Build your Enterprise Private Cloud – Powered by Citrix XenServer - Part 2

Part 1: Meeting with the Dev/Test Lab Administrator - Read here before starting Part 2 below.

Part 2: Meeting the Dev and Test Engineers

Abbie’s Dev/Test Lab

(Ziva, Test Lead and Tony, Dev Lead walk into the lab)
Ziva – Shut up Tony. That bug was not because of a setup issue. I know it was a REAL bug.

Tony – Ho Ho…I never said it wasn’t a bug Lady…All I am asking of you is to reproduce it.

Ziva – Hmmm…I am going to do just that Mr. Developer. Just wait till we discuss with Abbie. Abbie, could you re-setup the test bed you gave me yesterday. I need to kick Tony’s butt with that stupid bug.

Tony – Alright Miss. Perfect. How many times have you raised defects only to find that the s/w config was not setup correctly, the Environment variable was not set properly, the right version of the required s/w was not installed blah blah blah…

Abbie – Guys Guys…STOP….Agent Pal could you help us here before these guys eat up each other

Agent Pal – Ha ha…no problem guys…I have the right solution…Ziva, would you love it if you could capture the test bed right when the bug happens and push it out to Tony…File a defect with the link to the bug reproduced???

Ziva – Are you serious?? Can we do that?

Agent Pal – Yup…and you can also record all the user actions while the bug happens as a movie and let Tony watch it!!!

Ziva – Wow…That is unbelievable…That is going to save me weeks of testing cycles. How many times have I had to re-create bugs only bcoz the stubborn dev couldn’t reproduce it and wouldn’t accept the defect..

Agent Pal – Totally agree….And you also automate all the manual steps involved in setting up the test bed…prevents any manual errors…

Ziva – You are just awesome Pal (Gives Pal a big hug). Abbie – when are we getting this LabManager in our lab. I am going to tell my Boss that we can complete the whole testing cycle in 30 days – instead of 50 days. Am sure to get a fat pay hike and a promotion this year 

Tony – Mr. Pal, once you can stop blushing, and recover from that hug from Ziva, could I ask you a favour?

Agent Pal – Sure, shoot it Tony

Tony – Well my team designs and develops some large distributed systems that run the company’s online e-commerce portal. And I would like to create some of these N-Tier systems in the lab, today it takes me days to get the networks setup, VMs configured and have the system up. Anyway that your solution could speed up this process.

Agent Pal – Of course yes. You can use LabManager to design and deploy some of these complex multi tier applications.

Tony – I don’t want to tussle with the networking folks to setup the network and then beg abbie to give me the VM resources. Can that be done.

Agent Pal – Why not. It is as simple as defining the VM roles, network settings etc. in LabManager and just hit deploy. LabManager automatically brings up the whole system – and it can be an exact replica of your production application.

Tony – Wow that sounds cool. If it is going to be really that SIMPLE, I am going to give you a big hug too.

Agent Pal – Oops…I guess just a hand shake will do.

Tony – Hmmm..Okay.

(Michele, Marketing dept walks into the lab)

Michele - Abbie, I had requested for a Wiki Server to run our new marketing campaign – is it ready. We need to go live next week?

Abbie – You need to give me more time Michele. You wanted the Wiki to be accessible over the internet. That has to get cleared by the Networking and the Security Folks. Will let you know when it is done.
(Michele walks away)

Agent Pal – You should probably let her self-provision pre-built secure Wiki servers using the Citrix Self Service Portal.

Abbie – Ha ha…None of your solutions are gonna work here Pal That lady is just DUMB …Nevermind she will never be able to do that.

Agent Pal – Oh …The Self Service Portal servers just that purpose. A Super Simple UI where even the most Non-Tech folks can get what they want. You should try that with Michele.

Abbie – Will do Pal. And I want to charge these folks for the VMs that they run. So they learn to use the resources scarcely.

Agent Pal – Definitely. You should look at the billing code functionality built into Self Service Portal. Lets you generate monthly reports on how much resources your users have consumed.

Abbie – Ya…that will be handy. Btw you should meet McGee, the Geek who manages our Production Infrastructure. Your solution has been wonderful and I am sure McGee could use your help too.

Part 3 – Meeting with the Production Infrastructure Administrator

To be Continued….

Note: All characters depicted above are purely fictitious and bear no resemblance to anyone alive or dead – however any similarity to the fictitious characters of NCIS is purely intentional.

This blog is my personal and all the contents here are my personal comments and have no bearing on my employer.

Hypervisor Storage Integration - Is Citrix leading the Game?

Had posted in my previous post on the feature comparison between XenServer and ESX.

Apart from those, storage integration has been one area where Citrix has been leading the game. XenServer 5.0 has built in integration with NetApp and EqualLogic storage arrays. This enables XenServer to leverage the storage features like Snapshotting, Fast clone and thin provisioning.

Though this might not have a serious performance implications for normal workloads, this integration makes XenServer more suitable for disk intensive workloads and for apps like VDI and LabManager. Both VDI and Labmanager rely extensively on the fast clone and snapshot features. Offloading these functions to the storage should give users noticeable I/O performance enhancements and also free up CPU cycles on the Server. I am not aware of XenApp using the fast clone technology like VMWare View Manager does, but Citrix Labmanager (OEMd from VMLogix) extensively uses this feature and should be interesting to note the performance differences between VMLogix Labmanager on ESX and on XenServer with NetApp storage.

Citrix has gone another step further by introducing the new product - Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) for both XenServer and Hyper-V. This product integrates with the leading storage vendors and provides the capabilities to carve out LUNs on the arrays on demand and present them to the hypervisors. This should fill the gap with the non-availability of Cluster file system in Hyper-V. Being a 1.0 product, it seems to lack functionalities in terms of the no. of storage vendors it supports and also support for Zoning of the FC switches. But this definitely is an interesting product to watch out for.

In my view VSM should boost the virtualization of I/O intensive production apps. By mapping storage LUNs straight to the VMs, you can provide the same performance and reliability to the VMs as that of physical machines. By automating and integrating storage provisioning with the hypervisor tools, Citrix has given the flexibility to quickly provision the VMs On Demand.

VMWare is definitely not lagging far behind. VMWare has announced the vStorage framework for integrating drivers and features specific to storage vendors into ESX 4.0. Should be interesting to watch if VMWare can come out with a broader vendor support and more features compared to Citrix in vStorage.

Let's wait and watch.