Cloud Foundry is the revolutionary open platform as a service from VMware that supports multiple frameworks, application services, and clouds. The vFabric Hyperic team is pleased to announce the availability of the free Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic that brings Hyperic’s proven ability to monitor, alert, and control application infrastructure resources to Cloud Foundry’s applications and services.

Overview and Features

Cloud Foundry’s VMC command line interface allows you to deploy and manage your applications running on CloudFoundry.com, but serious users require the automation and continuous monitoring capabilities from full-fledged management tools. Therefore, we have developed the Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic that utilizes the same APIs that VMC uses to talk to the Cloud Controller, and brings all of the information and capabilities into a dashboard GUI view while tracking metric data and events for historical purposes. The Hyperic plugin communicates with CloudFoundry.com remotely, so it’s easy to deploy into any existing Hyperic instances running in your data center. Some of the features include:

• Start an application
• Stop an application
• Restart an application
• Update reserved memory for an application
• Update the number of instances for an application
• Scale up an application by 1 instance
• Scale down an application by 1 instance

Benefits

Using Hyperic in conjunction with Cloud Foundry account gives you a lot of benefits and control. Here are just some of the benefits that you’ll get when using them together.

• Create alerts to notify or fix application runtime issues
• Visual dashboard view of health and configuration of all applications in Cloud Foundry whether or not they are running
• Review application deployment, availability, and resource consumption history
• On-demand, scheduled, or automated control actions to start, stop, restart, re-configure, or scale Cloud Foundry applications
• Track events when applications crash or change state
• Compare resource utilization against user quota
• …and many more

In addition, you can combine these metrics with other existing Hyperic services, such as HTTP or ping checks, to get an even more comprehensive view of what is happening with your running applications, including response time and availability (from the client perspective).

Installation and Configuration

The Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic is now available on HyperForge. Follow the Configuration Instructions section to download and install and configure the plugin on both Hyperic server and agent, and you’ll be monitoring your Cloud Foundry account in minutes.

Note that because the Cloud Foundry server is created manually, the Hyperic agent will not gather the user account properties very quickly after provisioning since it wasn’t auto-discovered. To expedite the properties discovery process, you may choose to restart the agent to kickstart the data gathering. You can start the agent remotely by navigating to the agent resource in the Hyperic UI, click on Views tab and then Agent Commands. Here you can select ‘restart’ to restart the Hyperic agent and have it report your Cloud Foundry user account info immediately.

Additional Information

Here are some additional source of information regarding this plugin:

• A screencast demonstrating how to create the Cloud Foundry resource, create alerts, and perform control actions
• If you are not yet a Cloud Foundry user, go sign up for an account on the current beta service at CloudFoundry.com
• If you are not familiar with Hyperic and would like to find out more, please go to vFabric Hyperic
• Hyperic HQ is the open source Hyperic and is fully compatible with the Cloud Foundry plugin, find out more about it at the Hyperic Community

As our CEO Paul Maritz mentioned at yesterday’s VMworld keynote, our industry has hit a tipping point where virtualization has surpassed the physical computing paradigm, due to a need for IT to quickly respond to dynamic business needs at ever-improving price points. To ensure even greater agility and value, the next destination for our industry is cloud computing. Making this shift requires a pragmatic, evolutionary approach that leverages investments in existing architecture.

Yesterday, Rod Johnson, SVP of VMware’s Cloud Application Platform Division, described how VMware vFabric is a key element of enabling our customers to reach this next destination of cloud computing. Delivering the agility and value promised by cloud computing requires a new kind of application — cloud applications — that have their own unique characteristics:

• Dynamic architectures
• Elastic capacity
• Extreme scalability
• Open choice

How do cloud applications change performance monitoring?

These characteristics of cloud applications bring new requirements to application performance monitoring. For instance, dynamic architectures and elastic capacity imply a datacenter defined by constant flux, with pools of hundreds, even thousands of VMs continually being started and stopped, vMotioned, reverted to snapshots, and so on.

This blistering rate of change is a natural outgrowth of responsiveness to business needs. But it is impossible to manage with manually maintained, complex configuration files used by legacy monitoring tools. The only way to get ahead of it is to use a monitoring product that can automatically discover changes to your entire application infrastructure — everything from the application code itself to the vSphere host. Hyperic Autodiscovery does exactly that, updating itself within moments of app infrastructure changes.

The extreme scalability required by cloud applications requires a lot of virtual machines – which leads to a firehose of performance data. For instance, a typical Hyperic customer will collect a million performance metrics per minute. It’s not at all hard to get to this volume of metrics, since we have a number of customers running 1000 (or more!) virtual machines, each with a Hyperic agent collecting about 1000 metrics. So, even though we’re not talking about Google-level scalability, application performance data become a performance problem in itself if not managed properly. Thankfully, Hyperic is engineered to handle high volumes of application performance data.

