Bye 2013-Welcome 2014

I hope 2013 would good for everyone out there and i wish 2014, for everyone will be very prosperous and full of success.
Everyone already made new year resolutions for them, and sadly they're going to be broken on very first day of new year, you know all this, how it is.
i'm human too and i also made some resolutions for me and already started working on my goals for 2014 before the new year started.
1)Learning python
2)working on openstack
3)improve my virtualization skills
Please share your new year resolutions on the comments and for the sake of new year's eve i'm keeping this post very short and ending this with saying

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014


everyone enjoy a safe and happy holidays and joins me again in January for more blog posts.

50% discount on VCA certifications

As you all know VMware Inc. recently added VCA(VMware Certified Associate) as a new pre-requisite for It's renowned VCP(VMware Certified Professional) certification. VCA certification is available in three flavour and you only need to watch 3-hour long fundamentals session(one for each exam), working internet connection and a browser to clear these exams. 50% discount is an icing over the cake for New Year and you can take-off with VCA certification in year 2014. For rest of the details and coupon code follow the Link.

For providing the 50% discount coupon code, credit goes to vfrank.org blog.vca-certification-50-discount-voucher
So, what you are waiting for, begin your virtualization journey with VCA certifications.

Image Credit-tomsitpro.com

Whats on your mind for upcoming holidays

Whenever someone ask this question-something started to happen inside our minds(this happens to me since my school days). I think learning virtualization for almost free is the best place to be during holidays. Most virtualization software companies invested a lot of money for educating people on their virtualization offerings and their training methodologies are also very innovative.

1)Learning VMware- I used a lot of Vmware education material for getting familiarise with it's tons of software products and their HOL(Hands-on-Lab) is one of the best. Accessing these materials and HOL is very easy, just hop on to mylearn.vmware.com and create an account on this site. after creation of account you will get access to almost 49 free virtualization courses at your disposal.

For HOL access, create another account on this site. Yes! you can use existing email id that you just used for 'mylearn.vmware.com' site and after confirming your account, you'll get access to tons of HOL on new and existing ESX softwares. this one is great for those virtualization enthusiast, who still don't have homelabs and use only company provided lab environment. you can do all the practicals without worrying about breaking anything.

2) Hyper-V/Azure- For MS fan boys, they can taste hyper-v, azure and Other MS software offerings using Microsoft Virtual Academy(MVA), if you want some hands-on time, you can create an Azure account using your credit card(you need a valid card, Azure check it by doing a $1 transaction) and access the free-trial. Although their Video material on MVA site is superb and if you complete the tutorials you can even win certification vouchers for MS Exams.

3)Amazon AWS- For tapping the cloud offering from famous Book company(Not anymore), you again need to use your credit card for proving that you're a real person and willing to pay, if you use more than your allowed free tier(free instance). on amazon aws, be very cautious while experimenting, because they charge on monthly basis.

These are top three virtualization software companies who provide quality training for almost no cost and give you real exposure on their industry proven technology.

Have a nice weekend..

Comparison of Hypervisor Architectures-VMware, Hyper-V and Xen/KVM

Now, it's time for first technical post, otherwise people will think this blog as "Yet Another Personal Blog" rather than Virtualization blog. today i'm going to compare the architectures of most popular off-the-shelf available hypervisors. Mostly hypervisors can be segregated into two major categories type-1(bare metal) and type-2(paravirtual). for today i'm considering type-1 hypervisor. we can segregate type-1 hypervisors into two more categories 1)purpose built hypervisor and 2)legacy operating system hypervisor, logically there is not much difference between these two. First one runs directly above the bare metal and the later runs above the operating system layer, also called as parent partition(Windows) or Dom0(Linux).

1)VMware ESXi- Vmware ESXi falls under the type-1, purpose built hypervisor category, earlier releases of ESX were based on legacy operating system, but when they analyzed the number of patches required to keep the legacy OS up-to-date and large attack-surface, they moved away from that approach and now they are 100% purpose built bare metal hypervisor in the industry.

