experience toward a specific technology or solution.  For instance, in a cloud manager, a large whole-suite vendor is likely to ensure that the cloud manager integrates better, and has better UI functionality for other technologies in their stack like virtualization, orchestration, and configuration management, but chose not to put the same effort into integration with 3rd party vendor products.  This approach causes two problems:

  • Reduces customer choice
  • Makes it difficult to add additional technologies as needed

This bias is an important thing to take into account when making a technology decision.  Vendor X may have a good product, but when it claims to be unbiased, it’s probably not true.

Disparate technology classes

In order for a UI to be effective, it’s got to do a good job of componentizing and standardizing display items and values in a manner so that it can more fully abstract the underlying complexity from end users, who generally don’t care that Applications in Puppet are called “Classes”, “Recipes” in Chef, and then just “Applications” in HP Server Automation.  A well-written UI will make the right decision, and present users and IT administrators with something that makes sense, irrespective of what the underlying technology might call it.  This also helps with extensibility, as IT Administrators can implement new technologies without the worry that they’ll have to fight with end users about changing the nomenclature in an environment.

Different use cases

Both IT administrators and end users are target users of cloud managers.  Each of these user types, however, has a different understanding of what’s happening.  A good UI will effectively abstract the underpinnings from users, but perhaps make those same underlying components visible to administrators. 

Different users can also have different understanding levels.  A UI cannot be so strict as to mandate each and every user sees the same thing at all times.  Nearly every UI element needs to be customizable to effectively mold itself to match the user’s understanding. 

A cloud manager UI also needs to strike a balance between the potential for deeper-level administrative tasks (such as managing VM migration between hosts, or creating a new application in a CM tool) and general usability.  As cloud managers are just layers above the existing tools, there are things that will always make more sense to use the underlying tool to do.  From an administrative point-of-view, not every possible option and capability can be exposed.  This is important because while a good cloud manager UI will never be intended to accomplish every little underlying management capability, there needs to be a strong balance between breadth of capability and ease-of-use.  If the balance is off in either direction, administrators and users alike will be frustrated with the interface. 

The difficulties of open source UIs

Many open source tools come with UIs these days, but they end up falling into the categories above.  Project teams tasked with building and maintaining these projects are often employed by different companies.  Unification doesn’t happen too frequently in these projects.  Even two products from the same company can have wildly different look and feel based on who originally developed it.

This leads to a natural conflict of “your UI or mine”.  There ends up being inherent conflict between competing UIs, often leaving customers to choose between UIs depending on what task needs to be accomplished.  This, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose, as there is no true single pane of glass management. 

The Last Mile

All of these points come together to make a case for a tool that has both a powerful and flexible UI.  A UI in this case needs to do a few things to be useful:

  • Integrate with a wide range of technologies
  • Independently integrate with each technology class
  • Provide a mechanism to centrally access common tasks
  • Intuitively offer appropriate choices to various users

These aren’t trivial tasks to accomplish.  Getting them right takes significant skills, expertise, and credibility in the data center to get the use cases correct.

In short, it’s not for the faint-of-heart, and not everyone can do it.  Have a look at CloudBolt C2 to see how the C2 User Interface is the most intuitive and powerful interface available in a cloud manager.

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Topics: IT Challenges, Cloud Manager, Implementation

The 5 Cloud Management Vendor Categories: Where Does Your Vendor Fit?

Posted by John Menkart

4/8/13 3:51 PM

With Cloud Managers assuming such a critical role for IT groups, it is easy to understand why every existing IT vendor wants to supply a Cloud Manager that favors their core products in the roll out of an enterprise private/hybrid Cloud.

cloud manager chose wisely
Where does your Cloud Manager fit amonngst the available choices?

The Gartner Group has studied private/hybrid cloud management extensively and has summarized the space as having five (5) categories of vendors with ‘solutions’ for Cloud Management, as described by Gartner in their research note titled “Cloud Management Platform Vendor Landscape” Published 5 September 2012:

1) Traditional IT Operations Management Vendors

This segment of the Cloud Manager market includes vendors whose primary focus for management has been targeted at traditional physical and virtual infrastructures.  (BMC, HP SW, IBM, CA and others)

2) Infrastructure Stack Vendors

In this segment of the Cloud Management market are providers of the virtual infrastructure resources (Citrix Systems [Citrix], Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware) —the hypervisor and basic virtualization management. While some of these vendors offer some multiplatform (hypervisor or OS) capability, their expertise and deep integration are for their own platforms.

