William Vambenepe's blog

From ancient Mesopotamia to, more recently, Holland, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore and Korea, the success of many societies has been in part credited to their lack of natural resources. The theory being that it motivated them to rely on human capital, commerce and innovation rather than resource extraction. This approach eventually put them ahead of their better-endowed neighbors.

A similar dynamic may well propel Microsoft ahead in PaaS (Platform as a Service): IaaS with Windows is so painful that it may force Microsoft to focus on PaaS. The motivation is strong to “go up the stack” when the alternative is to cultivate the arid land of Windows-based IaaS.

I should disclose that I work for one of Microsoft’s main competitors, Oracle (though this blog only represents personal opinions), and that I am not an expert Windows system administrator. But I have enough experience to have seen some of the many reasons why Windows feels like a much less IaaS-friendly environment than Linux: e.g. the lack of SSH, the cumbersomeness of RDP, the constraints of the Windows license enforcement system, the Windows update mechanism, the immaturity of scripting, the difficulty of managing Windows from non-Windows machines (despite WS-Management), etc. For a simple illustration, go to EC2 and compare, between a Windows AMI and a Linux AMI, the steps (and time) needed to get from selecting an image to the point where you’re logged in and in control of a VM. And if you think that’s bad, things get even worse when we’re not just talking about a few long-lived Windows server instances in the Cloud but a highly dynamic environment in which all steps have to be automated and repeatable.

I am not saying that there aren’t ways around all this, just like it’s not impossible to grow grapes in Holland. It’s just usually not worth the effort. This recent post by RighScale illustrates both how hard it is but also that it is possible if you’re determined. The question is what benefits you get from Windows guests in IaaS and whether they justify the extra work. And also the additional license fee (while many of the issues are technical, others stem more from Microsoft’s refusal to acknowledge that the OS is a commodity). [Side note: this discussion is about Windows as a guest OS and not about the comparative virtues of Hyper-V, Xen-based hypervisors and VMWare.]

Under the DSI banner, Microsoft has been working for a while on improving the management/automation infrastructure for Windows, with tools like PowerShell (which I like a lot). These efforts pre-date the Cloud wave but definitely help Windows try to hold it own on the IaaS battleground. Still, it’s an uphill battle compared with Linux. So it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to move the battle to PaaS.

Just like commerce and innovation will, in the long term, bring more prosperity than focusing on mining and agriculture, PaaS will, in the long term, yield more benefits than IaaS. Even though it’s harder at first. That’s the good news for Microsoft.

On the other hand, lack of natural resources is not a guarantee of success either (as many poor desertic countries can testify) and Microsoft will have to fight to be successful in PaaS. But the work on Azure and many research efforts, like the “next-generation programming model for the cloud” (codename “Orleans”) that Mary Jo Foley revealed today, indicate that they are taking it very seriously. Their approach is not restricted by a VM-centric vision, which is often tempting for hypervisor and OS vendors. Microsoft’s move to PaaS is also facilitated by the fact that, while system administration and automation may not be a strength, development tools and application platforms are.

The forward-compatible Cloud will soon overshadow the backward-compatible Cloud and I expect Microsoft to play a role in it. They have to.

If you have more than one child, you’ve probably heard yourself say things like “if you are not using your train, you should let your brother play with it” more often than you’d like. The same happens in a datacenter (minus the screams and tears, at least usually). In that context, the rivaling siblings take the form of guest virtual machines and the toys in contention are the physical resources of the host system: CPU, I/O, memory. While virtualization platforms do a pretty good job at efficiently sharing the first two, the situation is not nearly as good for memory. It is often, as a result, the limiting factor for virtualization-driven consolidation. A new project aims to fix this.

The Oracle engineers working on the Xen-based Oracle Virtual Machine have just announced a new open source (GPL-licensed) project to improve the sharing of physical memory between guest virtual machines on the same physical system. It’s called Transcendent Memory, or tmem for short.

Much more information, including a comparison with VMWare’s memory balloon, is available from the project home page.

Another reason to come to the upcoming Xen Summit (February 24 and 25), hosted by Oracle here at headquarters.

The announcement finally came out. Users can now run supported versions of Oracle Enterprise Linux, 11G Database, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager on Amazon EC2 instances. You can create your own AMI or use any of the pre-packaged AMIs with the above-mentioned products. And you don’t have to purchase new licenses, you can transfer existing ones to run on Amazon’s infrastructure.

A separate but related announcement is the possibility to simply and securely backup your databases on Amazon S3 instead of (or in addition to) on tape. I hope BNY Mellon will take notice.

The Amazon AWS blog has a good overview of the news. Forrester covers it with a focus on data warehousing.

This comes in addition to the existing SaaS offering (“On Demand”) from Oracle and the SaaS platform (for others to provide SaaS on top of Oracle’s software). It is a major milestone for utility computing.

[UPDATED 2008/9/21: This is the home page for the Oracle Cloud Computing Center and this is the FAQ.]

[UPDATED 2008/9/23: More Cloud love, this time with Intel. I have no insight into that partnership.]

[UPDATED 2009/2/10: More on WebLogic Server on EC2, from Erik Bergenholtz.]

