I’m going to look into adding the links to my blogroll here but please follow me on TechRepublic if you can.

Here are links to my first four posts on TechRepublic:

1. How to install Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and Windows 7 on the same partition
2. Costs and risks to consider when planning a move to the public cloud
3. Don’t overlook these seven problem areas of virtualization
4. How to optimize VM memory and processor performance

What bothers me a little more is when so called IT professionals use the terms VM and cloud interchangeably and then claim that they are pretty much the same thing or that if it works in one it should work in another.  It is easy to get into a debate and find specific examples to bolster most claims on either side.  Reality is not quite so simple.  The right answer will usually start with “it depends”

With the rest of this post I’ll try to explain some of what it depends on and why there aren’t any simple answers. I’ll also give some examples of the beginnings of some more complicated answers without getting too technical.

The question worded a little differently:  Aren’t Virtualization and Cloud Computing the same thing?

Before we begin, let’s get a couple of things straight:

1. Remember that Cloud Computing is a delivery model and that Virtualization is a technology.  Virtualization as a technology may be used at the back end of a service that is delivered with a Cloud Computing service offering but not necessarily.
2. Virtualization is only one of the building blocks for cloud computing and there are many types of virtualization (server, desktop, application, storage, network, etc.) so categorical statements about virtualization and cloud computing is risky.  It really depends on what is being virtualized an how it is made available by the cloud provider.
3. There are different Cloud styles (fabric based, instance based, etc.), service models (Saas, PaaS, IaaS) and deployment models (private, public, hybrid, community).  Thus, an answer with any significant depth that is correct when describing a fabric based community PaaS will most likely be incorrect when applied to an instance based private IaaS.

At the risk of oversimplifying let’s just consider a simple VM running on a bare metal hypervisor based virtualization platform.  Although the hypervisor abstracts the hardware and makes it available to the VM, the VM is still bounded by the physical server itself.  What I mean by this is that although you may be able to move a live VM from one physical server to another, the entire VM (memory and processor resources) must reside on one physical server and a single virtual LUN is required for storage.

Something very similar is the instance based cloud (in fact Amazon’s EC2 uses Xen based VMs at it’s core).  This one-to-many relationship between physical resources and user containers (call them VMs if you like but technically they should be referred to as instances) obviously puts limits on the linear scalability and redundancy of this cloud approach.  For many, this scalability limitation is offset by the ease of porting an application to an instance based cloud.

Fabric based clouds achieve higher scalability through the use of a fabric controller that keeps track all of the computing resources (memory, processor, storage, network, etc.) and allocates them as services to applications.  The physical resources can be distributed among many physical systems.  Again, at the risk of oversimplifying, the fabric controller is like an operating system kernel and the fabric itself acts similarly to a traditional OS as far as its relationship to a specific application.  Fabric based clouds have a Many-to-Many relationship that allows a many applications to use resources on many physical resources.  This model results in superior scalability and theoretically less downtime.  However, this comes at the cost of application compatibility as applications must be designed to run in a fabric.

So yes, in some instances (pun intended) cloud computing is just large scale server virtualization but cloud computing is not necessarily the same as virtualization and there are many examples of cloud computing that are significantly different from traditional virtualization.

Related articles:

• Is Virtualization the Same as Cloud Computing? (informationweek.com)
• The Inevitable Eventual Consistency of Cloud Computing (devcentral.f5.com)

Remember that in a hypervisor based virtual environment, the guest OS is typically unaware that the hardware has been abstracted and that resource scheduling is taking place to provide shared computing resources based on some preset business rules (some guests may be configured to get more resources than others).

In a scenario like this, a legacy monitoring tool that is targeted at the guest VM, may get false positives concerning resource availability.  Typically you might see near 100% CPU consumed.  This will be based on the telemetry coming back from the guest VM indicating that it is nearly out of resources, when in reality, there may be more resources available just not committed or allocated to that VM at that point in time.

To get a more realistic and complete view of what is actually happening, the monitoring tool would need to monitor the hypervisor and all of the guests correlating the telemetry form all of them and providing a more holistic view of the availability of resources.

