1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:12,460 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. 2 00:00:12,540 --> 00:00:18,740 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. 3 00:00:18,740 --> 00:00:34,100 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. 4 00:00:34,580 --> 00:00:41,640 Hi, this is Jaydeep. I'm also co-founder. And I'm looking at engineering efforts within Converture. 5 00:00:41,640 --> 00:00:54,300 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. 6 00:00:54,300 --> 00:01:10,260 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. 7 00:01:10,260 --> 00:01:24,560 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. 8 00:01:24,560 --> 00:01:37,340 So about Convert, our ambition with Convert was to basically bring what we're calling enterprise-grade manageability to the open source virtualization ecosystem. 9 00:01:37,340 --> 00:01:46,680 And by that, we mean Zen-based deployments, KVM-based deployments, cloud-based deployments that are using any of these technologies. 10 00:01:47,700 --> 00:01:54,240 And this is in sharp contrast with the commercial offerings that are available, which are good. 11 00:01:54,240 --> 00:01:58,500 But we believe that open source virtualization platforms themselves. 12 00:01:59,060 --> 00:02:05,180 And now with Convert, the manageability is first-class enterprise-grade. 13 00:02:05,460 --> 00:02:09,600 And we want to make sure that that everyone knows and can avail themselves of. 14 00:02:09,700 --> 00:02:15,000 Convert itself is – and we'll go into the demo in a bit, and you guys will hopefully get a sense of this. 15 00:02:15,060 --> 00:02:18,980 But Convert itself is a comprehensive management solution. 16 00:02:18,980 --> 00:02:33,300 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. 17 00:02:34,320 --> 00:02:44,740 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. 18 00:02:44,740 --> 00:02:50,280 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. 19 00:02:50,780 --> 00:02:54,220 So can you kind of tell us what we're looking at right here? 20 00:02:54,220 --> 00:02:57,540 You see, what you're looking at is Convert Console. 21 00:02:58,260 --> 00:03:07,400 And on the left-hand side, what you're seeing is your server resources that are kind of grouped into their functional islands. 22 00:03:08,700 --> 00:03:14,420 And on the right-hand side, what you're seeing is how is my data center doing today? 23 00:03:14,420 --> 00:03:23,640 I mean, how each of these server pools is doing in terms of CPU utilization, memory utilization, storage, and network stats. 24 00:03:25,020 --> 00:03:30,120 I mean, if you see, these are the metrics that IT administrators care the most about. 25 00:03:30,200 --> 00:03:34,820 You know, we're kind of looking at the top level of the pools here, divided by these different things, obviously. 26 00:03:34,960 --> 00:03:40,820 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? 27 00:03:40,820 --> 00:03:47,060 Yeah, so as you're seeing, what you're seeing right now here is kind of an overview of the data center. 28 00:03:47,620 --> 00:03:51,860 And you're seeing some summarized information at a server pool level, right? 29 00:03:52,040 --> 00:03:57,820 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. 30 00:03:58,620 --> 00:04:05,900 So what you're seeing here is the similar information, but now it is rolled up for each server. 31 00:04:06,600 --> 00:04:12,940 And you can even further drill down and get to each VM in place. 32 00:04:14,140 --> 00:04:14,760 Right, right. 33 00:04:14,800 --> 00:04:20,860 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. 34 00:04:20,900 --> 00:04:26,960 Right, right, and we have, we collect a bunch of information for each of the servers over here. 35 00:04:27,160 --> 00:04:31,100 So as you're seeing, you're seeing a Red Hat 5.3 distribution over here. 36 00:04:31,720 --> 00:04:39,600 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. 