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Enomaly Releases New Enomalism Core

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Reuven announced the availability of Enomaly ECP 2.1.1 on SourceForge. Enomaly 2.1.1 is a bug fix and security release, so don’t expect to see a whole lot of new functionality –
2.2 is coming is planned to be released shortly into 2009 with lots of new features.

This maintenance release fixes a potential security exploit in the startup script’s temporary file handling as well as the following bug fixes:

* Randomly generated mac addresses are now written to the machine XML at provision time.
* The available system memory is now checked against the required memory for new machines at provision time.
* Fixed a bug regarding the valet extension module not properly checking the hypervisor type.
* Fixed a bug that disallows a machine’s XML definition to be edited.
* Fixed several misc. bugs in the valet extension module.
* Added messages to the interface stating the required extension modules.

You can download the new release here

ECP is governed by the AGPL, a free open source license

Enomalism 2.0 Available For Download, Beta Testers Wanted

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Enomaly just announced the Alpha release of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform. The Enomalism v2.0 Alpha is said to have been completely redeveloped from the ground up and builds on the concept of ” Elastic / Cloud Computing”.

virtualization-enomaly-enomalism.jpg

The company hopes to move to a stable beta within a couple weeks. The current release is considered “Alpha” and should be used at your own risk.

New Enomalism Features include:

  • Web Services API – RESTful
  • Automated VM Deployment with Elastic Valet
  • Multi-Server Support
  • Virtual Cluster Engine
  • Extensible system monitoring integration
  • Flexible business process management with SOA (jBPM)
  • Integrated appliance / module repository
  • Extended User / Group Management
  • Elastic Dashboard / Portal Framework
  • System Metering (Utility / Chargeback)
  • Increased Virtual Machine / Hypervisor Support
  • Xen, KVM, Qemu, OpenVZ, Amazon EC2 * (Ec2 Module)
  • Support for installation in Linux & Windows
  • New Open Source License (AGPL)

For installation Documentation and core distribution download, you can go to http://trac.enomalism.com/enomalism/

Enomaly is looking for early testers to assist them with the following tasks:

  • Interface Debugging CSS, JS (IE7,Firefox)
  • Platform Testing (Linux,Windows,BSD,OSX)
  • Cluster Testing
  • Amazon EC2 Testing
  • Repository / Appliance Testing
  • Module Testing
  • User Management Testing
  • REST API Testing
  • Anything else that needs fixing

If you are interested in lending a hand, please visit the Enomalism forums at
http://www.enomalism.com/resources/community-center/

[Source: Open Management Consortium blog]

Enomalism Beta-Released Management Console for Xen

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Virtualized Management Console (VMC)

Enomaly, a Canadian innovator in virtualization solutions, announced the Beta deployment of Enomalism Virtualized Management Console , a pre-packaged virtualization infrastructure solution based on Xen 3.0 and available under LGPL open source license. The Enomalism VMC is a powerful web-based systems administrator management tool for XEN hypervisor that enables the management of multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to be managed from a central web based interface. Enomalism brings the performance, stability, security and openness of the Xen hypervisor to the market in a product that emphasizes ease of use, effortless deployment and management of Xen-based virtual infrastructure.

“By using Enomalism, organizations can clearly implement a controlled and easy to manage virtualization environment resulting in increased server utilization, reduced IT cost and improved operational performance,” said Reuven Cohen, CTO of Enomaly. “Enomalism supplies customers with a superior virtualization solution that provides open access to source code and price performance benefits over proprietary offerings. By leveraging Xen virtualization technology and open source standards, Enomalism increases flexibility and reduced total cost of ownership for our enterprise customers”.

Xen is an operating system level server virtualization solution that makes efficient use of your hardware, software and management resources. Xen lets a computer run several operating systems simultaneously, sharing the same hardware and more effectively utilizing its capacity than is typically the case for stand-alone servers. In the Xen virtual environment independent servers perform and execute with their own memory and I/O, configuration files, users and applications running on a single operating system.

Enomalism enables customers from a single interface to start, stop and move virtual machines from one physical computer to another without any interruption in service or availability. Enomalism comes equipped with a provisioning wizard which deploys new virtual machines and centralized user management. Customers can manage memory resources changing virtual machine behavior so priorities are easily met.

Download a free copy of the Enomalism beta or visit their website for more information

Enomaly Unveils Elastic Computing Platform After Years of R&D

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Enomaly today announced Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), after having released an Alpha version in March of this year. ECP is an open source, programmable, cloud computing infrastructure for businesses looking to design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud. With its official product launch, Enomaly is shifting its business from a services organization to a software products and support company.

Enomaly’s ECP is designed to work alongside a company’s existing virtual data center providing time and money savings. An intuitive, browser-based dashboard makes it easy for IT personnel to efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing; and, analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity.

The Enomaly ECP is available for immediate download. Proprietary enterprise licenses of the software are available. With the release of the Enomaly ECP, the company is offering paid Web-based and phone support packages. The three plans are: Silver — Web-based support for up to 25 incidents per year; Gold — Phone and Web-based support for up to 50 incidents per year; and Platinum — Phone and Web-based support for up to 100 incidents per year plus assistance and advice with cluster architecture and virtual machine and application design.

Amazon Loves CloudStatus, And We’ve Got The Proof on Video

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At the O’Reilly Velocity conference we attended last month, Hyperic was there to hype the launch of Cloudstatus, which aspires to become the monitoring tool for cloud providers similar to what Netcraft is for’classic’ hosting providers. Get the lowdown on Hyperic and CloudStatus in this video (two parts) from Jon Travis (Principal Engineer) and Xavier Soltero (co-founder and CEO).

