Bluelock

For a little while now VMware has been talking about vFabric - its "Cloud Application Platform" that comes as a result of several acquisitions. vFabric is an emalgam of serveral different technologies from SpringSource, GemFire, Hyperic and RabbitMQ. At first this may seem like a boxed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering... but ultimately it isn't quite there.

You may remember the launch of VMforce back in April - VMware's first forray into PaaS. Here Salesforce.com took VMware's aquired... Read More »

Do you love screenshots? I have just the post for you!

When first introducing users to vCloud Director several people walk away confused about how vApp networking actually works. I posted earlier about how vApp networking makes life easier, but didn't necessarily illustrate how vApp networks are built.

To make things a bit clearer I will step through the construction of a brand-new vApp living within a vCloud Director Organization. The Org is a tidy one that offers two networks: one...Read More »

Does anyone happen to recall the days of deciding between a 468/SX and a 486/DX2? Ah, those were indeed the days. The additional floating point processor offered by the DX-branded Intel chipsets were initially cited to just be helpful in "certain mathematical operations" like spreadsheets. This was a rather weak pitch... but in reality there was no killer application to flaunt its power.

That all changed when John Carmack revealed QTest.

After id Software released Doom, everyone wanted to see...Read More »

Bill had a great post on VMworld 2010 earlier this week and mentioned a very useful session on hosting Java applications within a virtualized environment. Justin Murray's whitepaper "Java in Virtual Machines on VMware ESX: Best Practices" was released a while ago, but the suggestions are so fundamental they apply today. The steps are very pragmatic and apply to nearly any hypervised environment, although it becomes an increasing focus when your cloud computing infrastructure starts to increase...Read More »

One brief addendum to my last two posts. Our good friend Jake here at BlueLock just sent notice to our crew that the HYPERVIZOR blog had a series of fantastic diagrams detailing VMware's new vCloud Director. I loved them so much I immediately printed them on the good printer, posted them on the wall and wanted to tell our awesome readers right away.

If you're familiar with VMware's vSphere stack you will appreciate the "VMware vCloud Director Cell Architecture" diagram which provides a great...Read More »

At BlueLock we not only provide vCloud Director as a service, we also use it internally to provision and host our own applications. One reason I have become such an advocate of vCloud Director is because it has made my work of architecting, designing and deploying infrastructure tons easier and less error-prone. Earlier we discussed how vApps make infrastructure management easier, but of course provisioning is just one aspect of managment. Once we have our servers running we need to keep an ever...Read More »

This week VMware (finally!) released to the public vCloud Director, a tool that makes provisioning virtual resources in either a public cloud or a private cloud much more accessible to administrators, developers, users and managers within organizations large and small. BlueLock has been working with VMware on vCloud Director for quite a while now and we are excited to demonstrate what this advancement brings.

Before we delve too deeply into vCloud Director we need to talk about one if its largest...Read More »

I've got scalability on the brain lately. Right now I've been thinking about caching strategies as a way to accelerate applications, reduce I/O and increase scalability.

A recent post on High Availability entitled "6 Ways to Kill Your Servers - Learning How to Scale the Hard Way" has been circulating the Internet's tubes lately and is an interesting read on how someone came to understand scalability for a web site. It was narrated from a timeline perspective, detailing what had to be...Read More »

There are very, very different ways of architecting cloud infrastructure so that it can scale. Prior to deciding on a cloud strategy you should ask one big question - why does your infrastructure need to scale?

About five or six years ago scalability migrated from an architectural property to a widely-discussed buzz word. I would occasionally be in a meeting where someone would ask if my application was "scalable." At times I was met with an incredulous stare when I asked to elaborate on what was...Read More »

I will admit that "Cloud Computing" terminology is becoming confused. People are mixing together the concepts of commodity hardware datacenters, the benefits of virtualization and massively parallel systems into a blender and calling it a "cloud." The truth is that these three concepts are very disparate practices that often do not entirely co-exist. Most service providers will pick one or two of the three for their managed cloud hosting.

For example: Amazon AWS is largely a...Read More »