Virtualization has been a buzzword for me, until recently I stumbled across it and gave it a serious thought. I thought about sharing my experiences in this blog.

To start with we had some issues on our linux hosted webserver and had to do some sanity checks by duping it, on somewhat a similar kernel. The usual system resource crunch and the nagging system admins put me on a no mans land.

Left with no options, I decided to do some checks using ubuntu kernel. Remember I still have my notebook (windows XP) to try stuff on, I could have easily partitioned and installed ubuntu with windows and done my job. But probably I was more inclined to virtualization and thought of trying it out. I did some groundwork and came up with options like Sun Microsystems Virtual Box, VMware, virtual pc etc to name a few. Read more…

Virtualizing your IT infrastructure lets you reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of your existing assets.

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

1.Get more out of your existing resources: Pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model with server consolidation.

2.Reduce datacenter costs by reducing your physical infrastructure and improving your server to admin ratio: Fewer servers and related IT hardware means reduced real estate and reduced power and cooling requirements. Better management tools let you improve your server to admin ratio so personnel requirements are reduced as well.

3.Increase availability of hardware and applications for improved business continuity: Securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service. Eliminate planned downtime and recover immediately from unplanned issues.

4.Gain operational flexibility: Respond to market changes with dynamic resource management, faster server provisioning and improved desktop and application deployment.

5.Improve desktop manageability and security: Deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC.

Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer.

Here is an example how to Virtualize windows XP

There is a lot of action happening at SpringSource. Only after a week being acuqired by VMware , SpringSource bough CloudyFoundry, a year-old Oakland-based startup focused on pushing Java into the cloud.

Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates commented

SpringSource’s Enterprise Java Cloud is a service that is based on far more than merely acquiring Cloud Foundry.Certainly the functionality provided by Cloud Foundry is key, but SpringSource’s solutions for building, running and managing Java applications are ideally suited for applications that are deployed in the cloud. The new service brings this all together. For companies where the cloud deployment option makes sense, SpringSource has a killer offering.

Full news here

Today they lauched Enterprise Java cloud . From their blog post SpringSource Launches the Enterprise Java Cloud. The SpringSource Cloud Foundry Enterprise Java Cloud service is available immediately at CloudFoundry.com in beta and is free to use. Normal cloud service provider fees still apply

In one of my post , I had covered about Cloud Computing and the rising popularity. This was the post

Understanding Cloud Computing

I came today at one of the blog post which explains to setup and get your first app running.
Here is the link.

This should prove helpful to the users who want to experiment with cloud computing.

These days we keep on hearing that computing is moving towards “Clouds” and how this will make headaches and pains associated with infrastructure and server management thing of the past.. Let us try to look at what really is cloud computing

What is cloud computing ?

Cloud computing refers to term where in a company where instead of running software , applications on in house servers or storing data locally , are doing it on a third party resources which are being termed as clouds.

So what are these clouds ?

Clouds are thousands and thousands of computers connected via internet to each other and these computers are shared by companies to host their application and manage data.

One of the best examples of the cloud computing is salesforce.com which had been working on this concept since long. Another recent example is New York Times which has provided fully searchable access to its 1851 to 1922 archive—more than 15 million articles. This has been achieved without hosting any application on its own servers. They are using Amazon’s Cloud Computing service.

Google’s business suite launched in 2007 has 0.5 million clients and it uses the power of cloud computing by offering the companies and individuals business applications hosted over internet.

Now this would give you a fair idea of what is cloud computing and what is achievable with this.

Some other players who are in the field of offering cloud computing services are

a)      Amazon’s cloud computing

b)      Google App Engine

c)      Sun Microsystems

These companies are now providing cloud services to individuals and companies. One has to sign up then they are given access to their space in the clouds. The developers or application management team can connect to these clouds through various tools and deploy their application.

The price ranges on how much bandwidth is used and what is the traffic on the site.

The concept behind companies selling the cloud computing is that your infrastructure is not always loaded 100% .  So during the times US has its peak load, Europe is just waking up and Hong Kong is sleeping.

When Hong Kong is utilizing 100% load, the peak load is fallen 80% in US.

In this way the resources can be managed much more effectively if they are being managed by a central vendor.

Advantages : One of the biggest advantages of cloud that I see for small to medium sized companies , they do not have to rely on in house server management.

Another advantage is that sudden spikes in load or traffic can be handled by cloud servers with companies having to manage extra servers or anything. They only need to pay for this extra load.

The offerings are reasonably priced for one to try out and google offers free version as of now.

Limitations : Now all versions of hardware have been supported by clouds . Amazon is now offering the open source web server tomcat on its cloud.

Google is also offering deployment of java applications. More information of google app engine supporting java can be found here. (I think it is free)

Sun Microsystems has also has a very goof offering on the clouds. They offer Virtualization in the cloud and also prevent vendor lockout.

Update : I have added a post to demonstrate First Step working with Cloud Computing