So, what benefit we get if we're using purpose built hypervisor-
a)Less patching required
b)Less hops, communicating to the underlying hardware
c)Thin and small attack surface
d)Fast and agile infrastructure, when your hypervisor can be booted off from USB/SD card
e)No legacy and emulated device drivers

2)Hyper-V- Although there were so many rumors over the blogosphere about hyper-V being type-2, but it's confirmed that Hyper-V lies in type-1 hypervisor category. these days Hyper-V is giving tough competition to VMware and IMHO it is really win-win situation for consumers. if you don't believe me see the virtualization development timeline, consumers always wins. So, Hyper-V is type-1 legacy OS based hypervisor.

the cause of those rumors was the way hyper-v is installed above windows OS. after install OS reboots and hyper-v kernel sits on ring-1 of processor and windows kernel runs above hypervisor. it's a bit confusing for people who understands VMware architecture very well, don't worry now everything is crystal clear.

Merits of legacy hypervisor-
a)Smaller learning curve, Training people require less efforts
b)Wide range of hardware support
c)Less hardware compatibility issues

Demerits of legacy hypervisor-
a)More number of hops for communication with underlying h/w
b)higher number of patches
c)Large attack surface

3)Xen- it's the most famous open-source hypervisor, and there are very successful virtualization products based on xen, to name a few-citrix xenserver, amazon aws and rackspace etc. it is type-1 bare metal hypervisor and it supports two virtualization mode- paravirtualization or software assisted virtualization and full hardware assisted virtualization.

Merits of Xen hypervisor-
a)Widely available source code for various distros
b)Can be modified as per requirements
c)Device drivers can be easily written for hardware communication

Demerits of Xen hypervisor-
a)High skilled Developers required
b)Virtualizing Windows OS require para-virtualization drivers
c)Open-source community support

4)KVM- it is now owned by Red hat and renamed as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Red hat acquired Qumranet to take part in virtualization race. it is type-1 hypervisor and is somewhat similar to Xen Architecture.

Merits of KVM hypervisor-
a)Backed by biggest Open Source software vendor
b)24x7 support from redhat
c)Very aggressive development for competing with others

Demerits of KVM hypervisor-
a)Very less availability of skilled man power
b)Still not being widely accepted for production workloads
c)For Major issues support call escalates to principal developers.

I kept this post purposefully graphics heavy, as you know "a picture speaks thousand words", so consider this post as 5000+ words long, just joking. In my next post i will elaborate all the tech-jargon's used in virtualization world.

Have a pleasant night.
Images Credits-thanks to wikipedia and google image search

Few things on my mind-before christmas leave starts

Recently i returned from Japan, after staying there for six months, this one is my first offshore outsourcing project, i learnt a lot from Japanese people and gained a lot of experience while working with them. Japan is very peaceful and quiet country, people are very helpful and biggest problem was language. but today i'm in festive mood, so i will share some of the good things with you. During my Japan visit i bought so many gadgets there like, Asus taichi 21, Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9, Intel NUC and Kobo Ebook reader. Japan has very renowned Gadgets market called Akihabara aka Electronic city. Intel NUC is the best christmas gift for myself from there, it is still not available in india. but, IMHO it's a must have for every virtualization enthusiast out there. it's got clearance on all the homelab criteria, like-

1)WAF

2)Electricity bill under control (idle=5-10W, peak=25W)

3)Very Small Form Factor

4)Low noise/less heat

With Intel NUC you can easily create/modify/destroy lab environments at your ease, it supports intel VT-d under the hood and you can experiment with various hypervisors like Xen, Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, and Openstack(Not a hypervisor),and if you haven't setup your home lab, plz do it now. that's the first thing to share with you guys.

Second, i want to share my feedly subscription collection with everyone and want encourage you all to have your own feedly subscription and you can utilize my subscription collection as a kickstart and modify it as per your requirement, feedly.opml. How to configure feedly? or what is an RSS reader?, if you have such questions in your mind, you already missed your train...don't worry still you can find these answers on your favorite search engine(i don't want to push you to use google, although you will ;-)). 

Third thing on my list is, if you haven't started reading any books, please do so, virtualization related books are available off-the-shelf on Amazon, Packtpub (ebookbonanza) and Flipkart and get some cheap and durable ebook reader for making reading a habit. After buying Kobo-Glo-eReader from Japan (now avail. in india), my perspective towards reading is completely changed and using this smart device i finished more books compared to the past.

that's all, from my bucket list, you can consider it as a friendly advice for new year resolution or as my achievement in 2013 and last thing to say to everyone before leaving from work today "MERRY CHRISTMAS" enjoy holidays.