Products like this are starting to emerge.  Make sure that when you plan to migrate a server or application to a virtual environment you also plan for the monitoring requirements.

Download a copy of the Nuage Browser here.

What got me more excited is a new project that they are working on called the Ti-Took Cloud Router.  It’s an innovative offering that essentially frontends an IaaS offering such as Amazon’s EC2.  The Ti-Took Cloud Router is targeted at small organizations that want to take advantage of cloud service offerings but still require security and scope of control.  Using the Cloud Router essentially created a virtual private cloud (vPC?) inside a public cloud that encapsulates the services that are important for an individual organizations business and users.  It also allows secure access to a virtual datacenter from public locations.  The key to all of this is their web based identity management service that provides a unified single sign-on that securely validates users into the vPC and then controls access to other cloud services like email or CRM.  We discussed the importance of extended authentication protocols and they assure me that they are investigating two factor authentication.

I foresee this type of offering accelerating the adoption of cloud services in the SMB space.  I’m looking forward to more announcements from RealWat.

My initial thoughts were that there could be an opportunity for hybrid clouds that can provide organizations with excess capacity on demand.  This would be a great way to augment datacenters with cloud bursting opportunities and introduce organizations to cloud offerings with low risk.  Of course,  accomplish this, enterprises will need to build infrastructures that are compatible with public clouds.

The problem is that none of the (admittedly small sample) of private cloud infrastructures that I’ve looked at use the same APIs as their public cloud counterparts.  Until now that is …

Here’s an interesting announcement from Eucalyptus and Terracotta that essentially provides the management tools and a private cloud infrastructure that uses the same APIs as the Amazon AWS.  This is a good start and I hope and expect  to see more offerings that make it easy to build hybrid cloud solutions.

Read more here:  Terracotta and Eucalyptus Partner to Deliver High-Performance Data Scaling in Private Cloud Environments | Business Wire.

I expect that MS will soon announce on-premises availability of the Azure platform.

Some interesting quotes fromthe article:

“People that have never done anything with VMware are all going with ESXi,” said Singler. “Unless they need special hardware monitoring or have existing scripts, there’s no reason not to go with it.”

“Enterprise ESXi shops say the lightweight hypervisor offers many advantages over the full-blown version. In terms of security, ESXi’s smaller footprint and lack of Linux service console makes it harder for hackers to tamper with or for administrators to make mistakes on.”

“VMware’s made no secret of the fact that the ESX console is going to be end-of-lifed,” Wolf said. So while it’s still there in vSphere 4, “I’d be surprised if it was still there in version 5. Customers are going to have to plan on that in the next 24 to 36 months.” Part of that planning process is to select management tools that already support ESXi.”

Most interesting quote:

“We have made no secret of the fact that ESXi is the preferred and better architecture. “
-Bogomil Balkansky,
Vice-President of Product Marketing, VMware Inc.

A few key quotes from the article:

“So while VMware’s initial acquisition cost is much higher than Hyper-V’s, VMware allows for much denser VM configurations and permits RAM overcommit for higher memory utilization rates”

“…users interested in Hyper-V today tend to be small and medium-sized businesses and remote offices that already use Windows Server; Hyper-V is built into that familiar system and allows them to run hundreds of VMs at a lower cost than VMware…”

“large data centers that are serious about VM availability and density continue to rely on VMware, not the first version of Hyper-V”

Wow – Way to go out on a limb.  Other than Sam Johnston (prediction 9 on slide 10), everyone is essentially predicting the growth of cloud offering and  adoption rates.

My prediction for 2010 – There will be a significant cloud security breach (or breaches) that slow down adoption rates for a time but ultimately highlight the missing pieces of most cloud service offerings.  Two of these missing pieces, service level agreements, and security services will become more important in closing new cloud business.

I know I haven’t gone much further out on the limb than the others but at least I have a chance of being wrong.

Let me know how accurate I was  in 2011.

Everyone who needs VDI already has it – Brian Madden – BrianMadden.com.

It really underscores how important client side hypervisors will be to propel VDI to the next level.  The ability to have datacenter based VDI with a locally cached VM for offline use addresses the many use cases that are currently can only be addressed by a locally installed desktop OS.