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Today Microsoft announced that Windows Azure Backup Services is general available. Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager is now in public preview. Other enhancements are:
On October 17 Canonical released a new version of its free and open source operating system Ubuntu for server and cloud environments. This release supports the new OpenStack Havana, integrates VMware vSphere and a new version of its service orchestration tool Juju that is supporting containerised application deployment. The two releases Ubuntu 13.10 and OpenStack Havana were actually launched on the same day to probably stress the collaboration between the two companies.
The two biggest players on the x86 server virtualization market recently entered the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market as well.
Microsoft Windows Azure Virtual Machines went general available in April 2013. VMware vCloud Hybrid Service went general available in August 2013. Some believe the rivals for server virtualization will become rivals as well in the public and hybrid cloud space.
This post will describe why both cannot be compared.
Both Azure and VCHS provide customers the ability to create cloud based virtual machines and have control over the guest operating system and applications running on top of it. That is basically the IaaS model.
I guess this is about the only feature what Azure Virtual Machines and vCHS have in common. Both clouds have a different philosophy and the architecture is based on different use cases.
Comparing Azure to vCHS is like comparing a cattle truck to a bus. Both are transport, have wheels and needs a driver. But the payload is much different. Cattle do not need seats, a fridge and a toilet. Nor does a cow or sheep need a safety belt. If one of the animals dies while being transported nobody really cares. Passengers in a bus is something different. The bus company cares about this payload.
In September 2013 VMware launched vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). It is a VMware owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service offering. It offers customers a lot of control over virtual machines and networking. Features available on-premises like snapshots and custom sized virtual machines are available in vCHS as well. Simply said VCHS = vSphere + vCloud Networking & Security as a service.
During VMworld US and Europe VMware had a lot of breakout sessions about vCHS. In the near future I will make some postings with technical details on this new service. This post will discuss the features which will be added in the near future to vCHS.
First lets have a look at the roadmap of vCHS. The information in this post is based on the various sessions I attended at VMworld and is made public by VMware.
As usual it took about 6 months to the open source cloud computing project OpenStack to have released OpenStack Havana 2013.2 and it is release number eighth for the IaaS for public, private, and hybrid clouds, where about 400 new improvements have been added to the product and fixed more than 3000 reported bugs.
The Havana release includes many changes and lots of new features such as OpenStack Metering and OpenStack Orchestration, these new enhancements together with some already existing such as global clusters for Object Storage and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for Block Storage create would help companies that are using OpenStack to create or deploy applications on clouds, to have their Iaas transformed into a PaaS or a SaaS cloud.
Microsoft today announced the General Availability of the newest versions of its Operating Systems Windows, both Windows 8.1 for clients and Windows Server 2012 R2 are now available for download after Microsoft released them on August 27th this year. Both Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 were made available earlier for its Technet and MSDN subscribers as reported by cloudcomputing.info in September.
Now the product suite to also manage these new Operating Systems; System Center 2012 R2 is also available to download from Technet, MSDN and all the other channels available for customers and partners.
Some links detailing all the new functionality:
After the $1.5M Series A round funding MadeiraCloud raised from Sequoia Capital back in May 2013, the Beijing and San Francisco based cloud startup decided to use part of the funding to release the final version of MadeiraCloud IDE for AWS, a product that allows the graphical visualization of the architecture and resources used by a given application.
vCenter Operations Management Suite version 5.8 has 4 new features:
Monitor business critical applications
In the 5.8 release application monitoring is limited to Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server. vCenter Operations Management Packs for Microsoft applications will be available to get insight into the health of Microsoft applications. A management pack (MP) provides knowledge about an application. The MP will be able to discover application inter-dependencies and services. Also there is knowledge about what metrics to measure, what thresholds to set etc. The management packs for SQL and Exchange will provide health information for clusters. So it shows servers and instances in Database Availability Groups for example. And it shows the status of services like MSSQL Agent, MSSQL Analysis, MSSQL Report and MSSQL database. It also shows when for example the CPU has a high utilization indicating something is wrong.
IBM announced to have patented a method for dynamically managing network bandwidth within a cloud. The process for which IBM got a US Patent #8,352,953 would avoid stress to users that are trying to access a cloud computing system and are experiencing networking problems. The patent according to Big Blue would permit to solve the traffic problem and it would allow the system to automaticaly and dynamically redirect the task across physical servers according to the availability of the network bandwith, ensuring that the system and VMs can run efficiently.