SAN DIEGO — For enterprises kicking a tires on a OpenStack cloud government platform, there
are still some pivotal mixture blank from a stream release.

These gaps embody monitoring, high accessibility (HA), business smoothness (BC) and integration
with existent user government systems, as good as issues with ascent support and documentation,
according to attendees and presentations during this week’s OpenStack Summit.

Monitoring is a pivotal pain indicate for James Penick, an designer during Yahoo Inc., that is looking to
deploy tens of thousands of nodes on OpenStack by 2014. “There are solutions out there we can pay
for,” he said, “but that’s a outrageous opening in OpenStack right now.”

Storage monitoring that’s adult to standard with existent craving collection is also a blank element,
according to Pete Johnson, an operative during Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP). For example, if users today
want to get a normal age or distance of objects in a Swift storage container, that information has
to be collected by particular queries; that routine needs to be lifted to a turn of existing
storage government collection used in enterprises, Johnson said.

Enterprises, however, shouldn’t indispensably reason their exhale watchful for low-level monitoring
to turn partial of core OpenStack.

“It doesn’t unequivocally make clarity for us to build it,” pronounced Josh McKenty, OpenStack Foundation board
member and CEO during Piston Cloud Computing Inc. “But we’re also hard-pressed to collect that [existing
open source monitoring tool] to include.”

In his prior purpose during NASA, McKenty’s group used mixed open source monitoring collection –
namely, Nagios, Munin and Ganglia — to guard opposite elements of OpenStack.

HA and DR: OpenStack prohibited potatoes

High accessibility and BC are dual some-more areas of discuss as to who should build that facilities for
OpenStack. Right now, users are speedy to confederate existent open source tools, such as a HA
Pacemaker application or DRBD [Distributed Replicated Block Device], an HA clustered storage file
system.

But not everybody trusts these tools. “There are lots and lots of open comments [on them] and
things [about them] that can break,” Yahoo’s Penick said.

While HA competence be a no-brainer for enterprises, it competence not be such a healthy fit for
OpenStack, that is focused on newer cloud-based applications that pattern for disaster rather than
requiring HA from a underlying infrastructure. Enterprises are also awaiting formation into
existing environments for user management, according to HP’s Johnson, that means formation with
Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

There are 4 packages for Active Directory formation now submitted to OpenStack for
future releases.

Database changes and support shortcomings

The rate of change in OpenStack in a dual years it’s been grown has been wily to keep up
with, Penick said. For example, there have been changes to a Nova database schema between the
Essex and Folsom releases that streamline queries though also impede upgrades.

“I positively don’t remonstrate with changing [database] schema between revisions,” he said. But
converting between a Essex schema and a Folsom schema is easier pronounced than done.

Currently, there are no collection to do this conversion.

“OpenStack cloud operators have to write a collection required to make this happen, do it by hand,
or do zero during all,” Penick said. “I spend a good volume of time vocalization with other OpenStack
operators, listening to their stories,” he said. “More than a few have answered a ‘How do you
upgrade?’ doubt by saying, ‘We don’t. Build a new cluster. Tell everybody to reconstruct their
VMs.’”

Another area of change between Essex and Folsom that’s tripped adult some users has been the
extraction of retard storage, formerly famous as Nova Volumes, into a apart application
programming interface called Cinder.

“It used to be that information about volumes and instances could always be found in a same
database,” McKenty explained. Some users “cheated,” in McKenty’s words, formulating certain method
calls around that assumption, that no longer applies.

Finally, users are job for improved high-level documentation, that would be particularly
helpful in troubleshooting problems for infrastructure operations teams, pronounced one developer working
as an eccentric executive with a vital European telecom. “If there’s something wrong, we still
have to find what’s wrong,” he said. “It’s easy for me as a developer to demeanour during a code, though it’s
not that easy for infrastructure operations people.”

The OpenStack Foundation skeleton to tell support of this inlet soon, McKenty said.
Piston Cloud also offers an “OpenStack 101″ white paper.

Beth Pariseau is a comparison news author for SearchCloudComputing.com and
SearchServerVirtualization.com. Write to her during bpariseau@techtarget.com or follow @PariseauTT on
Twitter.

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VMware is a many renouned choice for virtualizing servers by a far-reaching margin, yet it isn’t the
only option. Microsoft’s Hyper-V
hypervisor is gaining users since it costs reduction and requires small additional training for
Windows users. As a result, some-more Hyper-V
storage government collection are apropos available.

