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VMware Technology Exchange for Developers at VMworld 2010

Steve Jin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:52:30 +0000

VMware TechExchange will take place in San Francisco in the same location of VMworld 2010 from August 30 to September 1st. If you want to learn VMware technologies especially APIs/SDKs including Spring framework, Zimbra, and etc., you should join us. I will present best practices on using VMware vSphere APIs. Hopefully we will GA the vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 by then.

To convince your boss, please read the blog Pablo just wrote:

vSphere 4.1 APIs has some significant improvements, specifically around the Property Collector and AD authentication. We will have sessions to update you on what has changed, provide best practices when using them and hear from our engineers who have hands on experience working with our APIs. See our latest sessions added

Access to our engineers – ever have a question that you needed some guidance on but just never got the answer you needed ? Our engineers will be not only presenting but there will be plenty of opportunities for questions and answers.

Learn about what VMware is doing from an Application Infrastructure perspective, the latest technology from newly acquired organizations, including Zimbra, RabbitMQ, Gemstone – all will be here, great opportunity to invite the Application infrastructure guys.

Labs and more labs. We will have Labs on the following topics vSphere PowerCLI, vSphere Web Services SDK for Java, and for C#, and vCloud APIs covering our latest SDKs.

Cool giveaways, Free Software, Chance to win an iPad, and a very nice Bag, and a very nice Polo shirt – We have certainly upscale here since our last event.

Ready to register? Click here.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

What’s Deprecated in vSphere 4.1 API?

Steve Jin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 05:01:36 +0000

In vSphere 4.1, several properties and types have been deprecated. The following table from vSphere Web Services SDK 4.1 release note lists each deprecated API element and its replacement.

Name of deprecated type, method, or property As of vSphere API 4.1, use instead…

Methods

PropertyCollector.CheckForUpdates PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx

PropertyCollector.RetrieveProperties PropertyCollector.RetrievePropertiesEx

PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdates PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx

VirtualMachine.AcquireMksTicket VirtualMachine.AcquireTicket

Data Objects

VirtualMachineMksTicket VirtualMachineTicket

Data Object Properties

ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.enabled ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.vmMonitoring

HostCapability.replayUnsupportedReason HostCapability.replayCompatibilityIssues

VirtualDisk.shares StorageIOAllocationInfo.shares

VirtualMachineRuntimeInfo.memoryOverhead PerformanceManager memory overhead counter

Note that the release note has much more information that you should really read through if you use vSphere 4.1 API.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Cloud Architecture Design: Should it be Top-Down or Bottom-Up?

Steve Jin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 05:01:29 +0000

In my last blog, I discussed how to optimize workloads across the cloud. This is based on the assumption that you already have an existing infrastructure. What if you don’t have an existing cloud infrastructure but would like to design one from scratch? Here is what you should be thinking about to get the most from your new cloud.

But first let’s take a look at other types of infrastructures – say a road. When you design a new road, you have to collect data such as population densities around the area, people’s working schedules, what types of vehicles will run on the road, and so on. With that information, you can decide how many lanes you want, what kind of road surface is required, and so on. You don’t just make up the design specification from scratch, and lay down an eight-lane freeway everywhere.

The same process applies in designing the cloud infrastructure as well. Unfortunately this is not what we see often today.

Top-down approach

In my previous blog , I said infrastructure is a means and application is the end. We need to drive the design cloud architecture from the application perspective. This is what I call the top-down approach.

The benefit of top-down approach is the system efficiency you gain – you create just enough infrastructure for your applications to run without any waste. This gives you the best ROI from a business perspective.

The top-down approach works perfectly for enterprise private cloud. For service providers, however, it may or may not work. If the service provider provides specialized services such as online storage where the application workload pattern is known, then you should definitely follow the top-down approach.

Bottom-up approach

For service providers who provide generic services, it’s hard, if impossible, to know customer workload patterns in advance. In these cases, you are best served by following a bottom-up approach. That means designing the cloud infrastructure based on typical applications.

When new applications come in, just mix them based on their workload patterns described in this blog. In so doing, you may still achieve good workload balancing and the best business ROI.

How to top-down?

When using top-down approach, you want to analyze the workload patterns and quantify them with numbers in CPU, memory, networking, storage and so on. If you cannot easily infer the numbers, just pick a similar system and measure it before adjusting your designed based on the scale ratio.

With the workload numbers, you can translate them into infrastructure level requirements. To play safe, you want to have some allowance for unusual cases. On the networking side, it’s not purely about bandwidth, it’s also about good topology design that can flow network traffic better.

Now, don’t forget another very important dimension of workload pattern – timing. If the same workloads and their peaks are evenly distributed over time, you should be fine. To best design a private cloud, you have to consider the element carefully. In fact, in many enterprises there are some pretty clear patterns with workload over the time. For example, the accounting system will peak at the close of each fiscal quarter.

Summary

Although cloud infrastructure design is mainly about computing infrastructure, we should drive the design from the applications that run on the infrastructure. This is what I call the top-down approach.

When the application workload patterns are unknown, you can go with bottom-up approach. Even so, you still want to balance the workload at runtime by mixing complementary applications together on the same physical resources.

For the private cloud and specialized public cloud, the top-down approach is preferred. For generic service providers, bottom-up is usually best.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Workload Optimization: Is It a Must-have for Cloud Computing?

Steve Jin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:59:04 +0000

Cloud computing hasn’t changed the nature of computing – it just changed provisioning and management. That’s important to remember because workloads in the cloud are very much similar to what we see in traditional computing infrastructures. To get the most out of your investment in cloud services or in your own physical IT infrastructure, you need to understand how to optimize workloads.

Workload Categorization

Typical computing workloads involve four basic parts: computation, memory, networking, and storage. Almost all applications have these four parts but mostly not balanced.

Now let’s quickly review the essential categories of application workloads:

CPU intensive workloads. These applications include scientific computation with significant data crunching, encryption and decryption, compression and decompression, and so forth;
Memory intensive workload. These applications include in-memory caching servers, in-memory database servers, and so forth;
Networking intensive workload. These applications are typically Web servers, as well as network load balancers, and so forth;
Storage intensive workload. These applications typically involve file serving, data mining applications, and so forth.

What is the problem?

Although cloud computing is supposed to provide unlimited capacity, the real work of specific workloads have to be run on a single server or a cluster of machines which are mostly virtualized.

With the unbalanced nature of individual workloads in mind, the last thing you want to do is to have the same category of workloads running on the same set of physical servers that have limited resources. For example, you don’t want to run all of your file server virtual machines on one physical server competing for storage IO, and leave their CPU cycles largely idle. This creates resource competition on one hand, and resource waste on the other hand.

Another important aspect is timing. If you have the same workload patterns but evenly distributed over time, it’s still balanced.

So, what is the solution?

If you already have an infrastructure in place, you can just mix the different types of workload together. In this way, you can have a balanced utilization of the physical resources on CPU, memory, networking and storage. More importantly, you can overcome the limits by hosting more workloads on the same investment in servers and system software.

This is not a big deal for cloud users because they still use the same resources under typical cloud service level agreements (SLAs). For the service providers, it is a big deal because of the higher ratio of applications to physical investments that impact the margins of the business. This means balanced utilization of workloads can give them a competitive edge over other service providers.

This is much easier said than done. Implementation is everything. You have to collect enough information on the workload patterns of all the applications and then calculate the best distribution of these applications. Based on what you find, you can re-allocate existing applications using live migration technologies such as vMotion, storage vMotion, and so on.

The algorithm described above is a simple one, and does not take into account other elements such as workload distribution over time, isolation of multi-tenants, security and compliance, the criticality of applications, or system backup. To get this workload optimization to work well in real life, you have to think through all of these other factors as well.

With the workload optimization system in place, you can then consult it for every new provision. And, when the workloads are no longer balanced, you can recalculate and re-distribute the workloads for the best utilization. Ta da!

What’s Next?

Now, what if you haven’t set up your infrastructure yet? No problem, in fact you will have more flexibility. I’ll show you how to do this successfully in my next blog.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Complete List of Managed Object Types in VMware vSphere API

Steve Jin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:48:17 +0000

The following tables list all the managed object types in VI 3.5, vSphere 4 and 4.1. A short description is provided for each type explaining its major responsibilities.

Note that the managed object types are added in an incremental way. The types in older versions are still supported in newer versions. The complete types in a verion include ones in the correpsonding table plus all the ones in all older version tables.

Hope this post gives you a high level overview of functionalities of the vSphere APIs. Check out other blogs such as best practices (1-5, 6-10) on how to use them in general. And don’t forget my book which introduces them extensively with many read to use samples.

Table 1 Managed Object Types in VI 3.5

Managed Object Types	Explanation
Alarm	Defines an alarm that is triggered and an action that occurs due to the triggered alarm when certain conditions are met on a specific ManagedEntity object.
AlarmManager	Represents a singleton object for managing alarms within a service instance.
AuthorizationManager	Provides operations to query and update roles and permissions.
ClusterComputeResource	Represents a cluster of HostSystem objects as a unified compute resource for virtual machines.
ComputeResource	Represents a set of physical compute resources for virtual machines.
ContainerView	Represents a view convenient for monitoring the contents of a single container.
CustomFieldsManager	Adds and removes custom fields to managed entities.
CustomizationSpecManager	Manages customization specifications stored on the VirtualCenter server.
Datacenter	Represents the interface to the common container object for hosts and virtual machines. Every host and virtual machine must be under a distinct datacenter in the inventory, and datacenters may not be nested under other datacenters.
Datastore	Represents a storage location for virtual machine files. A storage location can be a VMFS volume, a directory on Network Attached Storage, or a local file system path.
DiagnosticManager	Provides an interface to get low-level debugging logs or diagnostic bundles for a server. For VirtualCenter, this includes the log files for the server daemon. For an ESX Server host, this includes detailed log files for the VMkernel.
EnvironmentBrowser	Provides access to the environment that a ComputeResource presents for creating and configuring a virtual machine.
EventHistoryCollector	Retrieves historical data and updates when the server appends new events.
EventManager	Provides properties and methods for event management support. Event objects are used to record significant state changes of managed entities.
ExtensibleManagedObject	Represents the extensible managed object base interface, mainly for managing custom fields.
ExtensionManager	Provides registration and basic management services for all extensions.
FileManager (*)	Manages and manipulates files and folders on datastores.
Folder	Represents the container object type to manage entities in the inventory.
HistoryCollector	Retrieves historical data and receives updates when the server appends new data to a collection.
HostAutoStartManager	Invokes and sets up the auto-start/auto-stop order of virtual machines on a single host.
HostBootDeviceSystem	Queries and changes the current system boot device configuration.
HostCpuSchedulerSystem	Gathers and configures the host CPU scheduler policies that affect the performance of running virtual machines.
HostDatastoreBrowser	Provides access to the contents of one or more datastores. The items in a datastore are files that contain configuration, virtual disk, and other data associated with a virtual machine.
HostDatastoreSystem	Creates and manages datastores from the host.
HostDateTimeSystem	Provides service to query and manage date/time-related configuration on a host.
HostDiagnosticSystem	Configures the diagnostic mechanisms specific to the host.
HostFirewallSystem	Manages the firewall configuration of the host.
HostFirmwareSystem (*)	Provides access to the firmware of an embedded ESX host to back up/restore/reset the configuration.
HostHealthStatusSystem	Manages the health state of the host.
HostLocalAccountManager	Manages local accounts on a host.
HostMemorySystem	Configures and gathers the host memory management policies that affect the performance of running virtual machines.
HostNetworkSystem	Represents the networking system in a host.
HostPatchManager	Represents the path manager of a host that can scan and patch the host.
HostServiceSystem	Queries and manages the configuration of host services.
HostSnmpSystem	Queries and configures SNMP agent configuration on a host.
HostStorageSystem	Represents the storage subsystem in a host. It can be used to query and manage the storage attached to a host.
HostSystem	Represents a virtualization host platform. It can be used to operate and manage the host.
HostVMotionSystem	Queries and configures the VMotion configuration of a host.
InventoryView	Browses the inventory and tracks changes to open folders.
LicenseManager	Queries and manages license configuration.
ListView	Gets updates on an arbitrary set of objects.
ManagedEntity	Represents the abstract base type for all managed objects in the inventory tree.
ManagedObjectView	Represents the base type for view objects that expose a set of managed objects.
Network	Represents a network accessible by either hosts or virtual machines.
OptionManager	Manages key/value pair options.
PerformanceManager	Queries performance statistics.
PropertyCollector	Retrieves and monitors a set of properties from one or more managed objects.
PropertyFilter	Controls the properties that a collector retrieves and observes changes.
ResourcePool	Represents a set of physical resources: a single host, a subset of a host’s resources, or resources spanning multiple hosts. Resource pools can be subdivided by creating child resource pools. To run, a virtual machine must be associated as a child of a resource pool.
ScheduledTask	Schedules a task to run in the future.
ScheduledTaskManager	Creates and retrieves a ScheduleTask.
SearchIndex	Provides fast search service to obtain an item, typically a virtual machine or a host, in the inventory by UUID, IP address, and so on.
ServiceInstance	Represents the singleton server-side root object for the whole interactive session. From this object, you can obtain the inventory and various services.
SessionManager	Manages client sessions.
Task	Represents an operation that takes time and might be canceled.
TaskHistoryCollector	Retrieves historical data and updates related to tasks.
TaskManager	Retrieves and manages tasks.
UserDirectory	Discovers and verifies users in the underlying user directory.
View	Represents the base type for all the views that track changes of a set of managed objects.
ViewManager	Provides access to managed objects that make accessing objects and providing updates more convenient for specific use cases.
VirtualDiskManager(*)	Manages and manipulates virtual disks on datastores.
VirtualMachine	Represents the virtual machine.
VirtualMachineSnapshot	Represents a snapshot of a virtual machine.

Note: * Experimental feature in VI SDK 2.5.

Table 2 New Managed Object Types in vSphere 4

Managed Object Types	Explanation
ClusterProfile	Represents the profile for configuring the cluster.
ClusterProfileManager	Manages the cluster profiles.
DistributedVirtualPortgroup	Represents the distributed virtual portgroup objects.
DistributedVirtualSwitch	Represents the distributed virtual switch objects.
DistributedVirtualSwitchManager	Manages the virtual switches.
HostKernelModuleSystem*	Controls the configuration of kernel modules on the host.
HostPciPassthruSystem;	Manages the PciPassthru state of the host.
HostProfile	Configures the host.
HostProfileManager	Manages the host profiles.
HostVirtualNicManager	Manages the special v-NIC configuration of the host.
HttpNfcLease	Represents a lease on a VirtualMachine or a VirtualApp that can be used to import or export disks for the entity.
IpPoolManager	Manages and allocates IP addresses to vApps.
LicenseAssignmentManager	Manages licenses in a new licensing model.
LocalizationManager	Provides all the message catalogs for client-side localization of messages.
OvfManager	Provides services to parse and generate OVF descriptors.
Profile	Represents the base type for profiles for configuring the cluster and host.
ProfileManager	Represents the base type for managing profiles.
ProfileComplianceManager	Manages the compliance of entities against profiles.
ResourcePlanningManager	Estimates the database size required to store vCenter data.
VirtualApp	Represents a collection of virtual machines that consist of a software solution.
VirtualMachineCompatibilityChecker	Checks the compatibility of a virtual machine with a host.
VirtualMachineProvisioningChecker	Checks the feasibility of certain provisioning operations.
VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch	Represents the VMware implementation of the virtual switch.

Note: * HostKernelModuleSystem was first introduced in VI API 2.5u2.

Table 3 New Managed Object Types in vSphere 4.1

Managed Object Types	Explanation
HostActiveDirectoryAuthentication	Indicates domain membership status and provides methods to add and remove a host to/from a domain.
HostAuthenticationManager	provides access to Active Directory configuration information for an ESX host.
HostAuthenticationStore	base class represents both local user and host Active Directory authentication for an ESX host.
HostDirectoryStore	base class for directory-based authentication stores.
HostLocalAuthentication	represents local authentication for user accounts on an ESX host.
HostPowerSystem	Managing host power management policies
StorageResourceManager	Provides services to configure and query resource usage for storage resources

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Released: vSphere Java API 2.1 Beta for vSphere 4.1

Steve Jin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:41:59 +0000

Following the vSphere 4.1 release, I am pleased to announce the release of the vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 beta that fully supports the vSphere 4.1. The 2.1 beta has been ready for limited access for months by VMware internal teams, and partners/customers who participated vSphere 4.1 beta program.

The 2.1 beta works with VMware Infrastructure 3.0, 3.5, vSphere 4, and 4.1. It automatically detects the versions of 4 and 4.1, so you don’t need to change the way you work with the API. Besides the support of 4.1, it also includes several bug fixes since 2.0 update 1 released last December. For more info on what’s new in vSphere API 4.1, check out this blog.

I plan to GA version 2.1 in about one month. Please help to give the beta a try. I need your help to report bugs for best quality of the API. You can download the API here, and file bugs here.

BTW, many thanks to those who have submitted the survey VMware does for this open source API. If you haven’t submitted yours yet, please do so quickly because the survey is closing soon. Your feedbacks are critical for the API to be supported.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

What’s New in vSphere 4.1 API?

Steve Jin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:26:52 +0000

VMware announced GA of vSphere 4.1 product this Tuesday. Here is the official what’s new in vSphere 4.1. Many bloggers already covered different aspects of the product itself: VMware vSphere 4.1: Advancing the Platform for Cloud Computing, Useful vSphere 4.1 knowledgebase articles, vSphere 4.1 released, Release: VMware vSphere 4.1, etc. I don’t repeat these here, but focus on the new APIs in 4.1 release.

In general, the APIs are the programatic “view” of features. Understanding the features helps a lot on understanding the APIs. So I strongly encourage you to read new features of the product itself. Note that not all the new features especially the performance and scalability features are explicitly reflected in API signatures.

vSphere API 4.1 introduces 7 new managed object types:

vSphere 4.1 adds 23 new methods to 10 existing managed object types:

Managed Object	Method
ClusterComputeResource	CancelRecommendation
Datastore	UpdateVirtualMachineFiles
DistributedVirtualSwitch	EnableNetworkResourceManagement
DistributedVirtualSwitch	UpdateNetworkResourcePool
DistributedVirtualSwitchManager	QueryDvsCheckCompatibility
DistributedVirtualSwitchManager	QueryDvsFeatureCapability
HostSystem	EnterLockdownMode
	ExitLockdownMode
	RetrieveHardwareUptime
HttpNfcLease	HttpNfcLeaseGetManifest
PropertyCollector	CancelRetrievePropertiesEx
	ContinueRetrievePropertiesEx
	CreatePropertyCollector
	DestroyPropertyCollector
	RetrievePropertiesEx
	WaitForUpdatesEx
ResourcePool	QueryResourceConfigOption
ResourcePool	RefreshRuntime
VirtualApp	SuspendVApp
VirtualApp	UpdateLinkedChildren
VirtualMachine	AcquireTicket
	QueryFaultToleranceCompatibility
	reloadVirtualMachineFromPath

vSphere API 4.1 also adds 8 properties to 6 existing managed object types:

Managed Object	Property
Datastore	iormConfiguration
DistributedVirtualSwitch	networkResourcePool
HostStorageSystem	systemFile
VirtualApp	childLink
VirtualApp	parentVApp
VirtualMachine	parentVApp
VirtualMachine	rootSnapshot
VirtualMachineSnapshot	childSnapshot

There is one method signature change in the PowerOnMultiVM defined in Datacenter managed object with an additional parameter called option. If you use Web Service directly, your code may break.

Associated with the changes of the managed object types are the additions/changes of the data objects, enumerated type, and fault types. You don’t need to know these changes before you get to them from the managed object types introduced above.

The support of vSphere 4.1 is already done in vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 beta. I will merge the code and push it to sourceforge code repository very soon. Please stay tuned for the announcement.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

When to Use Cloud? Example Use Cases

Steve Jin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:01:51 +0000

In my last post, I discussed when not to use cloud services. Basically you should avoid the cloud for your organization’s core competency IT systems. Remember, cloud computing is not a silver bullet for everything.

Today I want to share the stories from the other side: when you should use cloud services. As a rule of thumb, you use cloud services for your non-core competency IT systems. But, what are the typical non-core competency systems?

There could be many cases in which you can use cloud services. Let me go through some of them by sharing customer experiences:

Outsourcing projects. If something is outsourced, most likely you don’t think it’s a core competency to your business. You can then leverage the full benefit that public cloud services bring to you. You can easily have workspace that is accessible by both your employees and contractors, and it’s more secure than opening up your own infrastructure to your contractors.

Pilot projects. You want to try something new and don’t want to be limited by capital budget not available for infrastructure experiments. From the moment you start a pilot project, you don’t know whether it will work or not. So it’s natural to “rent” the required infrastructures from service providers. This is especially true for pilot projects that require buying lots of machines that you can’t repurpose if the pilot project falls through.

Temporary projects. These are the projects that run for a short period of time, and it doesn’t make sense to buy the infrastructure. It’s like renting furniture instead of buying them for staging your house when you want to sell it. When your house is sold, you can ask the staging company to remove the furniture. You pay based on the furniture and the total time of renting, exactly the same idea as cloud services.

Demo and training scenarios. You may have a pre-sales event in which you want a full demo for a week. Ditto for a training class. These are perfect use cases for leveraging cloud computing.

Extension for dramatic workloads. Notice that I said dramatic, not dynamic workloads. Not every application has a steady workload pattern over time. Some applications could experience 100 times more workloads during peak time than otherwise. For example, a website which may need 1,000 servers for uploading photos during the weekend of the Super Bowls might only require a handful the rest of the time. Would you invest in buying 1,000 servers that are used one weekends in a year? I doubt it. That is a perfect use case for cloud services.

You may have other scenarios that are candidates for best use cloud services. Please feel free to share them in your comments below.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

When NOT to Use Cloud?

Steve Jin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:51:30 +0000

During the July 4^th long weekend, I got the chance to read the book “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh. It’s a great book with many great ideas and lessons he learned from LinkExchange and Zappos.

So, how does this relate to cloud computing?

Here’s what Tony wrote…

“It was a valuable lesson. We learned that we should never outsource our core competency. As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Outsourcing that to a third party and trusting that they would care about our customers as much as we would was one of our biggest mistakes. If we hadn’t reacted quickly, it would have eventually destroyed Zappos.”

In this paragraph Tony summarized the lesson from contracting eLogistics for inventory services in Kentucky, which turned out to be a mess and almost killed Zappos when cash flow became a big issue.

From a business perspective, cloud services are not much different from the inventory services. Both are all about outsourcing. The high tech nature of cloud doesn’t change the business nature of cloud services. What happened to Zappos could potentially happen to any cloud customers.

The question your business needs to ask, and answer, becomes “Is IT your core competency?” Or, more specifically, “What part of IT is – and is not – your core competency?”

At face value, they seem like easy questions. When you dig down to the details of your business, however, you may find surprising or even counter-intuitive answers.

Let me give you an example.

Most of us know Paypal, now part of eBay.com, as an online payment service company. You may think the core competency is the web site itself. It’s true. But the most important technical competency is not the web site itself. According to the founder Max Levchin, it’s the ability to judge risk, or protect against fraud. That is why they built a software package called IGOR, which brought down the fraud down to one-tenth of a percent. Without this core competency, they would have been quickly out of business just like their competitors such as MoneyMail that had 25 percent fraud and burned through cash too quickly. (full story at “Founders at work.”)

To decide whether an IT system is your core competency, consider these questions:

Is your system a secret weapon in your market competition with others? By saying a secret weapon, I mean does IT give your business competitive advantages in increasing sales, lowering costs, or creating good-will in the community?
Will you lose big money when the system is offline? You should look both internally for the impacts on daily operations and planning, and externally for impacts on sales and customer satisfaction. There are things that may be impactful in subtle ways.
Are you OK with the system being breached? That includes illegal access, data corruption, and data stolen by malicious hackers. This may involve cash losses and direct legal consequences in the short term, as well as loss of customer trust in the long term.
Will you have enough control of your systems to fulfill different business unit needs? IT systems have to support the growth of the business. Do you need to have control of the systems in terms of software configurations, maintenance, support, SLAs, and so forth? The last thing you want is to have your system become a hurdle of your growth.

Once you decide whether a piece of your IT is a core competency or not, you can plan accordingly. In future blogs, I will talk about when you should consider use cloud services.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

VMware Wants to Hear from You about vShere Java API

Steve Jin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 05:07:46 +0000

VMware launches an official survey on the open source vSphere(VI) Java API. Please let the company know your take on the open source project, and what you want, for example, formal developer support, etc.

The survey includes 16 simple questions and should take no more than 3 minutes to finish. All the collected information is confidential.

Note that the survey result decides what to come next. Please make sure your voice heard by taking the survey here.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

DoubleCloud

VMware Technology Exchange for Developers at VMworld 2010

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Name of deprecated type, method, or property	As of vSphere API 4.1, use instead…
Methods
`PropertyCollector.CheckForUpdates`	`PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx`
`PropertyCollector.RetrieveProperties`	`PropertyCollector.RetrievePropertiesEx`
`PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdates`	`PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx`
`VirtualMachine.AcquireMksTicket`	`VirtualMachine.AcquireTicket`
Data Objects
`VirtualMachineMksTicket`	`VirtualMachineTicket`
Data Object Properties
`ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.enabled`	`ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.vmMonitoring`
`HostCapability.replayUnsupportedReason`	`HostCapability.replayCompatibilityIssues`
`VirtualDisk.shares`	`StorageIOAllocationInfo.shares`
`VirtualMachineRuntimeInfo.memoryOverhead`	`PerformanceManager memory overhead counter`