3) Fabric Based Infrastructure Vendors

Most hardware infrastructure vendors offer cloud management software, which enables them to sell private and hybrid cloud solutions and not just the features and benefits of their hardware. (HP, IBM, Cisco, etc.). Think wholly contained racks of equipment that include storage, compute, network, and software, sold in pre-integrated chunks.

4) Open Source

These projects or vendors provide an open-source-based abstraction layer for resource management. They provide basic CMP functionality and generally provide a northbound API so that other vendors/independent software vendors (ISVs) can develop and build enriched CMP capabilities.

5) Best-of-Breed Point Solutions Vendors

The point solution Cloud Management vendors, which include mostly smaller Cloud Management companies, potentially are able to introduce innovation to the market. This is primarily because these vendors don't have legacy products that have to be integrated to build their solution.

 

Examining these categories some concerns about vendor motivations and the resulting limits placed on customers adopting some of these solutions arise.

The first three categories of vendors have a clear mission to maintain and advance the dependency that IT organizations have on their core technology.  A primary reason for adopting Cloud Management is enabling flexibility for future IT choices, yet selection of a Cloud Management solution from vendors in categories 1 through 3 have effect of restricting choice and flexibility for the customer due to biased technology support.

In order to gain full functionality from the offering, all the vendors in these three categories mandate use of a suite of software and/or hardware from the vendors’ own portfolio. These requirements will hamper the organization that adopts a Cloud Management solution.  Rather than being free over time to adopt new technologies like Network Virtualization, IT organizations will be limited to continuing to feed their ‘Cloud Management” vendor large sums of the IT budget for software and hardware, ensuring they are now ‘locked-in” as a result of a biased Cloud Management approach. These large vendors have a term for what they are trying to achieve with the customer. It’s ‘share of wallet’.  Any vendor looking for more share of your wallet is not going to make it easy or flexible for your enterprise to adopt products or technologies that they do not provide.

Gartner views the fourth category (open source) with promise noting: These solutions “provide basic Cloud Management functionality and generally provide a northbound API so that other vendors/independent software vendors (ISVs) can develop and build enriched CMP capabilities.”

The options in this category are tools like OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus.  The level of immaturity of the technologies in this space are the reason Gartner sees the need for an API so other more refined and mature Cloud Managers can abstract the users from these specific tools. By avoiding direct use of the cloud frameworks’ UI, the organization can use a more complete Cloud Manager to integrate the Cloud pilots undertaken with Open Source tools using only a broader cloud approach by the overall enterprise.

The additional concern with respect to these open source frameworks is that they are developed as a monolithic technology stack and bring unique technology such as server virtualization and configuration management. Rather than being truly vendor and technology agnostic, they represent a considerable integration effort and encourage costly rip and replace.

So that leaves only one category of Cloud Management vendor that doesn’t approach the IT organizations’ problem as an opportunity to ‘lock-in’ the customer, or is not too immature to deliver organizational value today.

The “Point Solutions” category is one where real unbiased solutions will be able to emerge. Like CloudBolt, other vendors in this category must deliver value in their own right. The products must account for heterogeneous resources in an IT environment and must stand on their own when considered as a solution.

The range of vendors offering independent solutions for cloud management is extensive and the solutions are diverse. From products limited to organizations using only virtualization to full-on enterprise offerings like CloudBolt Command & Control (C2) that cohesively manage and coordinate hardware provisioning, virtual servers, virtual networking, configuration and automation (HPSA, Chef, Puppet, etc.).

I am sure I speak for all the point solutions vendors when I suggest that; “selection of a Cloud Management solution must be made with eyes wide open with respect to each vendors’ desired outcome. Increased “Share of Wallet” is not a technical objective.  Only when your Cloud Management vendor is fully aligned with your organizations will you be able to deliver to the enterprise the desired technical and business flexibility.”

Want to learn more about CloudBolt C2? Download our Product Overview! 