See part 1 of the movie here on Vimeo, but scroll down for the best part!

As we are living in the ice age of cloud computing, glitches (like the recent outage of Amazon S3) are to be expected and it must be said that Amazon managed to fix its ecosystem relatively fast and openly reported on the underlying problem .

An interesting question is posted by Reuven Cohen on his blog about the use of federated network protocols within cloud services and the gossip protocol that caused Amazon’s WS downtime on June 24.

“…We have been big fans of use of XMPP for federated communications within our Enomalism cloud platform for multi cloud communications (Wide Area Cloud). XMPP is interesting because it natively solves a number of federation problems within a tried and tested framework. One of the biggest benefits to the use of a gossip protocol lies in the the robust spread of information and the exponential nature of it’s sharing of information within a large number of machines…”

At Virtualization.com, we intend to report on cloud initiatives too, since all these Platform-as-a-Service providers (Google App Engine being the exception to this rule) are enabled by virtualization technology. We expect to see several more competitive statistical analysis tools for various cloud service providers to emerge in the near future. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) blazing the cloud trail, Hyperic picked them to start reporting on via CloudStatus. But Google App Engine and (Sales)force.com seem target platforms to follow. So Amazon’s trouble with being first, is they are first in line to be publicely reported on too. This also means the PR and sales people at Cloudstatus have a busy time issuing press releases and contacting impacted prospects whenever Amazon experiences a glitch or failure.

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm ventilated the common fear that:

“… Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

Being curious and knowing Amazon only speaks through CEO Jeff Bezos or CTO Werner Vogels, we walked up to the latter and were happy to learn Amazon actually loves CloudStatus. He took a step back right afterwards, but why not just watch the video to see his response to the CloudStatus launch?


Amazon AWS Loves CloudStatus.com, Here’s The Proof (Hyperic Video 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

On a sidenote: Hyperic’s newly launched CloudStatus detected the outage at 8:45am PDT, a full 20 minutes before Amazon posted that they were aware of the issue, at 9:05 PDT on http://status.aws.amazon.com/. CloudStatus saw several server errors coming from the majority of their S3 and SQS monitoring agents, in addition to other problems with EC2 (lots of EC2 zombies being created) that may have been related.

Like hurricane warning systems, while Hyperic CloudStatus could not have prevented the S3 outage, it was able to provide enough of a “storm” warning for users to take action. The company will be adding additional cloud services to CloudStatus in the coming months, next up is Google App Engine.

Hyperic

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 1/2)

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A month ago we reported on how you can build your own open source cloud on clusters to make your personal cloud dreams come true!  Simply put your datacenter to use by ordering Xen virtualization on the Rocks and then carefully roll it in fresh Eucalyptus leaves.

In order to learn what makes these clouds tick, we have sent our enthusiastic cloud computing koala Toon Vanagt to San Francisco to interview Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski at the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Below, you can find the first part of this exclusive video interview (we’ll post the second part tomorrow).

Rich’s students came up with EUCALYPTUS, which stands for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’ as an open-source tool for doing “cloud computing”. Their tool is designed to stimulate the development, interest, experiments and research into the nascent concept and industry of cloud computing.

Eucalyptus was build in a modular fashion, so it can “mimic” the interface of popular commercial clouds, like the one they started off with, Amazon EC2. The team plans support for several cloud interfaces as long as they are public and well documented.

Rich underlined that Eucalyptus is designed to experiment and not to compete with industrial strength clouds as Amazon EC2. Although with some engineering, one could take parts of Eucalyptus, mature those and scale to specific needs.

When asked about the underlying virtualization experience, Xen is seen as a very useful technology in ‘cloud’ regards. Rich complements Xen on being well documented and conceptually easy to understand and he looks back at the Xen selection as a good first hypervisor choice. Due to the nature of their specific use, parts of Xen would ‘break’ under load and were modified to meet certain stability needs.

As LibVert is used, Eucalyptus should in theory be relatively easy be able to support other hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. If no major wrinkles appear on the development surface, Eucalyptus therefore expects to support VMware and KVM with its 2.0 release, scheduled for early September 2008.

Rich supportively points to the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure. as an alternative open source virtualization system.

Security remains an issue but in some respects, accountability and authentication are an even bigger problem to the open source community than within commercial projects. “In an academic space, where you are not paying for usage, it is not a credit card that you are accounting to, but a user”. So Eucalyptus had to devise a user accounting system that is based on certificates. On top of that components should not be ‘spoofable’, as there is no message encryption in Eucalyptus (yet). Because these messages can be spoofed, Rich’s team had to take care of an open source implementation of Web Services Security to make sure the cloud controllers cannot be ‘fooled’ by malicious messages of doubtful origin.

The shortage of public IP addresses in university environments was solved by using the open source technology VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). [VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet. You can see VDE as the software incarnation of a hardware network switch plus attached cables. Using the vde_switch and vde_plug programs you are able to create quite complex virtual analogies of a network that can span several hosts, even across the Internet.

By creating a virtual Ethernet for every cluster allocation and make that a set of user space processes can tunnel through NATs (Network Address Translation). As a downside to this VDE implementation comes a performance penalty. So Eucaluptus is offered with 2 flavors, linked to the SLA-nature in cloud computing. The first option uses the described very flexible ‘Virtual VLAN’ independent of IP-addresses. The second option bypasses VDE and is faster but less scalable as limits user requests to the confines of a single cluster.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the second part of this exclusive interview. Stay tuned!