My Best of MMS 2012 Series: Private Cloud 2012 Lessons Learned from Our Early Adopters

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An open discussion on people who have built private clouds at customers.

Elasticity

In real live things don’t shrink that often.  Smile Free or real cheap back charge rates are not doing anything to help.

My take on this is that you should look at elasticity as a flexibility feature. Even if a cloud is no that elastic in both ways. You can shrink a cloud v1 to zero as you migrate the VMs to private cloud v2. Than dump the resources back into another pool, step by step or in one go. I’ll use whatever works to make my live easier.

Standardizing & Customer Centric Operations = Planning is Key!

These two can be hard to combine. It takes serious planning and as such an upfront investment.

Than you need to build it to optimize operations (cost & excellent service). This sounds nice but how good are we at this and what is the shelf life of a solution versus the investment?

There is a lot of preparation to do. There is a lot of things to consider. Databases, Storage, the network, security boundaries, disaster recovery planning. They advise not to do it cross domain. Hmmm … we need to address this. Seriously..

Testing => build decent scripts with variables & config files. This will help to deploy in test, acceptance & production without to many changes/work.

Make sure you define all service accounts, groups and permissions you need.

It’s all about planning and what’s being told are best practices that exist already, private cloud or not.

Self Service

  • Service Catalog is a prerequisite.
  • Self Service is key to the private cloud.
  • If people can they will do things differently. You’ll have to learn to deal with this.
  • Billing for services should be clear. Not to much detail. VMs & Storage are two good ones. Keep it simple and don’t go into memory & vCPU. Just set boundaries.

Demos

We dive into the System Center products and look at it from both the IT Pro and the consumer side of things.

Requests => Approval & Deployment

Approval process should be dynamic based on what is requested & who’s making is. You’ll also need SLAs & chargeback on these. Be careful not over complicating it or you encourage rogue IT.

RANT: IT should make things as easy as possible. And in this discussion I’m not won over for charge back. It often turns into an excel exercise. Internal IT becomes more and more like an external service provider or integrator in this model. The inherent strength of being part of the business and being in the best position to help that business move ahead is lost. Is this a complot of the integrators? It fits their model but basically a lot of that is broken very badly. The last thing internal IT should do is become like them. That will do nothing for “Business-IT alignment”. We need to leverage the possibilities of the private cloud for our business or we have no unique selling point. Not that the service providers do a better job, but at least they are not on the pay roll so the bean counters like that. And as long as they can use public cloud to get their needs served hey couldn’t care less about who does the private cloud thingy for them. So a functional IT is first and foremost what we need. That is customer centered. Alignment of business & IT is worthless without that. The latter happens ay to much.

Management

Well yes this is important. We need reports, reviews, Service Improvement Plans, look for opportunities for automation.

Personal Best of MMS 2012 Series “Why We Fail–An Architect’s Journey to the Private Cloud”

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Introduction

The speaker (Alex Jauch) addresses cloud terminology confusion and points out that yet everyone wants it. So the pressure is on to deliver cloud.

But as an architect you can’t build with such vague notions of what it is. That just doesn’t work. 78% of enterprise IT Shops will deploy a private cloud by 2014 (Gartner) 62% of all IT Projects fail. For the record, building a private cloud is not an easy project.

For one, what are you building? What is it, way to may definitions. NIST seems to be one of the better definitions around. Specific, direct and actionable. We can work with that. I suggest you visit the NIST site for more information on:

  • Deployment Models:Private Cloud, Hybrid, Public.
  • Service models SAAS, PAAS, IAAS
  • The Essential Characteristics
    The Common Characteristics

Why We Fail

What happens:

  • Install Hyper-V
  • Deploy System Center
  • Build a solution

The essential element of cloud is that  “The cloud is a customer centric business model, not technology”.It’s approached to much as a technology problem and that’s why we fail.

The architect should not allow this to happen so he is to blame. The architectural practice is to marry business needs and wants to technology as a solution. This really hits home but there are more people involved and than there is the entire business / IT alignment fiasco as you can read in my blog The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse? , but the bucks ends with the architect..

How do we add value to the business? Commodities do not add value, they are necessities. So we need to decide what business we are in. Meeting standards is not a goal. Enabling business is the goal. So they think you’re doing a great job empowering them. After all they are paying for it.

The Take Away

Traditional IT needs to evolve (fast) to customer centric IT.  End user departments define the goals. Our operational proficiency used to be our pride but what does it mean to the customer? Problems that do not affect the business don’t matter. So talk to customers to find out about what they want and need. They don’t care about your skill set or certifications. You’ll need t extract the need from their wants.

The ability to take pain points away from customers. Small & medium sized projects do very well at this. But in a lot of companies they don’t promote you for those “smaller” projects. So the business also has to evolve.

I’d like to add that Old style IT is also promoted by  a lot of misguided security officers and business lawyers. Strict rules as a guidance and instrument are their instruments and no those are also not always in the business best interest.

This relates to IT Portfolio Management: Strategic, High Potential, Key Operational & Support. We need to realize that whatever we work on might be strategic or high potential will move to key operational and support. They all need different approaches and types of management. So choose your methodologies wisely. Don’t just pick one and force that square peg in the round hole. This is my advice to both business and IT. I’ve seen business decisions change support level products turned into high cost  high maintenance because due to bad decisions. So we might not have to be our brothers keeper towards the business but than again do we really need those bridging functions and those guys or gals need to be at the top of their game as I stated in The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

So keep things a simple and as effective as possible. Do it fast, ride and repeat. You’ll learn a lot and improve along the way. So here comes the build or buy decision and the link to the NetApp plug by the speaker. This is very dependent on the situation of the organization at hand. So the fast track has it’s place here. Is speed of delivery of key importance or absolute flexibility and adaptability? So it will depend. Yes the consultants answer. But being a real consultant is a very respectable job. I can’t hell it that the word has become meaningless due to missuses and inflationary titles for temps for hire.  The System Center stack and how NetApp improves and leverages all this is briefly discussed. He ties the fast track into the discussion of portfolio management and working in a customer centric way.