37 00:04:39,700 --> 00:04:46,500 So a whole bunch of kind of information about the server as well as the VM is kind of presented over here. 38 00:04:46,620 --> 00:04:55,580 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. 39 00:04:55,640 --> 00:05:00,760 But like, can you give us a sense for the scale of like the pools that people are managing with this? 40 00:05:00,820 --> 00:05:03,680 We have heard up to 400 plus servers by now. 41 00:05:04,100 --> 00:05:08,900 Yeah, there's at least one deployment that has actually close to 400 servers. 42 00:05:08,900 --> 00:05:15,980 But the general is, you know, anywhere 100, which is a, you know, a pretty large environment, I think. 43 00:05:16,180 --> 00:05:17,980 So people are using this in very large environments. 44 00:05:18,080 --> 00:05:27,140 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. 45 00:05:27,240 --> 00:05:30,560 Convert has what we call image store. 46 00:05:30,880 --> 00:05:36,180 It's basically a collection of templates. 47 00:05:37,380 --> 00:05:47,220 And these templates are kind of pre-configured as you're seeing kind of them being grouped in a couple of image groups. 48 00:05:47,420 --> 00:05:57,100 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. 49 00:05:57,340 --> 00:05:57,860 That's right. 50 00:05:57,920 --> 00:06:08,920 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. 51 00:06:09,140 --> 00:06:09,480 Absolutely, absolutely. 52 00:06:09,480 --> 00:06:09,940 Absolutely, absolutely. 53 00:06:10,060 --> 00:06:15,500 So let's take a simple image, and let's go through the provisioning operation. 54 00:06:16,500 --> 00:06:17,940 It's asking me where do you want to provision. 55 00:06:18,180 --> 00:06:19,100 We'll pick a server. 56 00:06:22,500 --> 00:06:23,300 Give it a name. 57 00:06:30,580 --> 00:06:32,020 And that's pretty much it. 58 00:06:33,340 --> 00:06:37,880 We fire away, and the provisioning operation is in place. 59 00:06:38,580 --> 00:06:40,600 We got our own new VM provision. 60 00:06:42,260 --> 00:06:46,580 We can take a look, and fire it up. 61 00:06:51,620 --> 00:06:57,080 So it's sort of, it's staged it there, essentially, and then starts it for you as well. 62 00:06:57,300 --> 00:07:08,600 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. 63 00:07:08,820 --> 00:07:13,360 When you start the VM, you can attach to the console and, you know, start using it immediately. 64 00:07:13,660 --> 00:07:18,340 And this is everyone's favorite part, is choosing the language and the very basic system level configuration. 65 00:07:18,960 --> 00:07:25,640 Let's take a look at, you know, a couple of customizations and see how easy it is to kind of do them. 66 00:07:25,640 --> 00:07:27,200 I have a Linux ID install. 67 00:07:27,660 --> 00:07:32,660 Why don't we, you know, just would like to customize it, so we'll do a create like and create our own. 68 00:07:38,820 --> 00:07:42,080 A specific image that we want to create. 69 00:07:43,440 --> 00:07:46,580 And we can then go and customize it to our need. 70 00:07:46,960 --> 00:07:54,860 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. 71 00:07:55,100 --> 00:08:00,320 But as soon as you want to kind of use it in practice, you would probably point this to an ISO. 72 00:08:00,700 --> 00:08:06,040 All right, you don't want to have the intern-based configuration management where you send the intern-based box. 73 00:08:06,600 --> 00:08:07,300 Yes, that's right. 74 00:08:07,540 --> 00:08:09,320 Please run to that box and insert a CD there. 75 00:08:09,360 --> 00:08:09,760 Exactly. 76 00:08:10,260 --> 00:08:17,760 So, what we're doing here is, you know, simply telling Convert, hey, instead of using the physical CD-ROM, use the ISO file. 77 00:08:18,020 --> 00:08:24,320 And I'm going to specify the ISO file name here. 78 00:08:25,460 --> 00:08:31,080 And in a large environment, this ISO is most likely going to be on a shared network drive. 79 00:08:31,460 --> 00:08:31,720 Right. 