Cloud computing and agile development are accelerating how quickly applications are deployed into the cloud. That means application teams are assuming more responsibility for how and where apps are deployed in the cloud.
The problem is, it’s a lot to manage. The virtual infrastructure admin has to stage, manage configuration and monitor changes in applications throughout their lifecycles, and not always just for one group in a company. Many admins are providing these services to many groups, managing multiple applications of all kinds. And don’t forget security—they’re managing that, too.
The sheer effort to stage all of that is a huge responsibility. In fact, it can be a nightmare if you have to do it manually. In addition, all that backend work should be invisible to the end user. How can you juggle all this and not drop the ball?
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In virtual data centers both on-premises and in the cloud, lifecycle management is particularly challenging for administrators due to the dynamic nature and volume of nodes that need to be deployed and managed. Puppet Enterprise can ease a lot of these challenges by allowing IT teams to automate the deployment and management of their VMware virtual infrastructure.
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If you’re using virtualization in your data center, you’re familiar with the challenges as well as the benefits: VM sprawl, maintaining consistent configuration, provisioning and tearing down VMs at the speed your business demands. Puppet Enterprise is an exceptional tool for dealing with these challenges. Here are 13 reasons that, if you’re not already using Puppet Enterprise to manage your VMware virtual environment, you should be.
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Second of two parts. Written by Max Martin. Originally published on Linux.com, republished with permission.
In the first part of this tutorial, we showed how to use Vagrant to automate and manage local virtual machines for a software development environment. We defined a simple Vagrantfile to specify certain attributes for a VM to run a simple web app, and got it running using Vagrant’s command line tools. In this part of the tutorial, we’ll be using Puppet to define and automate the configuration details for our VM. This way, whenever we start up the dev environment with vagrant up, it will be set up to run our web application without any additional manual configuration.
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First of two parts. Written by Max Martin. Originally published on Linux.com, republished with permission.
Setting up a development environment for a web application can seem simple—just use SQLite and WEBrick or a similar development server—but taking shortcuts can quickly lead to problems. What happens when you need to onboard new team members? What if your team members are geographically distributed? How do you prevent bugs from creeping in when the production environment’s configuration drifts away from the development environment? Even if you’ve managed to set up a picture-perfect development environment, what happens when a developer inevitably breaks its configuration?
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I read an article in Datamation that answers the question “What is a private cloud?” You might not realize it, but there is still a lot of confusion in the marketplace about what private clouds are and how they relate to virtualization. This article clarifies the issue.
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You can tell when an industry is starting to move to a higher level of maturity. It happens just about the time its original value proposition starts to feel a bit stale. If you look at the virtualization industry, you no longer hear long speeches about server consolidation and increased utilization. The bedrock is in place. Most data centers are where they need to be. The question is, how do you do start spreading the positive benefits of all the flexibility you get from virtualization? Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti says that in 2013 virtualization must be used in advanced ways to pay off. Savings from server consolidation will no longer be the focus. Instead, virtualization management techniques must grow in sophistication to support dynamic movement of workloads, improved disaster recovery, and hybrid data centers.
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Nan Liu is Senior Systems Engineer at VMware.
Disclaimer: This is a repost from Nan’s personal blog. The opinions expressed herein are Nan’s personal opinions and do not necessarily represent those of VMware.
Last week, we released a set of open source Puppet modules for managing VMware cloud environments, specifically VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 and VMware vCloud Network and Security 5.1 (vCNS, previously known as vShield). They provide a framework for managing resources within vCenter and vCNS via Puppet (read Nick Weaver’s blog for more information).
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