Oracle recently released a set of VM templates (aka images) for OVM (Oracle Virtual Machine). In addition to being interesting news for OVM users, it’s also potentially useful for EM (Enterprise Manager) users: one of the images contains a full install of Enterprise Manager Grid Control. It is a patched Grid Control 10.2.0.4 installation and associated DB 10.2.0.4 repository pre-configured. This is running on Oracle Enterprise Linux. It also has a local Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 Yum repository for Grid Control usage.

You can get the files through the Linux side of edelivery.oracle.com (select “Oracle VM templates” as the “product pack”).

More templates are available here. You can now impress your friends and family with a full Oracle demo/development environment and they won’t need to know that you didn’t have to install or configure any application.

A few announcements came out today.

The good news: Oracle’s acquisition of BEA closes. Unobstructed technical work can start.

The conveniently-timed news: WS-Management officially a standard.

Speaking of MMS 2008, any announcement there? Not much so far, as explained by Ian Blyth. If I parse the cross-platform part of the press release correctly, it says that management of non-Windows resources by Operations Manager is based on WS-Management, but WS-Management alone is not enough so Microsoft is providing a development kit for several non-Microsoft operating systems. It will be interesting to see what exactly is produced by these management packs. Can they be called on by management tools other Operations Manager or is the stuff that rides on top of WS-Management too proprietary to allow this? No word on SML/CML.

By the end of the week we may have a clearer picture, including what’s going on with the previously-announced reset on System Center Service Manager. Coté is on the scene and will undoubtedly share his thoughts.

As a side note, the way the MMS main page loads betrays the fact that, in 2008, Microsoft (or more likely its event marketing contractor) is using the same clueless HTML design approach that I first saw in 1995 and recently wrote about. All the text in the center of the MMS home page is contained in one large picture (available here). They didn’t even bother with a “ALT” field, so good luck to blind users. The part that says “Registration Overview Page” was made blue and underlined to suggest that it is a link, but it is just a part of the picture. Which, presumably, was supposed to be turned into a link using an image map. Well, turns out they can’t even get that right.

They tried to use a client-side image map (not available in 1995) but somehow the actual map code is commented out in the HTML source:

<!--<map name=Map>
  <area shape=RECT coords=18,549,210,572 href="registrationoverview.aspx">
  <area shape=RECT coords=17,596,222,634 href="registrationoverview.aspx">
</map>-->

As a result, the single most preeminent link on the home page is dead. And there is no server-side image map mechanism as a backup (which I remember used to be best practice when client support for client-side image maps was spotty).

Looking at the HTML source also reveals that tables are over-used. That’s the kind of HTML I can write, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

[UPDATED 2008/5/5: As expected/hoped, Coté did share his thoughts on this "cross-platform" move from the MMS floor.]

Over the last few months, I have seen two “top 10″ lists with almost the same title and nearly zero overlap in content. One is Network World’s “10 virtualization companies to watch” published in August 2007. The other is CIO’s “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008″ published three months later. To be precise, there is only one company present in both lists, Marathon Technologies. Congratulations to them (note to self: hire their PR firm when I start my own company). Things are happening quickly in that field, but I doubt the landscape changed drastically in these three months (even though the announcement of Oracle’s Virtual Machine product came during that period). So what is this discrepancy telling us?

If anything, this is a sign of the immaturity of the emerging ecosystem around virtualization technologies. That being said, it could well be that all this really reflects is the superficiality of these “top 10″ lists and the fact that they measure PR efforts more than any market/technology fact (note to self: try to become less cynical in 2008) (note to self: actually, don’t).

So let’s not read too much into the discrepancy. Less striking but more interesting is the fact that these lists are focused on management tools rather than hypervisors. It is as if the competitive landscape for hypervisors was already defined. And, as shouldn’t be a surprise, it is defined in a way that closely mirrors the operating system landscape, with Xen as Linux (the various Xen-based offerings correspond to the Linux distributions), VMWare as Solaris (good luck) and Microsoft as, well Microsoft.

In the case of Windows and Hyper-V, it is actually bundled as one product. We’ll see this happen more and more on the Linux/Xen side as well, as illustrated by Oracle’s offering. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this bundling so common that people start to refer to it as “LinuX” with a capital X.

Side note: I tried to see if the word “LinuX” is already being used but neither Google nor Yahoo nor MSN seems to support case-sensitive searching. From the pre-Google days I remember that Altavista supported it (a lower-case search term meant “any capitalization”, any upper-case letter in the search term meant “this exact capitalization”) but they seem to have dropped it too. Is this too computationally demanding at this scale? Is there no way to do a case-sensitive search on the Web?

With regards to management tools for virtualized environments, I feel pretty safe in predicting that the focus will move from niche products (like those on these lists) that deal specifically with managing virtualization technology to the effort of managing virtual entities in the context of the overall IT management effort. Just like happened with security management and SOA management. And of course that will involve the acquisition of some of the niche players, for which they are already positioning themselves. The only way I could be proven wrong on such a prediction is by forecasting a date, so I’ll leave it safely open ended…

As another side note, since I mention Network World maybe I should disclose that I wrote a couple of articles for them (on topics like model-based management) in the past. But when filtering for bias on this blog it’s probably a lot more relevant to keep in mind that I am currently employed by Oracle than to know what journal/magazine I’ve been published in.