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Topics: Management, Cloud Manager, Gartner, John, Challenges, Vendors

CloudBolt Releases C2 v3.7.0

Posted by Justin Nemmers

4/8/13 9:03 AM

On behalf of the entire team here at CloudBolt, I’m excited to announce the release of CloudBolt C2 version 3.7.0. 

We continue to pull out all of the development stops in CloudBolt C2.  This latest version adds numerous improvements, and new features to help reduce the burden of IT and cloud management.

C2 updates in v3.7.0 make AWS easier

Amazon Web Services (AWS) support continues to strengthen.  Now, CloudBolt C2 will auto-create region-specific environments based on administrator-selected regions for EC2.  C2 will also list out the various AMIs admins want to make accessible to their users.  The best part is that this will work for any EC2-provided AMI, as well as customer-specific AMIs.  C2 also now provides for richer discover of running instances in EC2, so the server list and individual server views in C2 contain even more information about the related EC2 instance.  Keep your eyes peeled, because we’re going to continue adding capabilities to the AWS connector.

We believe that Network Virtualization from folks like Nicira by VMware will drastically change how IT organizations manage enterprises.  Our engineers have now enabled Network Virtualization support in the KVM connector, meaning administrators can now create and deploy virtualized networks on KVM-backed hosts using CloudBolt C2. 

One powerful aspect of CloudBolt C2 is that is it’s ability to apply actions to systems cross-environment.  Part of what was needed here was a multi-select capability that allowed users to multi-select where it makes sense to do so.  C2 now supports multi-select in the appropriate dialog boxes.

Provisioning instances is what CloudBolt C2 was built to do. When a user has no knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes, it’s good practice to at least let them know that something is happening.  With 3.7.0, C2 does a better job showing users the provisioning progress of their instance.

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Topics: Innovation, Feature, Cloud Manager, Upgrade, Release Notes, AWS

Why Manual VM Provisioning Workflows Don't Work Anymore

Posted by Justin Nemmers

3/25/13 10:40 AM

Let’s look through a fictional situation that likely hits a little close to home.

An enterprise IT shop receives a developer request for a new server resource that is needed for testing. Unfortunately, the developer request doesn’t include all of the information needed to provision the server, so the IT administrator goes back to the developer, and has a discussion about the number of CPUs, and the amount of RAM and storage are needed. That email back-and-forth takes a day. Once that conversation is complete, the IT admin creates a ticket and begins the largely manual workflow of provisioning a server. First, the ticket is assigned to the storage team to create the required storage unit. The ticket is addressed in two days, and then passed on to the network team who ensures that the proper VLANs are created and accessible, and to assign IP addresses. The network team has been pretty busy, though, so their average turnaround is greater than four days. Then, the ticket is handed off back to the virtualization team, where the instance is provisioned, but not until two days later. Think it’s ready to hand off to the user yet?  Not yet.

manual provisioning, workflows, old-school assembly lineAn assembly-line model cannot deploy VMs as rapidly as needed. Automation is required.

The team that manages the virtual environment and creates the VMs is not responsible for installing software. The ticket is forwarded along to the software team, who, three days later, manually installs the needed software on that system, and verifies operation. The virtual server is still not ready to hand off to the developer, though!

You see, there’s also a security and compliance team as well, so the ticket gets handed off to those folks, who a few days later, run a bunch of scans and compliance tests. Now that the virtual resource is in it’s final configuration, it’s got to be ready, right?  Nope. It gets handed off to the configuration management team who then must thoroughly scan the system in order to create a configuration instance in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Finally, the instance is finally ready to be delivered to the developer that requested.

The tally is just shy of three full business weeks. What has the developer been doing in the meantime?  Probably not working to his or her full capacity.

Circumventing IT Completely with Shadow IT

Or, maybe that developer got tired of waiting, and after two days went around the entire IT team and ordered an instance from AWS that took five minutes to provision. The developer was so excited about getting a resource that quickly that they bragged to the fellow developers, who in turn start to use AWS.

Negative Effects on IT and the Business

Either way, this is a scenario that plays out repeatedly, and I’m amazed at how frequently it plays out just like this. The result might initially appear to just be some shadow IT, or maybe some VM sprawl from unused deployed instances, however, the potential damage to both the IT organization and the business is far greater.

First, users frequently circumventing the IT organization looks bad. These are actions that question the IT organization’s ability to effectively serve the business, and thus strike at the very heart of the IT group’s relevance.