Note-Updated Guide for building Nested ESXi Home Lab-http://www.v-front.de/2014/01/how-to-provision-nested-esxi-hosts-on.html

Yet Another Virtualization Blog-Continued

So, "Recession" was completely different topic, although it is very touchy, we will be taking a detour from here and go on to our virtualization track. Indian IT companies started using Virtualization the hard way and in so many ways it's the right step toward cleaner, greener and efficient way towards enterprise IT. I also implemented virtualization infrastructures for Government, semi-government and Mid-sized companies  while working with one of the major IT services company. during my tenure with this company i gained a lot of experience with heterogenous clients and various virtualization software implementation, like Xen, Hyper-V, and Parallels. I think all virtualization companies have almost similar offerings with less or more features, although their underlying approach toward virtualization is completely different and they are moreover inclined towards the companies they have bought. Understanding the underlying approach/technology is very important to implement the solution based on the software. i will cover the underlying technologies/architectures in laymen's language in future posts for mostly used virtualization offerings.

Almost 5 years passed away and during these years i've tasted almost major virtualization software's whether it's Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, Redhat RHEV or Greatest one VMware vSphere and also got certified on VMware and Microsoft. but our learning won't stop, whenever you start thinking that you've learned enough, there is always some new technology come in front of you. sometime it is like endless levels of playing Mario and still after crossing all the levels you won't get the queen(Please correct me if i'm wrong). Amazon AWS is one of the new kid in the indian market and IT companies are luring toward cloud era. although this is not a new concept, it was their since the days of gmail and google drive. but recently companies started to look towards cloud for complete IT nirvana(get rid of capex, only opex), what about IT guys 'nirvana'?. Some companies are smart or you can say following government laws, they're leveraging the concept of cloud and started building their own private/hybrid clouds for the sake of their own huge IT Departments (humour, not true completely), but for abiding their countries laws. Although cloud solutions looks good on accounts but still require IT staff to manage, when that day will come, when CEO/CIO's can provision server's from their handheld's (Some companies say, we're already there).Don't worry our Job's are secure, what we need to do is just grasp the new cloud based skills and we're good to go.

One positive thing in all this conversation\blog entry is, this second episode that i contributed today, make me feel that i'm not gonna end this blogging project like so many orphaned virtualization blogs.

see you tomorrow.

Yet Another Virtualization Blog

Hi Virtualization Folks!

In this Blogosphere, I'm contributing this "Yet Another Virtualization Blog".

Although, Internet is already exploding with virtualization content, but imho every virtualization admin can contribute his day-to-day experiences to this ever growing knowledge pool.

Personal blog play two roles
1) personal log and
2) reference for others in-case they face same issue.

And, i think a good story line will make this first blog entry, memorable and give me enthusiasm to write one entry daily. So, here is my story, i got acquainted with virtualization technology in the year 2003, and the credit goes to one of the most successful x86 virtualization company, i think you already guessed it, right!, but still i tell the name for guys who have a hard time guessing i.e. Vmware Inc. i got my hands dirty with  VMware_Workstation 4.0 , this was really astonishing experience for me, to install guest OS (ex. winXP) above winXP acting as host OS. At that time, i didn't felt the potential of this Award winning technology , because of my limited knowledge and exposure to server administration world.when i got the exposure and gained the skills toward my server administration path, i started seeing the benefits of virtualization technology and got familiar with other alternatives as well like QEMU, Xen and Connectix. Since then i never leave any opportunity of pushing virtualization technology as a solution to most of the server sprawl and consolidation problems. I also started doing experimentation with this really cool technology and found that in how many ways it can be utilized. then i started believing that sooner or later IT companies in India will start utilizing(accepting) it as reliable, production ready software for their less critical needs.

VMware was the strongest contender in virtualization market, is not facing any competition from other new-born virtualization softwares. and due to this, virtualization software development was going on very slowly. During this period. Big corporations foreseen the future and started acquisition war, EMC, Microsoft and Citrix, so that, they can get their share of pie or you can say share of upcoming market.

In 2008, when recession arrived in India, IT companies started cutting corners for cost reduction and no-one looked at the number of servers sitting inside their Datacenters, wasting power, DC space, cooling etc. that period no one can forget, it was really hard time for people in IT sector, even i got the 10% deduction letter.
From then onwards, as per Companies 'Recession' is still in india and going to stay here for years.

To be continued...