Open choice means that cloud applications can be built from a wide range of components. For instance, as Rod pointed out yesterday, cloud applications might use WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, and our own vFabric tc Server, as well as public cloud platforms, for their Java application server tier. It’s critical to have a monitoring tool that supports a range of popular web application technologies out of the box. But no one tool can support every conceivable technology. It’s understandable – there’s no way one vendor, no matter how innovative, can keep up with the thousands of other innovative companies in our industry. So in addition, it’s critical to have a monitoring tool that makes it easy to build custom monitoring plug-ins, and makes its built-in plugins open source to provide a wide range of code to reference and leverage. Hyperic delivers on this front, providing approximately 50,000 performance metrics for 75 web application technologies, as well as open source plugin code and a fully-supported plugin API that has been used by third parties to extend the range of technologies monitored by Hyperic.

What’s next for Hyperic?

We’re demonstrating vFabric Hyperic live at VMworld, in the main VMware booth. Come see for yourself how Hyperic adjusts to changes in virtual infrastructure in near real-time. Later this month, we’ll demonstrate Hyperic at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, September 19-23, and after that, we’ll be at Spring One 2GX in Chicago, October 19-22.

We’re committed to making Hyperic the leading choice for monitoring cloud applications, with their inherent dynamicism, scale, and openness, and we’re looking forward to working with you — our open source community, our users, and our customers — to make this happen.

Today we are proud to announce that Hyperic has been acquired by SpringSource. It’s been a pretty exciting couple of months here at our San Francisco headquarters. Luckily our team hasn’t missed a beat in our continued quest to build a great software company.

Why is this a Good Thing?

This combined company will provide the widest choice of market-leading products — from a single vendor — that address the needs of developers AND operations.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the divide between developers and operations is a huge obstacle in building more scalable, manageable applications. Hyperic’s most successful customers seem to be the ones who’ve built manageability into their apps, as opposed to those that simply monitor and manage the products the app is built on. These customers use Hyperic technology to gain a better understanding of the behavior and limits of their apps and are more successful at the fine art of keeping them running at optimal performance.

Hyperic has been working hard to help tear down the brick wall that often exists between operations and development. In fact, we started this company because the founders (all developers) knew all too well how tough and distracting it was to be a developer called into firefighting situations (Backflip.com comes to mind…). We started by accepting the incredible responsibility of providing software that wakes ops people up when things inevitably go wrong. We soon realized that there was a bigger opportunity to provide products that help both developers and operations be successful. SpringSource’s acquisition of Hyperic enables us to seize this opportunity as one company. Rod & the SpringSource team agree.

Joining forces with SpringSource gives us the opportunity to reach legions of developers and bring to life the vision of a full lifecycle company. One company which provides modern, open tools, runtimes, and management solutions that are (as described in the Spring Framework mission statement) “a pleasure to use” : developer tools like SpringSource Tool Suite, runtimes like  dm_server and the new tc_server, and of course management from Hyperic HQ & IQ.

As part of this acquisition, it’s important to make clear that SpringSource remains committed to Hyperic’s breadth of managed technologies. Our customers use us to manage Enterprise Java, LAMP, Windows, and Unix environments built on a mixture of open source and commercial middleware. We will continue to innovate around management of virtualized applications as well as those built in the cloud. We will do this because it is part of what makes Hyperic’s technology the top choice for managing the most demanding applications.

What about the team?

Successful acquisitions are all about people. As part of this acquisition, Hyperic’s stellar team will combine with SpringSource’s to create a world-class staff of the most creative product, support, marketing and sales people in the industry. This means that our customers and partners will continue to receive the same high level of product support and innovation from the same folks they have enjoyed working with. I will continue to own and focus on the vision for management & cloud products and will join SpringSource as CTO of Management Products.

Our employees, executives, and directors are extremely excited about the huge opportunity this combined company represents. In an time where mergers among goliaths are the norm, the teams behind two fast growing, young companies are combining to provide the world an alternative to the locked-in, old-school, painful, and expensive software of the 20th century.

How did we get here?

In 2004, our founders Doug, Charles, Ryan, John and I set out to redefine how large-scale web applications and infrastructure are managed.  We wanted to create a company built around software that was focused on the new era of operations management and capable of handling the latest Web technologies, constant change and the demanding environments of mission-critical applications. More than anything, we wanted to build a company that changed the way people evaluate, purchase, and deploy enterprise-grade management technology. I think we succeeded!  Proof of that success can be found in many hundreds of happy customers and over 5,000 open source deployments.