Furthermore, the IT Consumers are the business. Ensuring that users have access to resources in near-real time should be a goal of every IT org, but rapidly adjusting and transforming the IT teams and processes doesn’t work as quickly as demand changes. This means that the IT org cannot respond with enough agility to continually satisfy the business needs, which in turn potentially means more money is spent to provide less benefit, or even worse, the business misses out on key opportunities.

IT shops need to move beyond simple virtualization and virtualization management. Why? Improved virtualization management does not solve all of the problems presented in the scenario above, while (and this is key here) also providing for continued growth. Implementing tools that only manage virtualization only solve part of the problem, because they are unable to properly unify the provisioning process around software (by going beyond plain template libraries with tools like HPSA, Puppet or Chef), and other external mechanisms (like a CMDB). In order to fully modernize and adapt existing processes and teams to a cloud/service oriented business model, all aspects of the provisioning process must be automated. It’s the only way an IT organization can hope to stay responsive enough, and avoid being locked into one particular solution, such as a single-vendor approach to virtualization. A well-designed and implemented Cloud Manager will give an IT org the freedom to choose the best underlying technology for the job, without regard for how it will be presented to the end user.

Either way you look at it, IT organizations need a solution which will allow them to utilize as much of their existing assets as possible while still providing the governance, security, and serviceability needed to ensure the company’s data and services are well secured and properly supported.

The Solution

Thankfully, there’s just such a Cloud Manager. CloudBolt C2 is built by a team with decades of combined experience in the systems management space, and was created from the beginning to solve this exact problem. Because we started from the first line of code to solve this entire problem, we call ourselves the next-generation cloud manager, but out customers call it a game changer. Give it a download and effortless install today, and we’ll show you that CloudBolt C2 mean business.

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Topics: Customer, IT Challenges, Management, Virtualization, Cloud Manager, Shadow IT, Agility

Next-Generation IT and Greenfield Cloud Infrastructure

Posted by Justin Nemmers

3/12/13 3:06 PM

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. 

greenfield IT is great IT

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!

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Topics: Virtualization, New Technology, Cloud Manager, Challenges, Implementation, Vendors, Development, Hardware

CloudBolt Releases C2 v3.6.1

Posted by Justin Nemmers

3/8/13 4:03 PM

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!

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Topics: Public Cloud, Feature, Cloud Manager, Upgrade, Release Notes, AWS, Development

Cloud Managers Will Change IT Forever

Posted by John Menkart

2/20/13 10:37 AM

In numerous conversations with customers and analysts it has become clear that a consensus across the industry is that Cloud Managers are as game changing for IT as server and network virtualization themselves.  Among those looking longer term at the promise of Cloud Computing (Public, Private and Hybrid), it is clear that the Cloud Manager will become the keystone of value.  Many people’s opinion is that Cloud Managers are the initiator of next major wave of change in IT environments.  How?  Well let’s look to the past to predict the future.

Proprietary Everything

Back in the early 80’s, general purpose computers were first spreading across the business environment. These systems were in the form of fully-proprietary Mainframes, Minicomputers. The hardware (CPU, Memory, Storage, etc.), Operating Systems and any even any available software were all from the specific computer manufacturer (vendors included DEC, Prime, Harris, IBM, HP, DG amongst others).  Businesses couldn’t even acquire compilers for their systems from a third party.  They were only available from the system’s manufacturer.

Commodity OS leads to Commodity Hardware

Agility and maturity of IT environments step 1

The advent of broad interest and adoption of Unix started a sea change in the IT world.  As more hardware vendors supported Unix it became easier to migrate from one vendor’s system to another.  Additionally, vendors began building their systems based on commodity x86-compatible microprocessors as opposed to building proprietary CPU architectures optimized around their proprietary OS.

Architecture-compatible hardware not only accelerated the move to commodity OS (Unix, Linux and Windows), but in turn, increased pressure on vendors to fully commoditize server hardware.  The resulting commoditization of hardware systems steeply drove down prices.  To this day, server hardware largely remains a commodity.

