Sunday at LISA12 - VMware vCloud

Ah, Sunday at LISA. Every year, I remember what it's like, and every year, I still get taken by surprise.

Learning is integral to the system administrator's life. We read, we experiment, we watch videos, and we attend talks. But nothing in our normal experiences of learning prepare us for attending LISA, because it's only experience of its kind. You're surrounded by people who are smarter and more experienced than you, there are more classes that you want to attend than hours in the day, and you are desperately scratching to keep hold of all the information that you're exposed to. I know all of this, but I'm still surprised on Sunday at LISA, when I take my first drink from the fire hose. 

This year was no different. Since I've recently taken a position involving considerable VMware administration, I thought that it would be a good to get exposure to VMware's vCloud offerings. We're not currently planning on rolling out an "internal" cloud, but there's always the chance that we may want to go there in the future, and so I filled Monday with "VMware vCloud Concepts, Technology, and Operations" in the morning, and "VMware vCloud Architecture Design" in the afternoon. 

There's no one better to teach a class on vCloud concepts than John Arrasjid from VMware. He's VMware Certified Design Architect #1, which should say enough. He was joined by Ben Lin, a Global Cloud Specialist at VMware (whom I got to interview for this blog earlier this month). So yes, this seems like a team well prepared to cover vCloud Architecture. 

Cloud is one of those words that started innocently enough, got adopted by marketing departments and abused as a buzzword, but is now developing into a well-recognized technology. The definition was very cloudy (hah! I kill me!), but the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed the following definition as a way to establish a common ground: "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction"

The class itself was a relatively thorough high-level survey of the many, many technologies that comprise vCloud. Not knowing anything about vCloud going in, I was somewhat surprised to learn that vCloud is, essentially, a layer of abstraction on top of existing VMware technologies like vCenter. That's not to say that there aren't new technologies in use, but the underlying virtualization is still running on vCenter. This also implies that if the underlying VMware infrastructure isn't configured correctly or in an optimized way, then the entire cloud infrastructure will suffer for it. Definitely something to keep in mind.

There's a big mindset change that I noticed with a cloud environment. Instead of thinking of "IT Admins" and "Users", a cloud environment is designed around "consumers" and "providers". They're broken down like this: 

Consumers:

• Don't know or care where resources are
• Want access to resources on demand
• Want easily consumable resources
• Want acceptable performance with simplified pricing

Providers:

• Provide a catalog of 'service offerings' (which are tiered and priced logically)
• Abstract resource location & details from the consumers
• Carve up resources behind the scenes in a way transparent to consumer
• Mult-itenant, secure, with negotiated service levels, without consumer awareness of each other

If you really think about it, it isn't a whole lot different than what we're expected to provide right now (at least, in a lot of cases), but it sure is a different way of looking at it.
The afternoon class was VMware vCloud Architecture Design, and Ben Lin returned along with David Hill, a senior solutions architect at VMware. 

This was a really great followup after the introduction to vCloud in the morning. There was a very nice demonstration of a third party solution developed around the vCloud API, which is a full-featured interface to the abstraction layers provided by vCloud. 

As you would expect in this class, there were a lot of slides discussing the actual architecture. The idea was definitely hammered home that vCloud is a tiered solution. 

The most useful topics to me were the review of change management processes that need to occur when you build a relatively massive infrastructure like vCloud lends itself to. (I should also note that "massive" is relative in this case). Where building a normal virtualization environment environment involves stakeholders like the server, network, storage, and security teams, building a cloud environment involves buy-in from enterprise architects, IT governance, business development, and finance. It's a scale that I'm honestly not used to deal with - I don't think I've ever been in an organization that had an IT Governance department. Seeing what other people deal with here was interesting, and a learning experience. 

If I were to only take one of these classes, it would definitely be the afternoon vCloud Architecture Design class. The first class was valuable, but the second class seemed more in-depth and covered a decent amount of the same topics. If you are in the market for learning more about vCloud, this is definitely a class that you want to take, but you should have some experience with VMware before stepping in. I've been using vCenter for several months now, and there were some things that I had to look up, and I'm going to go back and research more about what I learned. But yes, you should sign up for this class if it's offered at LISA'13.