Virtual Ascetic

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Archives for April 2013

Using Zimbra in the cloud

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For the last little while I have been playing with email solutions in the cloud that offer customized, self branded email functionality. Additionally, I needed something that works reasonably well since it is an Enterprise class solution from VMware.

Zimbra has evolved significantly from its previous versions and now offers a much more streamlined solution that is easy to install and very straightforward. It can be installed as a virtual appliance in a private cloud or as a hosted solution in the public cloud. The important benefits are integration with voice, tasks, address book, etc in addition to the traditional email interface.  When I installed Zimbra I was concerned about the time it would take for installation, complexity, add-ons etc but none of these were an issue.

Zimbra can be installed on RedHat linux and it makes the installation more appealing to a wide variety of users. The memory and cpu utilization is optimum and because it can be installed on a virtualization platform the flexibility and architectural benefits offer great benefits.  There is a free 30 day trial version of Zimbra available that offers a chance to try it out first. While Zimbra offers mobility and unified integration capabilities I haven’t been able to test them out yet. What I have been able to test however, is the ease with which new accounts can be created, multi-tenancy can be established, and quotas can be setup.

There is integrated anti-spam filtering, antivirus and directory services (LDAP) available as well. Just some minor things to worry about during the installation – and these are very important. Do not enable the mail and apache functionality at the time of the Linux server setup. These conflict with the installation and cause problems with application startup. During and after installation there is a need to setup the admin password and license file as well. The prompts could be a little more easy to understand and I hope VMware improves something so basic. For e.g. there is an error during install that highlights that the admin password is not set and license file is not there. However, unless you refer the install guide you don’t get an indicate to select the right line to set the variables. Finally, if you are not able to connect to the admin console (https://server fqdn:7071/zimbraAdmin) then make sure that the port 7071 has been opened in the /etc/sysconfig/iptables configuration file. After opening the port restart the iptables service and you are good to go.

Zimbra is an excellent solution compared to many other email software that is pitched as enterprise class but is not truly the case. If you have any other experiences to share or need more information about my experience feel free to reach out to me.

Attending EMCWorld 2013 – discount code giveaway

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EMCWorld 2013 is coming up soon from May 6- 9, at Las Vegas. This year the focus is obviously going to be on the Cloud and you can’t get left behind.

For this year’s EMC World event, I have a limited number of discount codes to share with the rest of the tech community and I am very pleased to do so. Note that these discount codes are to be used up by April 8, 2013. If you have already registered for EMC World you can still use these codes but will lose any previously applied code and lose the early bird gift.

Being an EMC Elect, it is great to have the ability to share the discount codes with the general community because it means someone will really get to benefit. A big thanks to EMC  for providing the discount codes because it adds value. Some attendees will really appreciate getting discounts on their attendance cost because they could be small businesses or independent consultants.

If you are an EMC employee you will not be able take advantage of this benefit.

Post a reply in the comments area and I will send you the code by 8pm CST. If there are more than three community members who reply I will do a quick draw (my 4 year old daughter will pick the winner).

vCloud Automation Center

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When VMware acquired dynamic ops it was supposed to boost its arsenal of tools that would facilitate automation within VMware. However, over time they have boosted their own capabilities significantly by renaming and releasing vCloud Automation Center for the cloud infrastructure. First of all there are a lot of discussions around the future of vCloud Automation center and if it is supposed to remain as an independent product or integrate with other software like vCloud director etc and become one powerful suite itself.

I feel VMware would try and consolidate its variety of products in the next 1 or 2 releases (and if it is true.. you read it here first). It would make sense to do so and reduce complexity and costs around using multiple VMware products. Remember the focus of virtualization using VMward was to offload dependence from a variety of products and centralize management.

Anyways, moving back to focus on vCloud Automation Center 5,1 – it offers self provisioning and provides the capability to rapidly deploy and provision cloud services across private and public clouds. It can also be the platform for IaaS and SaaS models.  The use of Unified Cloud Management, governance related granularity, resource management, and extensibility is going to propel the software forward. Additionally, vCloud Automation Center is supposed to manage the complete lifecycle fo VMware vSphere VM’s from 3.5 through 5.1. That is interesting and very useful since some environments need to have a level of backwards compatibility. When we would be at a future release like 8.0 or something atleast there would be a great degree of backward compatibility as well.

Right now vCloud Automation Center integrates with vCloud director to deliver the promised land (read cloud) – multiplatform hybrid cloud.  While vCloud director serves its own features the Automation Center acts as a layer over it from a service standpoint providing IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS services. This diagram pretty much sums it up –

vCloud automation center

Taking the capabilities of vCloud director a step ahead it provisions vApps into preconfigured vDC’s leveraging the vDC and Software defined networking and storage services of vCloud Director.

It also integrates with vCenter Orchestrator for tasks like – retrieving information from an external database, generating a work order ticket, running a script on the machine, and others.  All this is done through a visual workflow designer invoking a VCO (vCenter Orchestrator) Workflow.

The functionality extends further to offer multi-machine service management or a multi-tier application. The vCloud Automation Center offers everything through a self service portal that can be used to request a service from a list of available cloud services. While new machines can be deployed changes to existing machines can be done to manage vCPU, memory, storage or anything else based on definition of a machine blueprint. The blueprint also consists of information about storage allocation and how one or more disks will be configured. The storage reservation policy describest the service level that the user will receive.

In terms of licensing, three models have been put forth –

  1. per VM server
  2. per VM desktop
  3. development kit license

However, support for desktop products like XenApp is unknown or not very clear at this time. It might happen that the integration with VMware Horizon Manager might integrate with the VMware vCloud Automation center for this piece. But I haven’t researched this aspect in more detail so won’t comment much on it.