Virtualization Commoditizes Servers

 

Agility and maturity of IT environments step 2

Despite less expensive commodity operating systems and commodity hardware, modernizing enterprise IT organizations were still spending large sums on new server hardware in order to accommodate the rapidly growing demand of new applications.  In large part, IT organizations had a problem taking full advantage of the hardware resources they are spending on.  Server utilization become a real issue.  Procurement of servers still took a considerable amount of time due to organizational processes.  Every new server required a significant amount of effort to purchase, rack and stack, and eventually deploy.  Power and cooling requirements became a significant concern.  The integration of storage, networking, and software deployment and maintenance still caused considerable delays into workflows that are reliant on new hardware systems.

Server virtualization arrives commercially in the late 1990’s and starts getting considerable traction in the mid 2000’s.  Virtualization of the underlying physical hardware provides an answer to the thorny utilization issue by enabling multiple individual server workloads that have low individual utilization to be consolidated on a single physical server.  Virtualization also provides a limited  solution for the  the procurement problem, and helps with the power and cooling issues posed by rampant hardware server growth. Areas of networking, storage, and application management remain disjointed, and typically still require similar times to effectively implement as before the advent of virtualization thus becoming a major impediment to flexibility in the enterprise IT shops.

Now we find ourselves in 2013.  Most enterprise IT shops have implemented some level of virtualization. All of the SaaS and Cloud-based service providers have standardized on virtualization. Virtual servers can be created rapidly and at no perceived cost other than associated licenses, so VM Servers are essentially a commodity, although the market share for the underlying (enabling) technology is clearly in VMware’s favor at this point.

The problem with these commodity VM servers is that making them fully available for use still hinges on integrating them with other parts of the IT environment that are far from commodity and complex to configure.  The VM’s dependency on network, automation tools, storage, etc. hinder the speed and flexibility of the IT group to configure and provide rapid access to these resources for the business.

Network Virtualization arrives

A huge pain point in flexibly deploying applications and workloads is the result of networking technology still being largely based on the physical configuration of network hardware devices across the enterprise. The typical enterprise network is both complex and fragile, which is a condition that dos not encourage rapid change in the network layer to accommodate business or mission application requirements. An inflexible network which is available is always preferred to a network that failed because of unintended consequences of a configuration change.

In much the same way as Server Virtualization abstracted the server from the underlying hardware, Network virtualization completely abstracts the logical network from the physical network.  Using network virtualization it is now possible to free the network configuration from the physical devices, enabling rapid deployment of new, and more efficient management of existing virtual networks.  Rapid adoption of network virtualization technology in the future is all but guaranteed.

Commoditizing all IT resources and compute

 

Agility and maturity of IT environments step 3

With both network and server virtualization, we are closer than ever to the real benefit of 'Cloud Computing': the promise of  fully commoditized IT resources and compute.  To get there, however, we need to coordinate and abstract the management and control the modern enterprises’ internal IT resources and compute resources being consumed in external public cloud providers.

To enable rapid and flexible coordination of the IT resources, the management of those enterprise application resources must be abstracted from the underlying tools.  The specific technologies (server virt, network virt, automation, storage, public cloud provider, etc.) involved are viewed as commodity, and can be exchanged or deprecated without negatively affecting the business capabilities of the enterprise IT. Additionally this abstraction allows the IT organization to flexibly adopt new and emerging technologies to add functionality and capability without exposing the business to the often sharp edges leading edge technology.

The necessary resource abstraction and control is the domain of the not just the virtualization manager-- but really the Cloud Manager. In short, the Cloud Manager commoditizes compute by commoditizing the IT resources across the enterprise and beyond.

With such an important role it is no wonder that every vendor wants to pitch a solution in this space. The orientation or bias of the various vendors’ approaches in developing a Cloud Manager for enterprise IT will play a critical role in the ultimate success of the products and customers that implement them.

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Topics: Network Virtualization, IT Challenges, Virtualization, Cloud Manager, John, Enterprise, IT Organization, Agility, Compute, Hardware

CloudBolt Releases C2 v3.6.0

Posted by Justin Nemmers

2/14/13 3:31 PM

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!

Download C2

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Topics: Nicira, Network Virtualization, Feature, Management, Virtualization, VMware, Cloud Manager, Upgrade, Release Notes

License Management in the Cloud: Are you Flying Blind?

Posted by Justin Nemmers

1/14/13 11:18 AM

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?

Cloud Software License Handcuffs
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.

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Topics: Feature, Cloud Manager, License Management