80 00:08:33,400 --> 00:08:34,320 And that's it. 81 00:08:34,320 --> 00:08:41,920 I just did customization for my specific environment, and I'm kind of ready to go. 82 00:08:42,140 --> 00:08:51,640 I can, you know, change the bridge details, you know, reduce the Zen bridge, just a couple of customization, and that's it. 83 00:08:51,680 --> 00:08:52,260 I'm ready to go. 84 00:08:52,340 --> 00:08:58,440 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? 85 00:08:58,440 --> 00:09:07,720 Here, the things that are kind of customizable are the memory settings, the CPU settings, the disk, and the network, right? 86 00:09:07,840 --> 00:09:13,980 And if you see within a disk, again, you can have disk created by Convert. 87 00:09:14,060 --> 00:09:15,060 So, Convert will create a disk. 88 00:09:15,460 --> 00:09:24,900 You can use, and while you're creating disk, you can, you know, create logical volume, QCOW, so LVMs, QCOW image or VMDK image. 89 00:09:26,020 --> 00:09:32,860 You can use a physical device, ISO file, and, you know, you also have an option to do a clone reference disk. 90 00:09:33,180 --> 00:09:35,280 And what's a clone reference disk, exactly? 91 00:09:36,080 --> 00:09:48,280 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, 92 00:09:48,280 --> 00:09:53,320 and, you know, that becomes their standard desktop image or standard workstation image and things like that. 93 00:09:53,420 --> 00:09:58,760 So, what this allows you to do is take that disk image and make a template out of it. 94 00:09:59,180 --> 00:10:04,900 So, you can take your, you know, let's do that. 95 00:10:05,300 --> 00:10:12,860 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, 96 00:10:13,140 --> 00:10:15,240 and you don't have to sort of build up from scratch. 97 00:10:15,300 --> 00:10:16,740 You can just start with that. 98 00:10:19,100 --> 00:10:19,840 Yes, absolutely. 99 00:10:19,980 --> 00:10:24,780 And another thing that one can do here is, and a lot of our users and customers have mentioned this, 100 00:10:24,860 --> 00:10:30,180 that, you know, they would sit down and they would start from scratch, and they'll build out a virtual machine, 101 00:10:30,180 --> 00:10:36,580 and they will fine-tune it according to their environment, and they'll deploy their application stack on it, whatever they need to use. 102 00:10:36,900 --> 00:10:41,700 And now they have this running, perfectly tuned for them virtual machine. 103 00:10:42,000 --> 00:10:44,740 Now, what they'd like to do is they'd like to replicate that in their environment. 104 00:10:45,640 --> 00:10:50,440 So, what they do is they actually take that running machine, and then they clone that. 105 00:10:50,920 --> 00:10:53,800 They take the disk image, and they clone that and turn that into a template. 106 00:10:53,920 --> 00:11:00,880 Now, that perfectly tuned image, now it can be replicated with a single click in Convert throughout their environment. 107 00:11:01,260 --> 00:11:06,020 And actually, this turns out to be a surprisingly popular feature with our community. 108 00:11:07,080 --> 00:11:11,480 So, as you can see, I just, you know, simply chose a clone reference disk, 109 00:11:11,560 --> 00:11:14,260 and I pointed to a shared location where my reference disk was. 110 00:11:15,120 --> 00:11:17,760 I'm just saying, hey, this is not containing a container. 111 00:11:17,760 --> 00:11:22,420 It's having the disk image itself, and it's in the GZ conference format. 112 00:11:23,300 --> 00:11:24,180 And that's pretty much it. 113 00:11:24,320 --> 00:11:30,080 Now, when you provision this particular image, it'll make a copy of the disk and create a VM, 114 00:11:30,540 --> 00:11:34,600 which is exactly similar to what you had in your gold image. 115 00:11:34,680 --> 00:11:39,460 The other thing is that this is kind of integrated into the storage management piece. 