Conclusion

Why are we doing what we do? Think about it. There is a nice book on this subject  “Why we fail? by Alex Jauch.

Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 2

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This is a multipart series based on some lab test & work I did.

  1. Part 1 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 8 (Beta) – Part 1
  2. Part 2 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 2
  3. Part 3 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 3

Here’s part two of my adventures while upgrading or rather “transitioning” my Hyper-V cluster nodes to Windows 8. Transition is more correctly as you can not upgrade a cluster, you create a new cluster en recuperate the node. I did however not reinstall them but upgrade them. Why, because I can and I wanted to try it out to see what happens. For production purposes I do advise you to rebuild nodes from scratch using a well defined and automated plan if possible. I already mentioned this in Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 8 (Beta) – Part 1

So we stopped Part 1 with a evicted and upgraded node. We’ll want to create a new cluster with that node and then transition the other nodes over to the new Windows 8 cluster one by one, or in batches, depending on how many you can afford to take down at one time. In this part we’ll just build our new Window 8 cluster with a single node. It’s a good thing this is possible as we can start a transition with just one node. This an easy part.

First of all we create a new cluster. I will all look very familiar if you’ve ever created a Windows 2008 (R2) cluster.

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The Create Cluster Wizard appears, read all the advice you want and click “Next”

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We select the node that we evicted from the old cluster and upgraded to Windows 8

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You now run the validation test for your cluster

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Let’s run ‘m all and see what it has to say.

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We get a summary of what notes will be tested and what tests will be run. Click “Next”

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The tests are running.

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We get a pass with some warnings. So we click “View Report” to take a look. It’s OK we only have one node, we don’t have storage yet and networking wise we still need to configure some things but we can create a one node cluster, So click “Finish”

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I named my new cluster “warriors”, the old one was called “warrior”.

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I define the IP Address for the Access Point for administering the cluster

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We’re ready to create the cluster so we click “Next” and the creation process starts

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And we’re informed we’ve have successfully created a cluster. Click Finish. Any experienced cluster builder should find this process very familiar without surprises.

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So now we have a cluster existing out of one node and we haven’t got any storage assigned yet.

We have several options for storage here. We could assign new storage but we cannot do a Quick Storage Migration between cluster using SCVMM2008R2 but that doesn’t fly as SCVMM2008R2 can’t manage Windows 8 clusters and I don’t know if it ever will.  We can do a good old manual or scripted export and import of the VMs what takes a considerable amount of time.

We can recuperate the old storage with the VMs still on there. This could get tricky as no two cluster should be able to see & use the storage at the same time. The benefit could be that we can just use the import type in Windows 8 ("Register the virtual machine in-place" (use the existing unique ID) and be done with it. We’ll try that one. We’ll still have some down time but it should be pretty fast. It’s only from Windows 8 on that we’ll be able to do Shared Nothing Live Migrations between clusters Smile We’ll address that in Part 3.

I’m off to Attend MMS 2012 In Las Vegas

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Life is good people. I have to good fortune to work in an interesting industry, doing great projects with modern technologies. On top of that my employer allows me to fully develop my skills . In that respect it makes a serious difference to have a good boss & management that understands the benefits of ongoing education. They look a both the short & long term value of people educating & developing themselves a lot more than at that nagging Excel sheet on the screen. Professional development is not just a cookie cutter 4 day training course once or twice a year but real opportunities to become a better professional if and when you’re willing to put in the effort. They’ve figured out that you cannot just use utmost cost reduction to catapult both your business and employees in to prosperity & wellbeing. You need to keep learning, evolving, networking, … The contacts I make and the education I get by working with and learning along very smart & motived people are priceless. Sure it costs money and effort form everyone involved but it beats doing nothing and saving a few € as a long term strategy for growth & success. On top of that I feel appreciated & valued for my contributions and the efforts I put in.So to the tunes of some eighties rockers I’m off again.

Here I go again on my own, goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known.
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone. An’ I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time. I’m attending MMS 2012

Alone, heck no, many thousands of us will be descending on Las Vegas (Nevada, USA) to attend the summit. This event sells out fast each year. A friend told me to register a.s.a.p. or miss out, so I did as soon as I got the go ahead to attend, securing my spot. So now I’m travelling over LHR to LAS following my buddies & other attendees journey from their respective countries to Las Vegas on line, mostly via Twitter.

If you can’t come, whatever the reason, you can always enjoy a good number of sessions here MMS 2012 goes digital: LIVE streaming and On-Demand for attendees AND non-attendees! 48 hours after the live presentation.

I don’t have to tell you what System Center 2012 means to the IT Pro in the Microsoft ecosystem. Combine that with the RTM of Windows 8 later this year and I just had to go and attend the Microsoft management Summit 2012 in Las Vegas.  It’s more than training. It’s networking and an education.

Apart from the formal agenda & sessions I already a have some meetings lined up with vendors, colleagues from around the globe. We’re making the most of this opportunity to meet face to face with people we other wise only get to talk to on line and often with huge time zone difference.

MMS2012_Server

I’ve you’re going and you read my blog or follow me on twitter. Give us a shout out and perhaps we can have a meet & greet.

To all my geek & nerd friends, colleagues, MEET members, business partners, Microsoft employees & MVPs in route to Vegas & the Summit at The Venetian, I’m looking forward to seeing you all again! But first I have some traveling to do in the next 24 hours, to make my way over there.