e-Zest is Professional Level Partner of VMWare and has a dedicated VMWare competency center. VMWare is the market leader in infrastructure virtualization and accoding to one of the Gartner's researches, its at least 6 years ahead of its competitors in terms of technology innovations. e-Zest has gained extensive experience in implementing the infrastructure virtualization using VMWare vSphere.

vSphere is amazing innovation from VMWare. Its worth spending few minutes understanding its key features and benefits.

VMware vSphere, the industry’s first cloud operating system, leverages the power of virtualization to transform datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud computing infrastructures and enables IT organizations to deliver the next generation of flexible and reliable IT services, using internal and external resources, securely and with low risk.

VMware vSphere infrastructure services transform discrete hardware resources into a shared mainframe-like computing platform that is incredibly resilient and capable of running the most demanding applications with nearnative performance.

Few of the the Key Features of VMWare vSphere:

1. Bare-metal architecture: VMware ESX and ESXi insert a robust virtualization layer directly on the server hardware for near-native virtual machine performance, reliability and scalability.

2. Small footprint: VMware ESXi is a compact, 70 MB form factor of the production proven VMware ESX hypervisor. It is a fraction of the size of a general purpose operating system for unparalleled security and reliability.

3. Server integration: VMware ESXi is available integrated into servers from leading OEM vendors for a simplified boot and deployment experience.

4. CPU virtualization: Run many operating systems and applications encapsulated inside virtual machines on a single physical server for higher utilization, without risking critical processes being starved of compute or memory resources. VMware ESX/ESXi use intelligent process scheduling and load balancing across available processors to manage the execution of virtual machine processing

5. Network virtualization: Network virtual machines like physical machines. Build complex networks within a single VMware ESX/ESXi or across multiple installations of VMware ESX/ESXi for production deployments or development and testing purposes.

6. Flexible virtual switches: Create a virtual network within a VMware ESX/ESXi host with virtual switches that connect virtual machines within the same host as well as the outside physical network. Virtual switches can be created with up to 2040 ports, and every host can be configured with up to 248 switches.

7. Storage virtualization: Abstract the complexity of storage subsystems while centrally maintaining virtual machine file storage for greater flexibility and manageability.

8. VMotion: Live migrate running virtual machines from one server to another with no disruption or downtime.

9. Storage VMotion: Live migrate running virtual machines from one storage location to another with no disruption or downtime.

10. High Availability: Protect against physical machine failures through low cost, easy

to setup VMware HA. VMware HA automatically detects physical machine failure and restarts virtual machines on other physical machines in a shared storage environment.

11. Scalability and extensibility: Manage upto 300 hosts and 3000 virtual machines with vCenter Server 4.0 and Link many vCenter Servers in your environment with vCenter Server Linked Mode to manage upto 10,000 virtual machines from a single console.

These are few of the key features which VMWare vSphere 4.1 offers. Contact us for a free demo/discussion wherein we can explain you in details the advantages of infrastructure virtualization using VMWare vSphere 4.1.

Author: Satish Agrawal is VP-Cloud Computing Practice at e-Zest Solutions Ltd. (www.e-zest.net) and mentor for Cloud Computing Professionals in and around Pune. His mission is to build core competencies at e-Zest in the domain of Cloud Computing for enterprises and ISVs and deliver best values. e-Zest Cloud Computing Practice provides complete cloud computing solutions from assessment to design to deployment to operation and adaption to evolution.

This Blog is in continuation of my first blog on OSGi.

In the first part we saw what OSGi is and what benefits it offers. In this section I would like to share my experience in evaluating OSGi for developing a Web based application, the challenges I faced, Spring DM server and DM Server development tools for developing OSGi applications. Next I would also share some of my experience in using Spring DM Server for an actual development project

After doing my initial research of the OSGi framework I decided to start my journey on developing a sample Web based application on OSGi. 

I soon realized my research is not complete and I still had to explore on how to integrate a Web based application within an OSGi container.  I also had to explore on the development tools to be used.

Challenges in developing an OSGi based web application

I faced an interesting challenge here. OSGi applications need to work within an OSGi container whereas Web applications run within a Web Container.

To resolve this issue one can either embed the Web Container bundle (Tomcat bundle or Jetty bundle) within OSGi container or deploy the OSGi platform as a war within the Web Container. I particularly didn’t find these approaches amusing but with no other option left chose the first option.  

Oops faced one more challenge here. Tomcat bundle was not readily available. I went through various forums and site where they explained how to build a tomcat bundle. Not to delay my progress I decided to use Jetty bundle which was readily available. It did take time for me to do the initial setup but finally I was set to start my development.

I was using PAX-Construct for handling the OSGi container and for deploying the various OSGi bundles. I went through the various steps that are required to develop a bundle and deploy it using PAX- Construct .I tried a few examples and found the steps to be too exhaustive and time consuming. Searching the open source library bundles manually, installing them and updating the Manifest file was becoming a nightmare. Instead of focusing on business logic my major time was getting spent in OSGi related activities.