SpringSource has a similar vision.  Just as we revolutionized the way companies monitor and manage applications, SpringSource has defined a new era for application development with the Spring Framework. They’ve extended that now to a broader vision around run-times and management (us) to give customers and the community an entire application lifecycle platform.  Like us, SpringSource depends on the innovation and collaboration that is only possible through Open Source. Our commitment to our community will strengthen through our combination with SpringSource’s extensive experience in building great open source projects.

What’s next?

Obviously, this acquisition brings up a lot of questions.  We are 100 percent committed to providing answers and helping make this transition as seamless and transparent as possible for our customers, partners, employees and community.  As such, we have set up several forums where people can go to get more information:

• Visit the announcement landing page
• Read the press release
• Join us for a Webinar on May 20th when we will share our vision

Rod Johnson (CEO of SpringSource) also shared his thoughts on what this means for SpringSource on his blog.

I couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished at Hyperic over the last five years.  Today’s announcement is a testament to the top-notch product, services and sales support that we have built in our organization.

We’re excited to starting working together as the SpringSource team.

According to the report, published on March 17, 2009, “cloud computing is becoming one of the most visible sourcing option for infrastructure and operations professionals. I&O professionals, thus, must be aware of how they will manage this environment from an availability, performance, disaster recovery and service aggregation point of view”.

The Gartner research report suggests IT operations organizations that are using cloud services provided by Amazon or Google should consider Hyperic products to monitor this environment. In addition, development teams desiring to better understand the performance of applications being designed for the cloud should investigate Hyperic’s offerings. We couldn’t agree more. To access the report, you’ll have to talk to Gartner first.

Developers like the cloud since it lets them bypass operations (i.e., the control agents) and serve their environment needs quickly. In the cloud, developers can build an application and launch it themselves, on their own, without waiting for hardware to be purchased, racked & stacked.  Without waiting for hardware or virtualization capacity planning, electricity consumption plans, cooling or green discussions to finish. If you’re a developer, the cloud offers speed! The cloud is way cool. You’re the man. But developers too often forget to ask themselves what happens afterwards?  Who will make sure the app is always available?  Apps in the cloud will still have performance issues and will still break.

The first cloud dilemma for developers… For better or for worse (up for debate), by publishing to the cloud devs become responsible for all three phases of the application – build, deploy and manage – whereas typically they are only responsible for the build stage.  Red flag – few developers have an operations background. And they usually know little about application performance monitoring, or the tools of this trade.

Developers often misstep by putting a web application up on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment assuming that bad code, bad programming or a poor choice of architecture is somehow not a problem, or that it will somehow work out in the end. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.  Can the ease of spinning up a new AMI in a nanosecond mask application performance problems like malformed queries, memory leaks and runaway processes?  Maybe, but the issues will catch up with you and you’ll be running up lots of unnecessary charges on AWS.

The second cloud dilemma for developers is subtle but should frighten any business that has to stand behind a service or application that it hosts in the heavens. This dilemma is centered around service level agreements (SLAs) that developers must consider to avoid becoming become trapped between a rock and a hard place.

The Rock: The SLA the developer provides to customers
The Hard Place: The SLA that the cloud provides to the developer

Almost never shall the two meet. What developer wants to be on the hook for a customer SLA that REQUIRES MORE THAN the cloud platform’s SLA? You’d be surprised how many developers make this bad decision and don’t even know it.

With the cloud, It comes down to this — performance, cost and availability are at the center of a very important job that rests in the hands of someone who typically doesn’t have the experience to make those decisions alone, the developer. That’s a dilemma no business wants to find itself in.

We believe that companies have two options.  One: continue to leverage our friends, the ops guys, to make sure your applications perform — wherever they may live.  And two: wait for the inevitable evolution of the role of developers  –  some will learn new skills and address the monitoring and management challenges head on.

How about you? Are your apps in the cloud rock solid? Do you see any “epic fails” in the cloud that you don’t see on-premise?  Who manages your apps in the cloud?

To find out what goodies await you in 4.0.3, please checkout the Release Notes.

Thanks again to all that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane.

And of course, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, who told the Guardian his opinion of cloud computing:

It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.

I wasn’t surprised at Larry’s reaction, as the more classical IT enterprise that his business serves is by definition going to be a late adopter. I was surprised at Stallman, however.

His arguments went for a general theme of cloud computing being too much risk for the CIO. Funny, as open source suffered the same start. Open source weathered many years of questions on what it is, how could businesses accept the indemnification risks, and of course how mature were the products being developed under its banner.

