A clear view of cloud computing

Ironically for a conference in sunny Las Vegas, people here are talking about clouds. Of course, they’re not thinking about typical English rain clouds. Here at the VMworld Conference, everyone is talking about cloud computing. Essentially this is all about encapsulating workloads inside VMs and running those VMs on a server somewhere. The key is that you don’t need to think too much about which server the workload runs on.

One example given was for a CRM app, and for the demo they used the Sugar CRM virtual appliance. This has been available as a free download from the VMware site for quite some time, and the appliance didn’t need to be modified in any way to work with this demo.

The demo showed how an IT department could use VMware’s forthcoming vCenter AppSpeed console to monitor the performance of the CRM app and automatically activate a second copy whenever SLA thresholds were breached. In this demo the SLA was that no transaction should take more than four seconds to complete. As more users were added to the demo environment the time taken for each transaction gradually increased until eventually some transactions took more than four seconds. At this point the second VM was started and soon began to handle enough of the workload so that the SLA was again met. Bog standard load balancing kit was used to distribute the workload between the two VMs.

Although the main VM was hosted in a VMware datacentre, the second VM was hosted by a commercial ISP, and the deal with the ISP was that it would only charge when the VM was actually running.

To use the parlance of the day, the demo was vImpressive. IT managers may even begin to use this kind of cloud configuration as part of their disaster recovery plans.