In further to Microsoft’s possess System
Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), vendors have expelled third-party products to manage
performance issues in Hyper-V practical environments. Here’s a outline of some of Microsoft’s
inherent Hyper-V storage government resources as good as some third-party tools.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

SCVMM is Microsoft’s practical appurtenance (VM) support center. Microsoft total Hyper-V support in
SCVMM 2008, and successive releases enclosed extended support for Hyper-V and VMware Inc.’s
hypervisor.

Microsoft’s SCVMM 2008 includes customary practical sourroundings government functions, such as VM
provisioning and monitoring, physical-to-virtual acclimatisation (P2V), and horde apparatus management. It
includes storage-related capabilities, such as a ability to boldly supplement and mislay storage
resources. Its Live Storage Migration allows emigration from one LUN to another with minimal
downtime.

Other SCVMM 2008 storage facilities embody Data
Protection Manager (DPM) total with Volume
Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for VM snapshots, and Clustered
Shared Volume (CSV) support for storing mixed VMs on a singular LUN to concede Windows failover
clusters. All of these facilities are permitted from a System Center GUI.

SCVMM
2012, scheduled for ubiquitous recover before a finish of a year, will supplement more
application-driven monitoring and apparatus orchestration, as good as practical VM network and storage
hardware provisioning by programmed wizards. To contest with VMware’s vCloud
Director, SCVMM has self-service portals for Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS) support.

Microsoft also increasing a support of a Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Storage
Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S) customary in SCVMM 2012 for private
cloud storage formation with storage arrays. SMI-S specifies how clients can promulgate with
storage arrays by SMI-S Provider modules.

SCVMM 2012’s new underline set stirred Citrix to pause a Citrix
Essentials for Hyper-V storage government program in May 2011 due to overlie and SCVMM’s new
support for XenServer VMs.

Storage complement vendors are also integrating their storage government collection with SCVMM and
extending a local information insurance capabilities. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) researcher Mark
Bowker pronounced that competence be a best starting indicate for Hyper-V storage
management tools. “If I’m sitting in IT’s shoes, I’m indeed starting with a businessman who I’m
dealing with now,” Bowker explained.

For example, we can conduct NetApp Inc. storage and information insurance collection by a SCVMM
console. NetApp will automate Hyper-V snapshots and recovery, as good as set policies for automated
VM-level backups. SnapManager for Hyper-V will also automatically detect new VMs and brand those
without backup image policies. You can even use tradition scripts to automate fasten offload before
or after a backup.

Dell’s OpenManage Integration Suite for Microsoft System Center and Advanced Infrastructure
Manager (AIM) offer storage and virtualization administrators one collection for monitoring,
deploying and configuring a apartment of formation collection for Hyper-V environments regulating Dell
hardware.

Performance management

Bowker pronounced opening is a No. 1 storage emanate among all hypervisors. While storage system
vendor formation with System Center can conduct a series of required tasks, storage system
performance government competence be improved finished with third-party collection privately designed for
Hyper-V environments.

Virsto Software Corp. chose to support usually Hyper-V when it launched a initial Virsto
One hypervisor storage opening government program in Feb 2010. Gregg Holzrichter,
Virsto’s clamp boss of marketing, pronounced Virsto wanted to be one of a initial providers for
Hyper-V environments instead of only one of dozens of competitors ancillary VMware’s vSphere.

“I consider that was a intelligent pierce on [Virsto’s] partial since a record can send to the
other hypervisors when it needs to do it anyway,” pronounced Henry Baltazar, a comparison researcher for storage
and systems with The 451 Group.

Virsto One virtualizes underlying extrinsic storage and manages a practical environment’s
random and complete writes, that Holzrichter calls “the biggest plea of server
virtualization essay over to storage.”

Virsto One intercepts writes from a VMs to a storage complement and sequentializes and optimizes
them to urge performance. Virsto also supports storage tiering and thin
provisioning for a storage allocated to a VMs.

 Virsto does not support automated, policy-based or energetic storage tiering now, but
Holzrichter pronounced those facilities are on a company’s roadmap.

The Virsto program installs on any earthy server, and a government apparatus is a snap-in
module to a Microsoft Management Console (MMC). Administrators use a Virsto government console
for initial storage pattern and to supplement capacity. Otherwise, a government is finished yet the
System Center console. When provisioning a new VM, an executive selects a Virsto practical disk
instead of a bound virtual hard
disk (VHD).

Sanbolic Inc.’s Melio product line focuses on Hyper-V’s stipulations with point file-system
access. Melio FS is Sanbolic’s exquisite cluster record system, that enables shared, concurrent
read and write entrance to iSCSI or Fibre Channel extrinsic SAN volumes and VHDs. Melio allows
the further of new earthy hosts and storage resources for scale-out infrastructures.

Melio FS also has a VSS-based distributed image capability for information insurance with
third-party backup products, quality-of-service (QoS) government and I/O transactional performance
reporting.