Hyperic has embraced both. We open sourced our software in 2006, and have roots in open source starting in the nineties from Netscape to Apache from our founders. It’s also no secret that Hyperic, and its users, are early adopters of the cloud. We’ve been part of this trend unfolding, visibly so with our CloudStatus service.

We didn’t do either because they were cool, or for any desire to be some sort of fashionable IT software company. We did it because it makes sense for our users, and both are an approach to building more affordable, useful, and scalable IT.

Open source is a business model for us to work with our users – they are building modern web-driven applications and need better monitoring and management for these dynamic, custom-built environments. Since they are web-afficianados when they have a problem they consult, that’s right – the web. They do a Google search, they look for how others solved it – and they look for the straightest line to applying the same solutions to their unique situation. They want self-service. They want quick results. Open source lets them download and use the software without unneccesary limits on time, scale or its application. Once our software establishes its value, if there is more opportunity to help them more, we have an educated, successful, in-house champion to help work through the sale. We save a lot on the cost of sales and support this way. The customers in turn save time and money in completing their solution. Open source is way to package our products and services to ease adoption so everyone benefits.

Cloud computing is much the same. Cloud computing is a system of technologies and services that have commoditized IT to make it more readily consumable, scalable, and cost-effective for everyone. It has leveraged the innovation and expertise of Internet giants like Amazon and Google, and is making it accessible to anyone with the next big idea. It removes the investment in physical and human resources to scale up a business. It affords more folks to try their ideas and vet its worth in the market. It also affords these same businesses to scale out as quickly as their business demands. Cloud computing, same as open source, is a way to package products and services to ease adoption so everyone benefits.

Open source was sexy because it was toppling the big guys by eroding their market shares. They *mostly* now all get that it is a better way to do business with a larger, more unpredictable market that prefer to leverage open components to construct their own inventions.

Cloud computing is sexy because it taps into the entrepreneur’s “CIO envy”, as the451group’s Rachel Chalmers called it when we last spoke. This “CIO envy” channels the aspirations for anyone to be the next Facebook. It removes the need for deep pockets and a deep technical bench to scale up their business to go to market, and scale out to capitalize on customer demand. It will come in all shapes and sizes, from infrastructure services to software application services to development platform services and all the surrounding implementation support services that typically surround IT. Regardless of the form, its purpose will be the same – to reduce IT complexity to create scalable, building blocks that can be consumed and paid for based on real usage.

In short, the term may evolve to become not as sexy, but the concept, just like open source, is too big and attractive to ignore.

At the beginning of this month, Hyperic formalized its European presence. Until now, we’ve had two European community managers, and dedicated sales and support staff here in the US working long hours. However, we now have a new Technical Account Manager, Nevenka Bierny, who will be leading our pre- and post-sales customer support in Europe. Finally, some feet on the street local technical support for customers and prospects alike. She is based in the UK out of our new Regional EMEA Headquarters – complete with a local number:

Communications House
26 York Street
London, UK
W1U 6PZ
Phone: + 44 0207-788-7440

It doesn’t stop there though! We’ve been busy adding a litany of new reseller and OEM partners with a focus on the european markets. The reasoning is that we need to accelerate local presence in Europe to match demand, and strong partnerships are the most effective way to get good people in place quickly. One announcement was our partnership with Dalet, who built a really cool broadcast industry vertical monitoring and management solution using Hyperic as the core.

Europe is a big focus – we’ve been saying that since the beginning of the year. We have about 60% of our user activity there, and we haven’t been ignoring them in the slightest. There’s more achievement there to come! Stay tuned in the next couple weeks as we shine up a couple more similarly cool announcements!

The latest release of Hyperic HQ, 3.2.5, is live and chock full of the good stuff. Notable changes and additions include: Changes in a platform’s fully qualified domain name are autodiscovered, the new JMX console allows you to display and control MBeans and troubleshoot JVM issues, script actions for alerts, metric display auto-reset from email and new escaltion pause options.

• Download it now!

CloudStatus Supports Google App Engine

Google App Engine is the second significant cloud service to be monitored by CloudStatus, which launched in June with support for Amazon Web Services. Hyperic’s free CloudStatus service delivers real-time, independent insight into the health and performance of the App Engine, giving users a greater level of confidence in the reliability, availability and scalability of web applications running on Google’s infrastructure.

• Learn more
• Try it out!

Hyperic opens UK office

• You heard right, Hyperic has just opened operations in London. Not London, Ontario, mind you. London, England. So, you know, tally ho!

