Bluelock

I have seen both sides of the virtualization discussion having spent most of my career at mid size private companies.  At one insurance company an ESX administrator would carve out websphere servers for us to use to build an external facing web application.  At the other I waited six weeks while hardware was sent from the Kansas City offices just to have a development environment that mirrored production.  Flash forward to 2010 and I find myself even closer to the virtual world; so much so that I can see the clouds swirling all around me. 

The 2010 VMworld was my first VMware conference.  I was amazed at the number of people in attendance, but it wasn't just the numbers it was the amount of excitement they had during the conference.  I spent most of my time in the TAP sessions, during which I got validation on the work I have done with the vCloud API the previous 2 months.  The TAP sessions demonstrated the various projects VMware as obtained to deliver a full stack solutions for the 2 million Java developers out there.  I learned about a new protocol used for sending messages between two processes (AMQP).  Rabbit MQ, a part of SpringSource, is the leading implementation of this wire-level protocol.  I also attended Chris Richardson's session Spring into the Cloud, which talked about the cloud and what it means to the enterprise Java developer.  Chris co-founded Cloud Foundary which became part of SpringSource and is now a division of VMware.  I have read Chris' book POJO in Action, and I saw him present at the 2006 JavaOne.  Attending this presentation, and knowing SpringSource is a part of VMware I can envision a deploy to vCloud menu option coming in future releases of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).  STS is an eclipse based IDE that makes working with the Spring framework even easier.  You can check it out at http://www.springsource.com/developer/sts.

I also attended a great panel discussion hosted by James Watters with jClouds, EngineYard, and Enstratus.  This was a great panel discussion which expanded my horizon of the vCloud API.  I already new about the jClouds project (http://code.google.com/p/jclouds/), which I had spent time reading through the code based while learning about the 0.8 version of the API, and now I have more context on the vCloud API and it's relation to the vSphere API thanks to the Dasein cloud project (http://dasein-cloud.sourceforge.net/).  Only skimming the surface with Ruby work, I didn't know much about Engine Yard (http://www.engineyard.com/).  It was exciting to learn about their integration with the vCloud API, and how they initially went down the path of writing their own integration with vCloud.

The last session I want to call out was Justin Murray's Java Applications on vSphere.  This was a great talk that covered six best practices for tuning your ESX hosts for virtualizing the JVM.  Since I come from the development side of the house were I spend time analyzing heap dumps worrying about the object graphs I have written; it was great to see the ESX tuning side to complete the picture.  These tips included adding the command line switch -XX:+UseLargePages to the JVM start up parameters.  This instructs the JVM to use larger page sizes for it's heap space which reduces the chances of it getting snagged by ESX hosts sharing pages of RAM.  Also, keeping 1 JVM per guest OS was suggested as well as not over committing your RAM in the ESX configuration.  One tool that Justin mentioned that was useful for plotting the performance data that ESX generates was vPivot (http://vpivot.com/).

In closing, I saw some pretty amazing, forward looking things about cloud computing and computing in general, including a cube being moved on the computer screen simply by the user thinking about it!  This conference made me feel good about choosing to be a software developer.  There is a critical mass of Enterprise Java developers and I think VmWare and their partners are the vehicle that is going to get that mass into the cloud.  Oh and if this survey http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/weekly-poll-what-was-hot-at-vm.php has any indication of the importance of hybrid clouds then the cloud connector that BlueLock provides will be a nice tool to have in the enterprise tool belt.