Hello, everybody. This is Michael Coté of RedMonk. And today for this screencast, we've got actually a pretty interesting virtualization management tool, if you will, that we're going to take a look at. But before I get into describing what exactly it is we're going to see, I'm going to allow the two guests that we have to introduce themselves. Hi, everyone. This is Ursulan Farouk. I am the co-founder and CEO at Converture Corporation. And we are the people who are behind this tool that Coté just introduced. Hi, this is Jaydeep. I'm also co-founder. And I'm looking at engineering efforts within Converture. And so what we're looking at right now is the beginning of the Convert tool here. But before we got into that, I just wanted to get like a really quick overview of what exactly Convert is and the company around it, Converture. Convert is basically a system that we've been working on. It's an open source project that started in 2006. And we formed the company Converture in early to mid-2007 behind it to support the project. Just before we go into the scope of the project, you know, it's full GPL v2 at the moment, fully open source. We have a nice community. We have all of the community infrastructure out there. You guys can go to www.converture.com and just take it from there. So about Convert, our ambition with Convert was to basically bring what we're calling enterprise-grade manageability to the open source virtualization ecosystem. And by that, we mean Zen-based deployments, KVM-based deployments, cloud-based deployments that are using any of these technologies. And this is in sharp contrast with the commercial offerings that are available, which are good. But we believe that open source virtualization platforms themselves. And now with Convert, the manageability is first-class enterprise-grade.
2:05And we want to make sure that that everyone knows and can avail themselves of. Convert itself is – and we'll go into the demo in a bit, and you guys will hopefully get a sense of this. But Convert itself is a comprehensive management solution. So for those of you who are familiar with tools like VMware's Virtual Center and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft's VMM, Virtual Machine Manager, think along those lines. You know, a comprehensive soup-to-nuts management solution that picks up upstream at the very beginning of the lifecycle of your virtualization deployment and takes you all the way to the end. Yeah, why don't we jump right into taking a look at the screen we've been staring at here as we've been getting the overview. So can you kind of tell us what we're looking at right here? You see, what you're looking at is Convert Console. And on the left-hand side, what you're seeing is your server resources that are kind of grouped into their functional islands. And on the right-hand side, what you're seeing is how is my data center doing today? I mean, how each of these server pools is doing in terms of CPU utilization, memory utilization, storage, and network stats. I mean, if you see, these are the metrics that IT administrators care the most about. You know, we're kind of looking at the top level of the pools here, divided by these different things, obviously. And so, like, can you give us a sense of what it's like, I mean, to use everyone's favorite management term, to drill down into something specifically? Yeah, so as you're seeing, what you're seeing right now here is kind of an overview of the data center. And you're seeing some summarized information at a server pool level, right? So let's select one of them and drill down and see how that pool or what are the servers in that pools are doing. So what you're seeing here is the similar information, but now it is rolled up for each server.
4:06And you can even further drill down and get to each VM in place. Right, right. So this is how we get to discover that, you know, these six boxes, we're seeing actually the physical boxes when we find out how many virtual servers. Right, right, and we have, we collect a bunch of information for each of the servers over here. So as you're seeing, you're seeing a Red Hat 5.3 distribution over here. And a bunch of what kind of CPU it is using, what kind of memory does it have, what kind of file systems are mounted, network interfaces. So a whole bunch of kind of information about the server as well as the VM is kind of presented over here. You know, while we're looking at a demo system here, you know, I think, you know, six systems is not like that giant of virtualized resources to look at. But like, can you give us a sense for the scale of like the pools that people are managing with this? We have heard up to 400 plus servers by now. Yeah, there's at least one deployment that has actually close to 400 servers. But the general is, you know, anywhere 100, which is a, you know, a pretty large environment, I think. So people are using this in very large environments. You know, the next thing that I wanted to get you to show us was, you know, the actual managing the creation and the catalog, if you will, of the virtual servers that you could be creating. Convert has what we call image store. It's basically a collection of templates. And these templates are kind of pre-configured as you're seeing kind of them being grouped in a couple of image groups. So if you look at the template, it contains what kind of memory it's going to have, how many CPUs it's going to have, what kind of disk it's going to have, what kind of network it's going to kind of connect to, and things like that. That's right. So we have, like, basically a wizard, if you will, for, I mean, not a wizard in the classic sense, but we have a very nice GUI-wrapped way of building up what's going to be in a server once it's developed.
6:09Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. So let's take a simple image, and let's go through the provisioning operation. It's asking me where do you want to provision. We'll pick a server. Give it a name. And that's pretty much it. We fire away, and the provisioning operation is in place. We got our own new VM provision. We can take a look, and fire it up. So it's sort of, it's staged it there, essentially, and then starts it for you as well. Yeah, so this one, so what we did was, we provisioned a new image that kicks off an installation, a network installation, and that's what we are kind of looking at it. When you start the VM, you can attach to the console and, you know, start using it immediately. And this is everyone's favorite part, is choosing the language and the very basic system level configuration. Let's take a look at, you know, a couple of customizations and see how easy it is to kind of do them. I have a Linux ID install. Why don't we, you know, just would like to customize it, so we'll do a create like and create our own. A specific image that we want to create. And we can then go and customize it to our need. What we're going to do here is, the default image came with, you know, popping a CD in the CD-ROM, which is really good for a really small environment. But as soon as you want to kind of use it in practice, you would probably point this to an ISO. All right, you don't want to have the intern-based configuration management where you send the intern-based box. Yes, that's right. Please run to that box and insert a CD there.
