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This is a summary of the post on the VMOps blog.

1) Inexpensive storage

The storage industry is built on the back of NAS and SAN, but for cloud providers, the overwhelming preference is for inexpensive local disk, or DAS solutions. … every cloud provider I talk with expects storage to be independent of the host physical server, redundant, and provide support for HA.

2) Open source hypervisor

Service providers know that if they plan to compete with Amazon, Rackspace and other cloud providers, on price, VMware is not a good option. Perhaps because it is being used by Amazon, Xen seems to be the most popular hypervisor for Infrastructure clouds among the service providers

3) Integration with Billing and Provisioning Apps

… most hosting companies and MSPs have billing and user management approaches that they have built-up over the years. Every one of the companies I’ve spoken with expect their cloud solution to plug into these existing systems.

4) Image-based pricing to support both Windows and Linux

Most service providers I talk to expect Linux to make up the majority of the images they run int he cloud, but they still need to make sure the cloud will support Windows, and all of the associated technology necessary to manage licenses.

5) Simplicity of administration by end0users

Plenty of end-users will leverage a Clouds API to automatically provision and manage virtual machines, but that doesn’t change the need for a simple UI. Most hosting companies have a huge number of end-users who are used to working with control panels, and an Infrastructure cloud needs to make life easy for these end-users.

6) Reliability

Over the next few years, many of the large providers of dedicated servers will be offering their customers the option to transition to virtual machines running on a computing cloud. For this to be successful, VMs need to offer better reliability than dedicated machines at a lower cost.

7) Turn-key solution

… service providers today can implement a completely integrated cloud stack on commodity hardware, and receive ongoing maintenance and upgrades over the years. Equally important, service providers can license software on a consumption basis, so upfront investment is negligible.

Incidentally, Mr. VMOps Product Manager, you may wish to provide just 3 more requirements to make this a Top 10 requirements list.

Our readers are primarily asking questions like:

• How can I free up disk space, on Windows, and on ext4, ext3 on Ubuntu and Linux, within virtual disks like vmdk, vhd and vdi?
• Where can I find the best virtual appliances/ Top 10 virtual appliances?
• How can I convert from one virtual disk (vmdk to vhd, or vdi to vhd) to another?
• Who are the competitors for ec2?

An analysis of the search terms shows interesting clusters:

If I abstract it out, our readers are primarily interested in learning how to free disk storage and where to find the best / Top 10 vmware, Xen and Windows virtual applainces.

Thank you. I appreciate your interest in this blog.

1) Software as a Service (SAAS)
Salesforce.com (sales application)
wush.net (svn)

2) Platform as a Service (PAAS)
a) Java
Google App Engine
b) Rails
Joyent
Heroku
EngineYard
c) Python
Google App Engine

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonHosting

d) .net
Azure

3) Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)
Amazon EC2

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (765)
2. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (566)
3. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (149)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (111)
5. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (101)
6. http://stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://sharevm.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/most-popular-vmware-virtual-appliances-for-it-administrators/ (84)
7. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (67)
8. http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/vmware-virtual-machine-to-virtual-box-conversion-how-to/ (66)
9. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (66)
10. http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2007/01/21/determining-file-fragmentation-on-ext3-file-systems/ (61)
11. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (52)
12. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (53)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers

I received the email annoucement from Amazon ec2 earlier today:

You can read the detailed announcement here and also download the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) is offering over 1500 AMI’s (virtual appliances). It’s recent foray into Europe highlights its aggressive pursuit of a land grab strategy. So, what has its competition in the US been up to? Every major web hosting vendor has announced a cloud initiative:

• The Rackspace cloud is called Mosso. Its prices compare favorably with Amazon’s. Its pricing calculator and spreadsheets can be found here.
• Savvis has a VMWare ESX based offering for Windows and Linux
• AT&T is also offering VMWare ESX based hosting Windows, Linux and Solaris x86. They intend to offer Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V in the future. AT&T offers SLA’s for cloud services, a first.
• Terremark has also launced an Enterprise Cloud, which incidentally is a utility computing cloud sans virtualization
• IBM’s cloud initiative has its products available as AMI’s on ec2.
• Sungard has not yet publicly announced its cloud plans.
• Verizon is slated to announce its cloud initiative in Summer 2009

Amazon’s ec2 is nearly three years old now (Mar 2006) and competition has started appearing on the horizon just over the past year. If you look at the timescale of announcements,

• Rackspace’s Mosso is just over a year old (Feb 2008),
• Terremark’s cloud is nine months old (June 2008),
• AT&T’s cloud is seven months old (Aug 2008),
• IBM’s AMI launch on ec2 and Savvis’ cloud is three weeks old (Feb 2009).