Windows laxity sways L.A. medical group

Because Hyper-V runs on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 and is entirely integrated into SCVMM,
provisioning and doing a Hyper-V practical sourroundings competence be easier than carrying to exercise an
entirely new height such as with VMware vSphere and Citrix Systems’ XenServer.

Femi Adegoke, a IT executive for a Los Angeles-based West Gastroenterology Medical Group
(WGI), cited cost and his laxity with a Windows-based Hyper-V as reasons for switching to
it from a aged Virtual Iron (now partial of Oracle VM) server virtualization program in May 2009. He
said adopting Hyper-V meant he didn’t have to learn a new handling system.

He now has Hyper-V regulating his PBX phone, confidence label entrance and payroll systems. Now
that vendors are starting to rise products for Hyper-V environments, Adegoke skeleton to put his
entire IT business infrastructure in a practical environment.

“The ecosystem unexpected now seems to have a lot of activity, including backup providers and
monitoring software,” he said.

Adegoke manages his Hyper-V sourroundings with SCVMM 2008 and uses Windows PowerShell custom
scripts to automatically sustenance VMs with Virsto One practical storage disks and desktop image
clones. Adegoke pronounced he was one of Virsto’s initial 5 business and began regulating it in early
2010.

“For me, a ability to skinny sustenance and still get a high opening is huge,” Adegoke said
about regulating Virsto within his Hyper-V environment. “Otherwise, I’d be out of storage space looking
to go spend some some-more income to buy another shelf of spindles.”

More Hyper-V support coming

Because it is a marketplace leader, VMware’s vSphere garners a many courtesy from vendors
looking to support practical environments. But as those ancillary applications and inclination mature,
their technologies will roughly positively make their approach into a Hyper-V and XenServer
marketplaces. That will make some-more storage government collection permitted to enhance a SCVMM apparatus set
and move some-more modernized government and information insurance technologies to Hyper-V storage
environments.

“They are going to drip their technologies down to a hypervisors,” Baltazar pronounced of
third-party program vendors. “In some cases we don’t consider it’s a vital growth bid to
[switch] over to a other hypervisors. we consider it’s some-more a matter of there’s not adequate value in
doing it now since they don’t have adequate business violence down a doorway seeking for them.”

Bowker pronounced all hypervisors have many of a same storage issues. “It unequivocally comes down to
configuring it and environment it adult specific to what focus we competence be running,” he said, adding
that a differences between a hypervisors come down to familiarity, facilities and function.

This was initial published in Sep 2011

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and to urge his storage complement and practical server performance.

For some-more on storage opening monitoring

Storage
performance monitoring for practical servers takes app approach

Carlton pronounced his sourroundings is approximately 20% virtualized on VMware Inc.’s vSphere 4.1
platform. In further to his health caring applications, he runs a series of standard applications in
his virtual
environment, including Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint. His earthy hosts lift between
seven and 35 practical machines (VMs).

Medical annals can be huge files, and Carlton has to be prepared when his users fast eat up
his ability and I/O resources. “There’s no control resource on some of these applications,” he
said, “so somebody can go crazy and start scanning information during a high resolution. I’ve mislaid a terabyte
of ability in dual days, only like that. So we try to keep forward of that as best we can.”

His sum storage ability will strech 1 petabyte (PB) soon, and he’s regulating between 50% and 60%
of it.

Carlton also has to watch for opening problems caused by apparatus damage. “Those are the
things that punch us in a behind many of a time given we don’t know they’re problems until
they’ve gotten to a serious point,” he said. “You consider these problems are teenager until it’s the
middle of a night and you’re in a automobile pushing to work.”

Carlton uses a collection from Virtual Instruments to watch his horde train adapters (HBAs), small
form-factor pluggable (SFP) visual transceivers, earthy horde connectivity and I/Os per second
(IOPS). He runs reports that uncover if any SFPs are behaving outward approaching ranges. If they don’t
meet a manufacturer’s guidelines, he replaces them before they means trouble. “It’s done a huge
difference for us,” he said.

His group also uses NetApp’s SANscreen Service Insight storage government tools, as good as Hitachi Data
Systems’ Device Manager and Capacity Reporter.

Recently, Carlton separated a vital SCSI reservation calamity that was pushing him crazy by
throwing too many daily alerts. Hitachi commissioned a VMware
vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) and it’s done a large difference. “A month ago you
would have left in there and seen all a SCSI reservation conflicts,” Carlton said. “I haven’t
done a numbers, though my tummy tells me we haven’t had an warning given we implemented a VAAI code
except for on weekends when [the virtualization team] does migrations for patching.”

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