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

Be sure to tune in to this month’s amazing and informative webinars:

• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Beta Program – Do you want to get a sneak peek at Hyperic HQ 4.0, while earning fame and prizes? Praise and accolades? Envy and respect from your friends and family? This HyperCAST will show you how to get all that and more with the all new Hyperic Beta Program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it just might change the world of monitoring and management.
• Choose the next HyperCAST! We know you’re dying to know how to optimize or configure something or other. Everyone has something they’d like to better hack. So you tell us what our next webinar ought to be. Better plugins through HQU? How to make the perfect Manhattan? If we choose your idea, we’ll send you a free parting gift. It might be a year’s supply of Turtle Wax, or a trip to the Olympics the next time they’re in Beiling. But it’s probably more like some Hyperic branded merchandise.

If you missed or want to re-watch any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives. Some of the recent ones include:

• The Citrix XenServer Plugin
• The Hyperic Roadmap

Hyperic HQ Iterations for 4.0

Tick tock. The dawn of 4.0 is about to break. To get a glimpse:

• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Iterations
• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Roadmap

Plugin of the Month

• Congratulations to Graeme Dunlop! Graeme wins plug in of the month for August 2008 for sending us code fixes for our JMX measurement plugin tutorial. Thanks Graeme!

Best of the Blog

• Meters, breakers, and other cloud analogies. “Software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails” says Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero, “what role do providers have in providing management technology to their customers?”

Hyperic in the News

• Om Malik is the first to post on the CloudStatus + Google App Engine announcement!
• No cloud computing for Dell case closed.
• Business Week recognizes open source at Red Hat convention.

Hyperic Professional Services

• Did you know that Hyperic sells Professional Services like Advanced Troubleshooting and Implementation or Upgrade assistance? Well, it’s true. If you’re interested in hearing more, contact sales.

We’ll be updating the website and forums over the next month or so, but if you want to follow us for now check out the account ‘hyperic’ on twitter. You can start following us today!

Here’s tweeting at you, kid!

Hyperic HQ 3.2.3 and Hyperic HQ 3.2.3 Enterprise are now available! HQ 3.2.3 is a maintenance release with minor bugfixes. We recommend that all 3.2.x users upgrade to this latest version. Get it now:

• Download HQ 3.2.3
• Read the Release Notes

Meet and Greet, Part 1

While we may not have actually been to every conference on the planet in April, it sure seems like it. Here’s a quick rundown of recent events with links to their respective wrap-ups:

• Web 2.0 Expo
• MySQL Conference and Expo
• Linux Foundation Summit
• Lug Radio Live

JavaOne and CommunityOne

(or Meet and Greet, Part 2)
But wait, there’s more! There are still more events to attend. Right around the corner is JavaOne, held in SF from May 6 through 9. Hyperic will have a booth, as well as a conference session by Lead UI Architect Richard Pack on the topic of "Choosing Your Java-based Web Framework: a Comparison." Also, Senior Software Engineer Scott Feldstein will speak at CommunityOne (May 5) on the subject of "Scaling MySQL."

• Visit the JavaOne web site
• Visit CommunityOne

Velocity Conference

(or Meet and Greet, Part 3)
We are especially excited about O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference. This is a conference we helped design and build just for our users, the web operations teams powering some of the coolest companies on the planet. As such, Hyperic is a Diamond Sponsor and our own Javier Soltero will deliver a keynote "Clouds Are no Substitute for Competence." With cloud computing lurking as the next big disrupter in the web operations world, you’ll want to hear what Javier has to say. And, for being a friend-of-Hyperic, you get a hefty discount!

To claim your 20% registration discount, use this code: vel08hyp

• Visit the Velocity Conference site

New OEM Partner: Terracotta

Terracotta, the leader in infrastructure software for enterprise Java scalability, and Hyperic, Inc. have announced a technology license agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Hyperic’s SIGAR (System Information Gatherer and Reporter) has been incorporated into Terracotta 2.6, the latest version of their open source Java clustering solution. Hyperic’s cross-platform SIGAR enables Terracotta to obtain key operating system and hardware information, important data points for monitoring and managing the health of application clusters.

• Read the press release

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduced some great new features allowing admins to get a real-time view of their HQ server’s health. If you’ve been interested in finding out how to tune your Hyperic deployment, register for this HyperCAST:

• HQ Health: Reading Diagnostics and Tuning Your HQ Server – Scott Morrison, May 6, 11am PDT / 18:00 UTC

If you’ve never seen any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives. Some of the recent ones include:

• Building JMX Plugins
• Building SNMP Plugins

New HQU Plugin: Event Center

One of the great advantages of HQU is the ability to build new interfaces to data. One example of this is the Event Center HQU plugin, which allows admins to view all of their log and event tracking data in one place.