Since ec2 was first to market, the Rackspace, AT&T and Savvis cloud offerings have a “me too” feel to them. However, unlike other vendors, Rackspace has published pricing on the Web and it appears to be very competitive with ec2. 

Unlike Amazon, Savvis and AT&T are going the buy versus build route to get fast time to market. They are initially launching their service using VMWare technology put together using Professional Services instead of following Amazon’s approach of building a proprietary infrastructure using Open Source software as its foundation. In fact, this may be the preferred route amongst the upper echelons of cloud service providers. There is optimism that providing cloud services is a growth business. I am noticing startups like Enomaly (“Build your own private elastic cloud”) and VMOps (“launch ec2 today”, aka public cloud) offering cloud infrastrcture products.

In conclusion, credible competition is emerging and there are real alternatives to ec2 available today. However, given the state of the economy, I think the market will begin to form by 2010 and should reach critical mass by 2011-2012.

Oracle Corporation has delivered a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), to make it easy for customers to get started deploying Oracle solutions on Amazon EC2. The following appliances are built on Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5 Update 2 as the base OS:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition – 32 Bit
• Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Express Edition – 32 Bit
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 64 Bit
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 32 Bit
• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Standard Edition/Standard Edition One – 64 Bit
• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition – 64 Bit

Oracle Secure Backup

For on-premise Oracle installations, AWS offers a dependable and secure off-site backup location through the Cloud Backup module, which is a part of Oracle Secure Backup – a tape backup management solution. It provides customers the flexibility to back up data to either tape or the Cloud.

Licensing

Oracle customers can now license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager to run in the AWS cloud computing environment. Oracle customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.

 Ubuntu JeOS

• How to develop virtual appliances using Ubuntu JeOS

VMWare Studio

• Studio: A Free Virtual Appliance Authoring Tool With Robust Management Features
• Videos: Learn how to build a VMWare virtual appliance
• Create your own Linux appliances

Parallels

• How to build a Parallel’s virtual appliances

rPath rBuilder

• rBuilder Appliance creator
• Best practices for building virtual appliances

Rightscale

RightImages provide ready-to-go base operating systems with core cloud software.

ServerTemplates also allow you to designate any number of scripts that you want to run at boot time, upon demand, or when an event is triggered.

RightScripts allow you to specify packages that you want to install before a script is executed and even allow you to upload and attach files directly to scripts.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

• Use an existing AMI
• Create your own AMI from scratch

IBM has begun offering IBM DB2, IBM Informix, IBM WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server AMI‘s on Amazon.com’s EC2.

IBM is providing several “Development” AMIs at no additional fee beyond Amazon EC2 charges for developers building commercial IBM-based applications.

AWS will also roll out pay-as-you-go pricing for the “Production” Amazon EC2 running IBM service, enabling you to purchase these services by the hour.

The groundbreaking development is that IBM has rationalized their licensing so the customers can use their existing licenses for virtual appliances

For customers that already have existing IBM licenses, you are now eligible to bring them to Amazon EC2 starting today. IBM has created a Processor Value Unit (PVU) conversion table that makes it easy to determine how your existing licenses apply to the various EC2 instance types.

Update : An interesting analysis of this announcement at CIO.com

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (546)
2. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (342)
3. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (110)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (59)
5. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/189804?tstart=0 (49)
6. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (42)
7. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (37)
8. http://wordpress.com/tag/vhd/ (33)
9. http://wordpress.com/tag/vmdk/ (32)
10. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (32)
11. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (32)
12. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (31)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers.