Private Cloud? Public Cloud? What is this to SMBs?

For SMBs (small to medium businesses) all the buzz they are hearing about public and private clouds can be a bit daunting. In many cases they have an IT shop that isn't very large, and perhaps has mostly generalists at the helm. Even for them, the terms may draw a bit of confusion, as they attempt to muddle through the outside excitement. In truth, the two approaches to cloud services are fairly straight forward, and summarily different in their thinking. As for defining them the public could is more or less the use of a hosting provider (Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, etc) to host your applications and services. You would then access them via the public internet over secure connections, and all the hardware maintenance would be completed by the host company as a part of their hosting fees. Private cloud on the other hand would be the business hosting their own servers that would run virtualized services and applications that you would deliver from that location. You would be able to access them over the internet over secure connections, or via VPN or local link depending on your location at the time.

So we must ask ourselves, where are other businesses going? There has been a lot of hype over public cloud providers due to the low cost and low maintenance of paying for such hosting. But I'm not entirely convinced that the game has entirely went in that direction. I recently read over a Forbes article that leads me to believe that the private cloud is still a dominant force. The quote below is citing a survey of 570 IT managers (conducted by Freeform Dynamics as specified in the original article.

" More than 70% of respondents say they view the private cloud as “a natural progression from virtualization.” Only about 20% agree that “private cloud and public cloud go hand in hand,” and even fewer, less than 10%, see the private cloud as a safer alternative to public cloud offerings.

There is much greater impetus to move into private cloud than private cloud as well, especially among larger organizations. Tellingly, more than 40% agree with the statement that “most of our internal IT will be private cloud based over time.” By contrast, fewer than 10% feel that most of their IT will go to public cloud. " -Joe McKendrick, contributer at Forbes (link to article).

Those of you who have read my earlier articles already know that I'm a pretty keen proponent of the private cloud. It would seem that I'm not alone in this preference as organizations are becoming comfortable with taking visualization to its next logical step and preparing their own private cloud offerings. These solutions allow them to deliver in house solutions to their internal and external customers, and without exposing them to the risks involved in taking on a 3rd party partner.

But what does this ultimately mean for SMBs? Honestly the private vs public cloud debate is a bit less black and white when you go down to organizations of this size. In large enterprise environments they have massive IT budgets and a move the private cloud is much easier to accomplish, and certainly has very attractive and fast returns. For SMBs its a bit more nuanced in that there are situations where portions of both ways of thinking are beneficial. For example this type of organization might find great benefit from offloading their email and document software services to either Office 365, or to Google Docs and Gmail. While at the same time retaining all of their computer backups, financial records, customer records and really anything that would be deemed 'confidential' on their small private cloud.

At the end of the day, the SMB needs to weigh cost, accessibility, security, and privacy as the key factors in their IT decision making. Depending on the business they are in there will be different requirements for each and a different solution may be required. For example a doctor's office is going to have to comply with all sorts of HIPPA regulations on patient privacy, and thus is going to be suited to a purely private cloud environment. On the other hand a retail oriented company may have the ability to use the public cloud a bit, as the only truly confidential bits of information are their own financial records, and customer information.

For most SMBs I do have some basic suggestions, though this will of course not fit all strategies. If you feel the need to use the public cloud, I suggest only doing so for documents, such as with Google Docs. I honestly suggest then purchasing some hardware and using a hypervisor to virtualize email solutions (I suggest Zimbra for the cost savings as it runs on linux and can be gotten for free or a low price for certain features) and to conduct all of your confidential business on your local PCs, or via VMs set up as virtual desktops. As for your backup and disaster recovery planning, I suggest picking up a backup appliance like the one my company sells (3x Backup appliance) and setting it up offsite.

In any event if you have any comments to add to the discussion please add them below. If you have had any experiences with either public or private cloud solutions please tell us about them, as it may help others in their decision making processes. Also, check out the 3X blog, as we very recently gained a global partner out of Australia which is very exciting news.

VSS Troubleshooting

I've had a few instances where clients have run into problems with their Exchange Writer during backup. Generally the end of their tale is that the writer shows a status of 8 when queried by the backup software and thus the job fails. One thing I have noticed about this retry-able error state is that its very vague, and what it means can vary greatly depending on what is showing up in your application log. However, I would like to provide some thoughts on a method for troubleshooting this effectively, as I've been doing a lot of trial and error myself.