• Download the Event Center plugin

New Support for Oracle Application Server

Gerardo Viedma, our illustrious software engineer, has released a brand new plugin that allows Hyperic HQ to manage instances of both Oracle Application Server and Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J). The plugin is now available at the HyperFORGE.

• Read Gerardo’s announcement
• Get the plugin

Plugin of the Month – Scheduled Downtime

Jeff Schwartz has written a nice plugin that allows HQ admins to schedule downtime for alerts on a given platform. This is a pretty useful feature for admins who have to take down some essential services for maintenance and don’t want their monitoring tool(s) to send them alerts to that effect – they already know the service is down. This blog post lets you download the plugin and lists steps for how to deploy it. (disclaimer: we cannot vouch or provide support for this plugin)

Congrats to Jeff! As a reward, we will provide him with a $250 gift certificate.

• Read the plugin announcement
• Download the plugin

Hyperic HQ Iterations for 4.0

Our engineers have been taking a community approach in plotting the develpment of Hyperic HQ 4.0. One of the most visible changes wrought by this change in approach is the publishing of iterations, very early pre-alpha versions of code, on SourceForge.net. If you’re very curious and love to tinker and hack on developmental code, take a look:

• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Iterations
• Hyperic HQ 4.0 Roadmap – Learn about the progress and goals of the HQ 4.0 release

Best of the Blog

• The Power of Community – Stacey Schneider reflects on her conversation with Roberto Galoppini
• Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting – Javier Soltero weighs in on Werner Vogels keynote from the MySQL Conference.
• Barry Klawans at Hyperic – Barry Klawans, the long-time JasperSoft CTO, has recently been spotted in the Hyperic office. Welcome, Barry!

Hyperic in the News

Take a look at what they’re saying about Hyperic:

Many of you know Barry as the co-founder and longtime CTO of JasperSoft. Barry recently took leave of JasperSoft to find something that let him enjoy his family more. However, for those of you that know Barry well – his big brain is always cooking, and he can’t stay still for long. We’re excited that Barry is joining us at Hyperic on a part-time basis to do some more work on our JasperSoft integration. He’s actually cooking up a whole new ad-hoc reporting tool that is sure to cause millions of Hyperic-lovers out there to swoon.

Welcome, Barry!

This year definitely had a different feel, and of course that had a lot to do with Sun’s influence. It felt like it was almost a new event, a chapter 2 for MySQL, and its ecosystem of vendors and customers. There were more people – I don’t know exact numbers, but it felt appeared to be twice as packed. The exhibit hall was the same, but we took up a bit more space than last year and certainly there were much fancier booths – ours included! We even gave away multiple prizes this year – our fun 8-ball tshirts, and a couple remote control helicopters. Scott Baird and Mike Hogan were the lucky winners this year.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is our fit with the MySQL customers. This year we met several of our own customers and users face-to-face – including an entire legion of the Rackspace/Mosso guys. I had dozens of conversations with MySQL users managing the LAM-* stack, and showed them how Hyperic helps wrangle all the moving parts. Several of them were lined up when the exhibit hall opened the next day to tell me how their deployment went the night before! Very cool. We spend a lot of time talking to users – via the forums, email and phone – so to see their faces the next day after they deployed is a really cool experience.

And this experience wasn’t mine alone, Hyperic has grown quite a bit in the past year, almost tripling in size. So we had many more people from all departments hanging out on the floor and interacting live with users. Check out our own Mark Deadder, sales guru, wooing a small crowd while flashing his broken wing. (Minutes before, Mark fatally crashed the demo helicopter – perhaps if we could monitor it with HQ, the wing would still be attached!)

Thanks, MySQL – we’re looking forward to next year already!

Dan’s article, titled Closing the Doors That Virtual Sprawl Leaves Open, covers a broad array of topics from the evolution of the main virtualization software providers to the issues that linger around deploying virtualization including security, compliance and systems management. Dan is part of a growing legion of reporters and business executives that recognize the change virtualization is having on customer facing business issues, citing:

New technology, however, often brings new problems, and the rise of virtual machines also makes it harder for corporate I.T. managers to track everything the machines are doing.

Virtualization has grown up over the years, and moved firmly forward into being a strategic technology decision for IT operations that deploy it properly. However, for all its growth it has several challenges still ahead.

About 10 years ago, virtualization software was used only to develop other software applications, said Stacey Schneider, director of marketing at Hyperic, a San Francisco software company. But it has since taken a more public role, exposing it to attacks from the outside. “It is quick and easy to add virtual servers,” Ms. Schneider said. “But it makes the system manager’s job harder.”