8:09Exactly. So, what we're doing here is, you know, simply telling Convert, hey, instead of using the physical CD-ROM, use the ISO file. And I'm going to specify the ISO file name here. And in a large environment, this ISO is most likely going to be on a shared network drive. Right. And that's it. I just did customization for my specific environment, and I'm kind of ready to go. I can, you know, change the bridge details, you know, reduce the Zen bridge, just a couple of customization, and that's it. I'm ready to go. As we're going through this, like, what are the different options that, I mean, what are the things in the settings that people can edit? Here, the things that are kind of customizable are the memory settings, the CPU settings, the disk, and the network, right? And if you see within a disk, again, you can have disk created by Convert. So, Convert will create a disk. You can use, and while you're creating disk, you can, you know, create logical volume, QCOW, so LVMs, QCOW image or VMDK image. You can use a physical device, ISO file, and, you know, you also have an option to do a clone reference disk. And what's a clone reference disk, exactly? So, basically, most of the time, people, you know, end up with their clone, sorry, their gold image, which, you know, they fine-tune for their environment, and, you know, that becomes their standard desktop image or standard workstation image and things like that. So, what this allows you to do is take that disk image and make a template out of it. So, you can take your, you know, let's do that. Yeah, and that's also handy, especially if you're sort of transitioning to more of a virtual world where you've been running around with the gold image,
10:13and you don't have to sort of build up from scratch. You can just start with that. Yes, absolutely. And another thing that one can do here is, and a lot of our users and customers have mentioned this, that, you know, they would sit down and they would start from scratch, and they'll build out a virtual machine, and they will fine-tune it according to their environment, and they'll deploy their application stack on it, whatever they need to use. And now they have this running, perfectly tuned for them virtual machine. Now, what they'd like to do is they'd like to replicate that in their environment. So, what they do is they actually take that running machine, and then they clone that. They take the disk image, and they clone that and turn that into a template. Now, that perfectly tuned image, now it can be replicated with a single click in Convert throughout their environment. And actually, this turns out to be a surprisingly popular feature with our community. So, as you can see, I just, you know, simply chose a clone reference disk, and I pointed to a shared location where my reference disk was. I'm just saying, hey, this is not containing a container. It's having the disk image itself, and it's in the GZ conference format. And that's pretty much it. Now, when you provision this particular image, it'll make a copy of the disk and create a VM, which is exactly similar to what you had in your gold image. The other thing is that this is kind of integrated into the storage management piece. So, let me just kind of try to do a provisioning this time. And we can see how storage is also integrated over here. So, now when I'm trying to provision a new VM, you can also go and select something from the storage. And these are the storage kind of defined. All right. You can define NFS, ISKC, or AOE type, right? So, I'm just selecting one of the ISKC production storages that we have.
12:13And you can select one LUN out of that at the time of provisioning. And that's it. You're done. There is another whole category of source from where you can, you know, create your templates. And these are typically appliances. There are appliance providers which, you know, create this perfect image from including the operating system application components and application completely pre-configured and ready to go. So, what we have done here is we have done an integration with a couple of popular appliance provider, namely RPATH and Jumpbox. I'm sure most of the people in the industry have heard about them. And what we do is allow you to, you know, simply pick any of the appliances that they are kind of publishing and get it as a template in Convert, right? So, for example, you can pick up a wiki or Ruby on Rails environment, right? Let's take an example. You can simply say, hey, I want to import this thing. And then you're creating your own template based on that, essentially. Absolutely, right? And then it's, you know, ready to go. And you can provision multiple such environments in a similar fashion, right? For each developer, when they join in, you can simply say, okay, give him a Ruby on Rails development environment and be done. You have two appliance vendors in here now. I mean, what's your sense for, like, how, like, other ways people will get stuff into the catalog? It's very easy for you to publish your own appliance or appliance catalog, if you wish, right? And this becomes very interesting for people who are, you know, a little of bigger size, where they are having a multiple of or large number of, you know, blessed images for various environments. So what you can do here is publish your own appliance catalog, and that will, you know, completely be integrated and show up kind of here as one of the provider, right?
14:18So you'll see here Acme Corporation images. Provider is Acme Corporation. And then you will have a bunch of your images. Right. So essentially, I mean, that's interesting because then it allows sort of like a division of authority in IT for people who are using this. There might be people who are in more authority and can kind of, like, build the sort of private catalog, if you will. And then you can sort of leave it to other people who might be the ones who pick and choose from that catalog as far as things go. Yeah. Actually, that's a very interesting point. There are now, you know, tools available where you, which allows you to customize, you know, open source stuff or, you know, build your juice or build your blessed images, right? So our builder is one of them. I think Susie also has some online stuff where you can build your own images, right? So the idea is that you have a tool chain that is producing these blessed images. Of course, a lot goes in tuning and fine tuning for your environment, right? Sure. But once it is done and blessed, hey, you can, you know, give it to Convert tool and Convert can pick it up from there and manage the rest of the whole lifecycle of provisioning, monitoring, managing, and retiring.