vFabric on vCloud - meet the vFabric cloud application platform (episode 2)

In this second episode of "vFabric on vCloud" I'll introduce you to vFabric. Our end user here is an architect/developper/devops for the cloud scale application challenge that Octo runs with VMware and Steria - but the demonstration is fairly generic.

The user is having access to the VMware powered platform through vCloud Director, over the internet using its web browser.

He has a vFabric 4 VM cluster running and has access to the built-in Hyperic instance.

Using Hyperic, the user has a centralized, secured and top to bottom view on his application platform - for the entire vFabric stack. Even if the cluster is elastic with new VM coming in, Hyperic built-in self-discovery kicks in and keeps consistency in a dynamic environment.

The vFabric cloud application platform features a number of web related platform services:

• tc Server - lightweight and scalable enterprise version of Tomcat for Java apps and Spring apps
• ERS - an Apache based httpd that can frontend the stack or deal with non Java apps (PHP, Perl etc)
• RabbitMQ - an AMQP compliant messaging broker with many languages binding and additional protocols, that can also be connected straight to browsers for web messaging
• GemFire - a distributed data grid that combines replicated / partionned caching and eviction with map reduce and no-data loss / shared nothing parralel persistence capabilities
• Hyperic - an agent based distributed system for performance monitoring and control of the entire stack - from bare operating system to inside-application - that provides fundamental capabilities to manage elastic environments at scale, including non-vFabric if you want.

vFabric can be used as a whole platform "better together" - with for example tc Server offloading state (session, Hibernate L2 or java caching) to GemFire, and async processing to RabbitMQ - while ERS can load balance tc Server instances.

Hyperic glue the entire distributed environment together from an operational perspective - for deployment, configuration, remote control and performance management - but you can use command line just as well.

In a next episode we will look at part 3 of the user experience - as seen from a cloud operator adding new vFabric VM to the cluster to increase compute and data capacity at deploy time or at runtime with a "clone to scale" built-in design.

vFabric on vCloud - meet the vFabric cluster vApp (episode 1)

In this first episode of "vFabric on vCloud" I'll introduce you to the end user experience. Our end user here is an architect/developper/devops for the cloud scale application challenge that Octo runs with VMware and Steria - but the demonstration is fairly generic.

The user is having access to the VMware powered platform through vCloud Director, over the internet using its web browser.

He has access to a pre-provided vApp - a set of 4 vFabric VM and one utility VM that are wired on a private network and can be managed as a whole entity by the user (start, stop, suspend etc) but also by the underlying cloud provider or organization manager if needed.

Once started, the user is having access to its 5 VM over a secured SSH and can then create a tunnel to access for example the vFabric Hyperic web UI in a secured fashion even with use of default password.

In our example, the vApp has been pre-provided through a vApp template by the organization manager. It encapsulates all best practices and ensure isolation yet flexibility for a multi tier application environment.

Depending on roles we could have given the user more freedom to create his own vApp(s) based on quotas limits and catalog access where our VM and vApp templates are listed.

In a next episode we will look at part 2 of the user experience - few seconds after a vFabric VM cluster boot where all the vFabric cloud application platform gets accessible, manageeable, and dynamic and elastic.