Dan’s article is pretty broad, assessing the larger changes in the market – inferring VMware’s monopoly will be threatened this year, and players to solve security and management are rapidly emerging. And of course, Hyperic is just one of those players – solving monitoring and management blindspots for these next generation companies that are deploying virtualization.

Javier will appear in the panel I’ll Show You My Forge If You Show Me Yours at 10:30am on Wednesday, March 26. The topic of discussion will be how you engage users and developers and sell them on the forge concept, and there will be a whole lot of expertise on hand to discuss it. Besides Javier, there’s also Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource, Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, OpenSUSE’s Community Director. Moderating is Eric Knorr, Editor-in-chief of InfoWorld. Now *that’s* a high-powered panel.

As for me, I’m apparently the only person crazy enough to go up against Mark Shuttleworth, John Roberts and Marten Mickos in the 10:30am timeslot on Tuesday. I am moderating the panel The Community Imperative: Building and Leveraging Community into IT at 10:30am on Tuesday, March 25. I’m blessed with a very intriguing panel featuring Russ Danner from the Christian Science Publishing Society, Gautam Guliani from Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, Paolo Juvara from OpenBravo, and Gianugo Rabellino from Sourcesense. Look for some interesting back and forth, as these guys all have different perspectives on community building.

I’m really looking forward to this, as I’ve always been a fan of OSBC. If you’re going to OSBC and have already seen Mickos, Roberts and Shuttleworth speak multiple times, then this is the panel for you!

Note: The theme music is from “Panic Attack” by EdShift and is published under the Creative Commons By-NC license, version 2.5.

For those who prefer your audio in OGG format, download here.

Mosso, as you may recall, is a Hyperic customer and was the subject of a recent case study.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always aspired to be a completely independent management software company. We figure its important for us to deliver the best management solution for whatever technology you’ve chosen. Case in point, Mosso, a Hyperic enterprise customer was recently interviewed regarding their use of virtualization technology from VMWare. The key point from this interview was the fact that they’re open to switching to a different virtualization platform based on their requirements. Lucky for them, Hyperic will be delivering Xen support (as well as OracleVM) as soon as the Xen folks finalize their management API’s (c’mon guys, we’ve been waiting a long time) so their management solution will be in lockstep with their technology choices.

I arrived in Dallas on Tuesday evening for an open source systems management BoF – to which I was 15 minutes late on account of missing a connecting flight in Denver, but I digress… I was one of two vendors represented there, with Mark Hinkle of Zenoss being the other. The rest of the BoF attendees, about 15 others, were sysadmins from various organizations: a couple of universities, a smattering of smaller companies, and at least one large financial institution. All were using a variety of open source systems management tools. Of course, being a USENIX conference, all were using these tools in a *NIX environment.

It shouldn’t surprise you that they were using open source tools. What might surprise you is *why* they were using them – ease of use. Most of these tools are not excessively complicated, and you don’t have to go through a sales organization to get to them. Thus, the barrier to entry is miniscule, especially for a competent sysadmin who knows how to modify their configuration to fit a particular environment. The next most popular reason was flexibility – being Unix admins, this means something other than what a non-Unix admin might infer. Flexibility for a Unix admin means it easily integrates with whatever scripts the sysadmin has at the ready in ~/bin or other Unix-based tools that perform singular functions. Cost was 3rd on the list. As one sysadmin pointed out, they worked for a billion-dollar company – shelling out $$$ for more software was a drop in their IT budget bucket. This should speak volumes for systems management software vendors: our future customers will drop their money on solutions that fit their needs on their schedule and within their existing environment. Vendors take heed.

Later, I met up with Luke Kanies, of Puppet fame, and Scott D, who was an IT ops guy for a major banking institution. Luke is fond of railing on the IT industry as a whole, and this time was no exception, comparing modern sysadmin practices to a developer writing in assembly language. Luke also expresses a desire to bring the concept of design patterns to the sysadmin profession, further linking the ideas of administration and management to software development. Scott regaled me with how his employer deployed an AFS-based distributed systems environment and discussed the topic at LISA in 1995. Time permitting, I hope to follow up with both of them for interviews on this blog.

At some point, a wandering Elvis impersonator decided to pay the LISA confines a visit. Turns out he was actually lost and seeking assistance. A USENIX staffer soon set him straight, explaining that DEFCON would be held at another time, date and location.

Other highlights included meeting customers, users, and prospective users / customers. It’s always interesting to see what people are doing with HQ and learn what we could do to improve our software. It also didn’t hurt that I was a roving swag machine, handing out trinkets with abandon. Let’s just say that high-quality retractable ethernet cables don’t last long at a USENIX conference!