Generally you want to start by checking at the highest level and here you want to make sure that you are meeting the minimum requirements to complete the backup. For our example here we'll just assume its an Exchange backup. So to start we'll want to check the Shadow Copy service itself. For this to function properly we will want to start the service and make sure its set to manual. While doing this also double check the volumes you are backing up and make sure you have at least 1GB free (assuming your data is larger than 1GB).

Now since this is a retry-able error another good thing to do is retry it. If you restart the Exchange Information Store service it should clear the 8 status from the writer and allow you to continue. If you get the same result, I then suggest re-registering the DLLs for VSS. If you go to this blog post you'll find something you can copy paste to build a batch file.

If we're still stuck with problems after these steps we need to take a look at the application log. Generally here you can reference the time of the failure on your backup solution with the appropriate event on the windows side. Sometimes you'll get something useful, sometimes you wont. If you find an Event ID that looks promising, honestly you will want to Google it at that point and cross your fingers that there is an easy fix. An example of this would be if you see events related to a failure of a 'volume dependency' which is just implying that your shadow copy is missing a portion of what you are backing up (in the case of exchange). You merely need to adjust your backup job to include all of the exchange volumes.

Once you've gotten this far it would be best to take advantage of a tool from the Shadow Copy service SDK. The tool is called vshadow and allows you to invoke specific writers based on the Writer ID, or the string for the name and other filters. It also gives a much more useful error message than what you have likely gotten thus far. You can find the technet article for it here. A simple example of this command goes as follows:


vshadow -tracing -wi={writer ID} [Target Volume]

This would include the writer specified during the shadow copy of the target volume, and do so in a verbose manner. You could also theoretically pipe the output into a text file for easier viewing.

While there is always more one could do in troubleshooting VSS, I've found these steps to be helpful as of late. If you have any strategies you've found to be particularly effect please feel free to share in the comments.

Ryan Koch
3X Systems
ryan.koch@3x.com

SUSE Studio

I might be late in the game on discovering Suse Studio, but I must admit that I felt compelled to talk about it a bit today. Now in the past I really haven't used the Suse distribution of Linux so much, as I had already fallen into the use of others such as Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc and just hadn't made my way down the list to them yet. But then they released this web interface with the purpose of making it easy to build a customized Linux image or appliance. My home lab is now going to change a bit.

The reason I say my home lab is going to change, is because of how simple it really is Suse Studio to make a Linux VM has the exact services I want, and without me having to deal with the hassle of setting them up manually. To show you just how much of a time saver this is I'm going to go ahead and walk you through the creation of a VMware appliance.

For the purposes of this we're going to set up a fairly simple web server. To start we are presented with the choice of a base template. I'm going to go ahead and choose the server addition of Suse Enterprise 11 with a 32bit architecture.

Next we'll go into the software tab and take a look at that menu. To start off with there are a little over 300 packages selected for install. For my case I've decided to add apache2, the PHP mod for apache and postgresql-server as additional packages. This would ostensibly give me a good basis for a webserver with some decent functionality.

 

Next one can begin to set their custom configuration for the VM. Here I'll create a user account called 'tux' to use. You can also do things like customize the network settings, but for the purposes of this example I'll leave it alone at DHCP. Two things that are really cool here though are that you can use a SQL dump to set up the schema for your database in the image, saving the time of having to write create table queries. And you can also customize the VM appliance hardware settings so that you don't have to mess with it when you import the VM files into your environment.

Lastly before going into the build phase you can also upload any files you would like to have on the machine to start out with. This could be useful in a variety of scenarios, such as ours if we were migrating our web site from one server to another. And once you've finished that up we move into the build phase. The build phase gives a whole lot of options as far as format for your new appliance. You can get it as an ISO, VM files (various vendors) or even as an EC2 image. For this I went ahead and had it generate a Vmware VM appliance. You can also select more than one format which is cool.

The build for me took around 8 minutes which really is rather fast. The whole process to do this took less than 15 minutes in order to get through the menus, and we now have a viable image for a web server. They have also provided the ability to test drive the appliance for up to an hour, and the ability to export the image configuration for local building (they delete the build after 7 days forcing you to have to click build again and wait the few minutes). In any event this is a neat web based tool that I'll certainly be playing with quite a bit.

Also, keep an eye out, as I am being tasked to write some articles in other interest areas such as international relations in the near future. There should be some good content both on technology, and other areas in the days to come.

Ryan Koch
3X Systems
ryan.koch@3x.com