Dynamic provisioning of VMware with Service Level Monitoring using ZXTM.

The promise of Cloud Computing is often this: when your application servers become overloaded, new servers will start automatically to share the load. This is the vision, the dream, the ideal. However, it is not often demonstrated.

Mark Boddington, one of the system engineers at Zeus has written and excellent article on how their product ZXTM can be used to automatically provision VMware virtual machines. Not only that, he has recorded a great little video to demonstrate the principles in action, which is embedded below:

Link to video on Youtube.

The ZXTM product monitors web applications and using the Service Level Monitoring class (SLM), Trafficscript and the VMPoolControl Java Extension to interact with a VMware ESX server to provision virtual machines when a web application becomes overly loaded.

This demonstration is important to consider in the context of cloud computing and specifically in regard to the “Internal Cloud”, and cloud computing generally. These sorts of methodology can be used as part of the infrastructure required to build your internal and/or external cloud. It is not and end in itself, but rather a tool to be used appropriately when designing your solution.

ZXTM is used primarily to optimise and load balance web applications, an area very close to most discussions about cloud computing. As ZXTM has this focus, it is a very good tool to use if you are dealing with any application that has a web interface of course. With this one tool you can do web optimisation, network load balancing and also manage VMware instances automatically.

This provides an excellent tool, that could be ideal in some “cloud” situations. This solution would probably be coupled with other technologies to handle things like b uilding the ESX servers from “bare metal” and provisioning operating systems and applications stacks onto virtual machines. This does not diminish from what thedemostration is showing us however. The ZXTM is very good at what it does, this example builds on Zeus’ area of expertise to extend the flexibility of their product. If you are a ZXTM user already, contemplating how to build an internal cloud, then this might be a starting point from where you can develop a more sophisticated solution.

Lance

p.s. Mark has also written a traffic script that sends information to Twitter, does your data centre send you messages?

UPDATE: December 17th 2008.

Mark has added some code to send ZXTM messages to a Nabaztag Bunny, specifically the one here at enVirtua.
Below is a small video of this happening on our Nabaztag bunny :

If you can’t see the video it is available at : http://www.viddler.com/explore/lancew/videos/2/