Last week, some of the best and brightest open source companies in the bay area congregated at Hyperic Headquarters, and played a spirited game of Wii Tennis to vie for the title of Open Source Champion and its prize: The Golden Racket.

The title gives it away, Hyperic won. Specifically, Scott Feldstein (aka scottmf) rose to the occasion and took the prize:

It was a great event though – and although winning was nice, it was made even nicer by getting to blow off some steam and socialize with the other companies that came. Thanks to JasperSoft, MuleSource, Marketcetera (apparently hosting next time!) and MySQL for making the event so fun. Here are some photos for your enjoyment:

We used our new, unbuilt space to host the event. Part housewarming, part wii-fest!

Zack Urlocker from MySQL had the great idea of adding Guitar Hero to the mix. So much fun!

That’s me on the guitar. Let’s just say I’ve had a little practice…

This is actually Scott playing (left) tennis. Although this was taken earlier in the night, we can see Scott was well on his way to his winning streak.

Thanks again to everyone for coming to such a fun night. I look forward to the next round of defending the Golden Racket!

Oh by the way, your websites will no longer be hosted in 4 days

In spring of 2002 I was called in by a Company to help them with their websites (I wasn’t an employee at that time, I had a small shop of about 10 guys doing web development/business systems).

The issue? Their Host went bankrupt and they had 4 days to move 100+ sites with 50+ pages each off their servers before the plug was pulled.

If this didn’t go right, 80,000 plus doctors around the country would be very unhappy – they use the sites to look for Continuing Medical Education seminars, register, make payments, keep track of their certificates, etc. the Company would lose a LOT of money.

So – no big deal, right? Just access the servers and pull the code off and put it on our servers.

SORRY – the Hosting Vendor of the Company actually outsourced the hosting to another vendor whom they hadn’t paid and they refused to give us access at all! With the short amount of time that we had, I pulled my entire team together to go to every page, save as html, fix the image src tags and everything else and rebuild the sites by hand as static HTML (no database driven content). We got their sites back up in 1/2 day before the plug got pulled, and then a week or two later launched a Content Management system for them to be able to keep the content up to date.

This took a team of 6 72+ hours of work. Non-stop. 3 all nighters in a row with interspersing of Colin Powell 20 Minute Power Naps.

Needless to say, the Company was very happy we could rescue them, and now that I’ve moved on from owning my own company they have very happily employed me.

Congratulations, Mr Anderson, your Wii will be in the mail this week!

Enterprise Systems Management blogger John Willis recently attended a Tivoli user group (SOTUG) up in Canada, and met Brett Gillett, a veteran Tivoli user who has turned to Hyperic in the past couple years. Brett offered John a good perspective on why he made the switch and for what functionality. Acknowledging that Tivoli is a very large product, areas of the product no longer meet his business needs. Hence Hyperic!

John reached out to me and last Friday we got Javier Soltero, Hyperic CEO together with Brett and John to talk about the Hyperic story, including why Brett made the move, thoughts on where Tivoli products still remain relevant, and where services folks can help out with Hyperic. They also touched a little on the upcoming Wii wars (which are ON for this Thursday, November 1st for all you open source kids who think you have some Wii sauce!). John would like to have the next set in Atlanta so watch out LoopFuse! Roy and team will be our first target for expanding our world domination in open source wii wars!

Back to the podcast: The sound quality isn’t really great, but as John Willis says – “content is king”. To listen to the full podcast click here.

Businesses are experimenting with Ubuntu as their primary OS, and with Dell’s announcement that it will ship Ubuntu laptops, this trend will continue. Better manageability is a critical gating factor for Ubuntu to achieve more widespread business adoption. The Hyperic HQ plugin accomplishes just that. Now, HQ and Ubuntu administrators can instantly take full advantage of Hyperic’s management capabilities, including auto-discovery, monitoring, complex alerting and remediation.

Ubuntu uses free software to provide an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user. Its Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) includes improvements in advanced plug-and-play printing, enhanced browsing and the option of an intuitive new user interface.

This latest plugin reflects Hyperic’s dedication to providing the most aggressive and expansive native product support for leading technologies in the market today.

Linux is the clear choice for Hyperic HQ admins, who typically power large scale web applications where Linux is the preferred, cost-effective operating system of choice. Nearly 60% of all hardware managed by Hyperic HQ is Linux-based. To keep pace with that demand, Hyperic has a policy of aggressively supporting new Linux-based releases, typically within a week of their release. Hyperic already has plans to support Ubuntu’s next version, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), in April 2008.