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VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

September 1, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 2 Comments

VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: amazon aws, amazonaws, cloud, ec2, vCloud, vcloud express, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, vmware vcloud express, vsphere

RightScale Supports The Smell Of Saunas

November 4, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Today RightScale Inc. announced they will team up with the Eucalyptus team have their platform available with Eucalyptus so they can deliver an Easy to Mange Open Source Cloud Computing platform.

They have announced that starting today, November 4, 2008 they will have the RightScale Cloud computing management platform ready for use with the Eucalyptus Puclic Cloud (EPC).


“We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to accelerate the advancement of cloud computing technology,” said Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale. “Now anyone — from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon’s EC2 — will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale’s management platform.”

RightScale was already supporting Amazon’s EC2, FlexiScale and now GoGrid and sends a big message to the Cloud Community that Eucalyptus is a valuable platform to support.

Earlier this year Elastra also announced support for Eucalyptus. May we wonder why the Eucalyptus folks went with RightScale and not with Scalr ? Afterall integrating Scalr with Eucalyptus seems like a good way to achieve a fully featured opensource platform.

And on a final note .. if RightScale titles their Press Release “RightScale and the Eucalyptus Team Join Forces to Deliver Easy-to-Manage Open Source Cloud Computing” , when will they show us the code ?

Filed Under: Guest Posts, News, Partnerships Tagged With: cloud, ec2, eucalyptus, FlexiScale, GoGrid, rightscale, virtualization

Amazon EC2 Now With Beta Support for Windows

October 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on Amazon EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

With over two years of operation and many highly-requested features added, Amazon EC2 is today exiting its beta into general availability and offering customers a Service Legal Agreement (SLA). The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 day period, or customers are eligible to receive service credits back. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: Amazon, Amazon EC2, Amazon EC2 for Windows, Amazon EC2 SLA, Amazon EC2 Windows, ec2, microsoft, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows, SQL Server, virtualisation, virtualization, windows

Virtualization.com Contest: Guess What’s on Werner Vogels’ Mind and Win A Book

July 31, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

Aside from interviewing Werner Vogels at the GigaOM Structure 08 conference, we asked him to dedicate an O’Reilly book on the Amazon Web Services, which we will give away in the contest we’re introducing today. First, watch the video below.


Win O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS and SimpleDB

Second, follow these simple rules for our summer contest: up until the 15th of August, you can guess what Vogels has written in this book and provide your answer in the comments below. You don’t necessarily have to get it right, but the funniest, most original, most in-depth or closest comment on this post will be picked out by our editors on the 15th of August 2008. The lucky winner will get a free copy of O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB (Programming), with the hand-signed note from Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels inside!

If you are really creative, we throw in a second freeby, for the funniest fake job title. Get inspired by “Werner Vogels, System Admin at a Small Bookshop (aka CTO Amazon)”

Make your educated guess or just be funny and don’t forget to include your e-mail address (not shown) so we can contact you afterwards and get your book delivered.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People Tagged With: Amazon, book, contest, ec2, FPS and SimpleDB, O'Reilly, Programming Amazon Web Services, Programming Amazon Web Services S3, SQS, virtualisation, virtualization, Werner Vogels

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

July 18, 2008 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

In this second part of our video interview with Rich Wolski (see the first part here), recorded at the O’Reilly Velocity conference, we learn how Eucalyptus came around the Amazon subscription method, where credit cards are the key to authentication. Offering ‘free and open’ clouds in university environments was achieved by introducing a system administrator in between the user account request and the issuing of certificates. Upon user request, the Eucalyptus user subscription interface generates an e-mail to an administrator, who will then perform a ‘manual’ verification. This can be a phone call or a physical meeting.


Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski on open source cloud computing, Xen and Amazon’s EC2 (part 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Users did not like Rocks (leading open source cloud management tool), but the community (in smaller community/ deployment supports) preferred to do this manually. So Eucalyptus 1.1 provides Guidance, a script to build from scratch by hand.

A ‘build with one button’ remains the goal for future versions.

The full Eucalyptus image is only 55 Mb (without Linux image) and includes the necessary packages in order to make sure all of the revision-levels are fully compatible. Eucalyptus comes as Free BSD Open-Source license with a small disclaimer that the University of Santa Barbara explicitly wants to avoid any intellectual property infringements and will take necessary steps if needed.

Virtualization is supported by Xen 3.1 for security sake (3.0 works too, but is discouraged).

Lessons learned in building clouds from open source are quite rare. Here are a few from Rich:

Unlike commercial environments (where one controls the configuration, hardware purchase and networking), the architectural decisions are very different in open source environment, where one does not know the installation. One of the current challenges is to build a system depending on the control you have over your specific installation, you could successfully remove more of the portability from the system as you needs fit.

A second lesson is that people do things by hand and this is an opportunity for automation. Nobody is deploying Linux manually, instead sys admin use distributions. Shouldn’t there be a similar cloud distribution product out there? The people at Puppet were eager to help on providing such scripts for cloud deployments. According to Rich, this illustrates how O’Reilly should be credited for creating a good atmosphere at the Velocity 08 conference where a lot of cross-fertilization happened.

Rich ends the interview by throwing a fundamental question at the cloud community. He classifies current cloud initiatives on a scale based on the ‘closeness’ of the application layer to the cloud API. At the one end of this spectrum, he puts Google Apps (with Python oriented function calls) and at the other end Amazon EC2 (a set of very simple web service interfaces to the underlying virtualization technology) and all other cloud offerings float in between. This impacts what you can do with virtualization. Google AppEngine becomes your compiler on their end of the scale.

Rich wonders if this tighter link to the Google AppEngine will become a liability or an asset in the future when it comes to virtualization capabilities?

We invite you to provide your answers in the comments below!

Filed Under: Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: Amazon EC2, cloud computing, ec2, eucalyptus, interview, kvm, LibVert, O'Reilly, O'Reilly Velocity, open source, open source cloud computing, Rich Wolski, VDE, video, video interview, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, Xen, Xen virtualization

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

July 8, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 4 Comments

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!

Filed Under: Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: Amazon EC2, cloud computing, ec2, eucalyptus, interview, kvm, LibVert, O'Reilly, O'Reilly Velocity, open source, open source cloud computing, Rich Wolski, VDE, video, video interview, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, Xen, Xen virtualization

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