My excitement about OSGi was coming down and I was thinking may be OSGi development tools are not matured enough and OSGi is best suited only for desktop based application. I wanted to have a simple deployment container for OSGi Web applications and easy to use development tools.

 I wanted to do more research in this area before coming to a final conclusion and so I continued my research on OSGi in the web mode.

After going through several sites and forums I found the OSGi Enterprise Experts Group is working on the RFC66 standard for OSGi web container. I also came across several claims about Spring DM server being the best reference implementation of the standard. I didn’t come across any other implementation of the standard so couldn’t do much of the comparison here and finally decided to do more analysis of the DM Server.

Just after spending a couple of hours on the Spring DM server I found SpringSource has resolved both of my previous concerns.  Spring DM Server served as a ready platform for deploying OSGi based web applications and Spring Source DM Server Tools provided very good Eclipse development environment for Spring DM server based applications.

Let’s have a look at what Spring DM Server and its development tools provides us

Spring DM Server

1. Spring DM Server is a lightweight, modular, OSGi-based runtime that provides a complete packaged solution for developing, deploying, and managing enterprise applications.
2. The SpringSource dm Server is built on top of the following core technologies:
3. Spring Framework
4. Tomcat as the web container.
5. OSGi R4.1.
6. Equinox as the OSGi implementation.
7. Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi for working with OSGi in a Spring application.
8. SpringSource Tool Suite for developing applications.
9. Spring Application Management Suite for monitoring the SpringSource dm Server and the applications that have been deployed to it.

Key Capabilities Include:

Admin Console: deploy and manage artifacts, examine diagnostic dumps, and examine bundle wiring, either in the live system or from a resolution failure

Equinox console extension – manage DM Server and deployed artifacts

Plans - define the artifacts that comprise an application, optionally making the application atomic to tie the artifact lifecycles together, and scoped to isolate the application from other applications

Provisioning - automatically supply the dependencies of an application including bundles, plans, plan archives (PARs), and configurations, from both local and remote repositories

Web container - supports vanilla WAR files, with all their dependencies in WEB-INF/lib, and Web Application Bundles, that import their dependencies via OSGi manifest metadata, via the embedded Tomcat-based reference implementation of the OSGi Web Container specification, configured using the standard Tomcat server.xml

User Region - isolates the kernel from user-installed applications and enables admins to focus on application artifacts and their dependencies without seeing those of the kernel as well

Spring 3 –Spring DM Server packages Spring 3.0 final, but can easily be configured to use a different version of Spring.

Hot deployment - deploy artifacts to Virgo by copying them into the pickup directory, either in archive or exploded form, as an alternative to deploying via the admin console

Logging - via embedded LogBack, configured in config/serviceability.xml, with a rich set of appenders available out of the box

Spring Source Tool Suite

SpringSource provides a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse IDE that streamlines the development lifecycle of OSGi bundles and PAR applications. The SpringSource dm Server Tools build on top of the Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP) and Spring IDE, the open-source Spring development tool set.

 The SpringSource dm Server Tools support the creation of new OSGi bundle and PAR projects within Eclipse, and the conversion of existing projects into OSGi bundle projects. Projects can then be deployed and debugged on a running dm Server from within Eclipse.

Experience of using Spring DM Server in Live Project

 I developed a sample Web application based on Spring DM server and its development tools. Once all stake holders were convinced we decided to use it for our next development project.  

At the time of writing this blog its beings six months we have been using Spring DM server in actual development. Following are some of my experiences in this period:

1. Technical Documentation: Spring Source has come up with a detailed documentation for setting up the server and developing/migrating a web based application using Spring DM server.We were able to resolve most of our setup and development issues by referring to the Spring Source provided documents. We also got answers to most of our queries from Spring DM server forums but still there were some situations where in we had to struggle for our problems.But overall we would rate the documentation and the forum support to be fairly good.
2. Spring Source Repository: Spring Source has come up with an online repository where you can find OSGi bundles and libraries for all major Java open source libraries. For our development project we were able to find 95% of our open source bundles readily available here which saved our search time to a great extent.
3. Hibernate integration: It was very easy to integrate Hibernate in our application. The OSGified Hibernate Library was readily available with the Spring Source repository and we had to follow the standard Spring – Hibernate integration process.
4.  Axis 2.0 integration: We faced lot of issues here. The Axis 2.0 bundles were not readily available. There were some sites which OSGified the bundles but deploying these was causing lot of version conflicts with other bundles.Since the Web Service code was part of a single web bundle and was not required to be decomposed into smaller bundles we decided to use the normal Axis 2.0 libraries. We deployed the standard Axis2.0 libraries in the lib folder of our web bundle and were able to integrate Axis without further issues.
5.  Tiles Integration: Again we faced bundle conflict issues here. There were version conflicting issues with the Tiles library and Spring 3.0 Library. To resolve the issue we had to provide reference to a couple of core Spring 2.5 library
6. Spring DM Server integration within Eclipse: The development tools provide seamless integrations of Spring DM server with Eclipse. We were able to Start, Stop the server, Deploy and Redeploy PAR files from within Eclipse easily. Debugging the application code was also very easy and we had to follow the standard debug process here.
7. Deploying Open source bundles from the development environment:  This is one of the best features provided by the development tools. The development tools provide easy integration with various online repositories from where the OSGi bundles/libraries can be downloaded and integrated for an application. Using this feature we were able to search and deploy open source OSGi bundles and libraries easily for our application.
8. Manifest file manipulation from Development environment:   The development tools provide an excellent User Interface for importing packages from other bundles and for exporting packages of a bundle. The actual Manifest file is automatically generated based on the selections made from the User Interface. This saves lots of Manifest file management hassles.
9. Using Maven for continuous Integration :  We are still doing research in this area. Our intial research suggests using Maven for build process results in losing lots of benefits offered by the development tools. At the moment we are using only the development tool for building and deploying the PAR project but we would definitely want integration with Maven to streamline the integration and build process.

To conclude OSGi provides a great platform for building modular Java applications in a true sense. OSGi is proven technology adapted by many open source and proprietary  Java Enterprise servers and applications .Spring DM server looks promising as an OSGi web container and the DM server tools greatly simplify the OSGi development tasks. With the standardization of the OSGi web container specifications and Spring Source being actively involved in its implementation we would expect adaption of OSGi in many future Java Web application developments.

Finally I would support the quote posted on Spring Source site by Jan Hendrik  Kuperus ‘ Spring DM Server is the future of Java EE’.

PS: At e-Zest, we work on emerging technologies & solutions based on OSGi component framework & Enterprise OSGi specification. Please feel free to email me your queries regarding OSGi on our corporate email id: info@e-zest.net

This week an open cloud manifesto has got published with intent of beginning a conversation in the direction of formulating principles for open cloud computing. The companies behind drafting this open cloud manifesto are of an opinion that innovations happening in cloud computing area in terms of standards, interoperability, integration and portability should be guided by the principles of openness.

The manifesto has covered topics like importance and need of cloud computing today and challenges and barriers for its adoption. The cloud computing manifesto has identified goals like availability of choices, flexibility in cloud computing usage, speed and agility to respond quickly to changes and open cloud computing skills. This all should help building a foundation for open standards and architecture for cloud computing.

The initiative is criticized by Microsoft calling it as a secret cloud manifesto. A blog attributed to Steven Martin, senior director of platform product management, has said in its post that the document was asked to sign 'as is' without modification or additional input. Though Microsoft admits that there should be standardization, it feels that it is too early to do that. Amazon supported the initiative and Google is yet to comment on it.

The responses from Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be helpful in guiding the future path for this open cloud manifesto.

IT services companies can relax a bit with news coming from Gartner managing vice president, Joanne Correia. US sub-prime crisis has haunted software services company higher authorities with a fear of diminishing IT spending. But prediction from Gartner that worldwide IT spending should top $3.4 trillion in 2008, up 8 percent from 2007, will give them a restful night’s sleep. Much of this growth is due to the decline in the U.S. dollar.

Software spending and IT services are expected to see the biggest gain, up 10 percent and 9.4 percent respectively in 2008. "Software as a service/cloud computing, service-oriented architecture/Web 2.0, and open-source software are causing huge changes to the software market," wrote Joanne Correia in a research note. "Many of these factors are impacting market growth as enterprises replace assets with per-use services."

With internet proliferation on-demand services are on high. Even desktop bully Microsoft is trying to taste waters in web world with software as a service offerings lined up. Coming few years will be most happening and we may witness desktop losing major chunk of pie to cloud computing. But whatever may be the scenario IT spending will grow up at least in 2008.

Today while a post by Phil Wainewright who is very well known technology writer at ZDNet I came across a very convincing definition of Web 3.0. According to him Web 3.0 is technology that brings Web 2.0 and on-demand applications into the enterprise.

Enterprise Mashups is helping world achieve Web 3.0 objective. Some call it composite web application. These mashups will help combine information from enterprise search engines, web services, messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions and combine that information from external services from all stakeholders, partners and suppliers and emerging external data sources to deliver the information at one place.

The open Web services and SOAs philosophy for application development is lowering the integration impedances and now applications are able to readily combine all web services into rich new applications. This can be a precursor for the long-awaited arrival of true software reuse.

The development language would not be as important as architecture and future thinking for development of such web applications. The key is to create virtual humanized web applications that will talk, hear and share with each other to provide true electronic communication across the supply chain. The flow towards Web 3.0 development will soon increase.