116 00:11:39,500 --> 00:11:43,100 So, let me just kind of try to do a provisioning this time. 117 00:11:44,160 --> 00:11:49,420 And we can see how storage is also integrated over here. 118 00:11:49,760 --> 00:11:58,300 So, now when I'm trying to provision a new VM, you can also go and select something from the storage. 119 00:11:59,360 --> 00:12:01,100 And these are the storage kind of defined. 120 00:12:01,440 --> 00:12:01,920 All right. 121 00:12:01,980 --> 00:12:06,560 You can define NFS, ISKC, or AOE type, right? 122 00:12:06,900 --> 00:12:11,460 So, I'm just selecting one of the ISKC production storages that we have. 123 00:12:13,160 --> 00:12:17,740 And you can select one LUN out of that at the time of provisioning. 124 00:12:17,960 --> 00:12:18,940 And that's it. 125 00:12:19,040 --> 00:12:19,360 You're done. 126 00:12:19,500 --> 00:12:25,600 There is another whole category of source from where you can, you know, create your templates. 127 00:12:26,220 --> 00:12:28,120 And these are typically appliances. 128 00:12:28,120 --> 00:12:40,140 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. 129 00:12:40,340 --> 00:12:52,560 So, what we have done here is we have done an integration with a couple of popular appliance provider, namely RPATH and Jumpbox. 130 00:12:53,100 --> 00:12:55,780 I'm sure most of the people in the industry have heard about them. 131 00:12:57,340 --> 00:13:10,140 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? 132 00:13:10,200 --> 00:13:14,840 So, for example, you can pick up a wiki or Ruby on Rails environment, right? 133 00:13:15,160 --> 00:13:16,080 Let's take an example. 134 00:13:16,760 --> 00:13:19,940 You can simply say, hey, I want to import this thing. 135 00:13:25,060 --> 00:13:27,940 And then you're creating your own template based on that, essentially. 136 00:13:28,660 --> 00:13:29,500 Absolutely, right? 137 00:13:29,920 --> 00:13:32,180 And then it's, you know, ready to go. 138 00:13:32,400 --> 00:13:35,900 And you can provision multiple such environments in a similar fashion, right? 139 00:13:35,940 --> 00:13:41,980 For each developer, when they join in, you can simply say, okay, give him a Ruby on Rails development environment and be done. 140 00:13:42,160 --> 00:13:44,180 You have two appliance vendors in here now. 141 00:13:44,280 --> 00:13:49,680 I mean, what's your sense for, like, how, like, other ways people will get stuff into the catalog? 142 00:13:49,680 --> 00:13:55,540 It's very easy for you to publish your own appliance or appliance catalog, if you wish, right? 143 00:13:55,740 --> 00:14:07,420 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. 144 00:14:07,420 --> 00:14:18,000 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? 145 00:14:18,040 --> 00:14:20,380 So you'll see here Acme Corporation images. 146 00:14:20,980 --> 00:14:22,320 Provider is Acme Corporation. 147 00:14:23,060 --> 00:14:25,080 And then you will have a bunch of your images. 148 00:14:25,700 --> 00:14:26,060 Right. 149 00:14:26,200 --> 00:14:35,240 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. 150 00:14:35,360 --> 00:14:41,000 There might be people who are in more authority and can kind of, like, build the sort of private catalog, if you will. 151 00:14:41,240 --> 00:14:46,020 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. 152 00:14:46,020 --> 00:14:46,200 Yeah. 153 00:14:47,060 --> 00:14:48,880 Actually, that's a very interesting point. 154 00:14:49,540 --> 00:15:00,040 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? 155 00:15:00,200 --> 00:15:01,800 So our builder is one of them. 156 00:15:02,780 --> 00:15:07,620 I think Susie also has some online stuff where you can build your own images, right? 157 00:15:07,920 --> 00:15:13,120 So the idea is that you have a tool chain that is producing these blessed images. 158 00:15:13,580 --> 00:15:17,760 Of course, a lot goes in tuning and fine tuning for your environment, right? 159 00:15:17,980 --> 00:15:18,240 Sure. 160 00:15:18,400 --> 00:15:29,580 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.