Kategorie: technology

Does your data deserve a private cloud?

Your business and your data are unique. For that reason, your enterprise architecture must also be tailored to fit the exact needs of your business. When data is involved, you want choices, not tradeoffs. More importantly, you want your solutions to build upon and complement one another.
For most companies, the variety of data sources and where that data should be stored are top priorities. You can’t afford to keep the data in silos or leave certain data untouched just because of its type or where it happens to sit. You need the flexibility to access all your data and place it in the optimal location.
Typically, the solution to this problem has been the public cloud. But what if you also have sensitive data that, due to company mandates or external regulations, needs significant levels of protection? You don’t want to trust the safety of that data to anyone else, preferring instead to take control and choose the level of security for yourself. This is where on-premises solutions have often come into play.
Ultimately, you want choice in flexibility and security without making sacrifices. You want to benefit from the best of both options as well as exceptional performance. At the intersection of these needs is the private cloud. Private clouds offer flexibility, just like public clouds, but they sit behind your firewall, giving you more control. Instead of making a tradeoff, flexibility and security are provided in unison, giving you more choice when it comes to your data.
IBM has embraced the concept of private clouds because we recognize the uniqueness of each data-related business opportunity. IBM Cloud Private delivers the features that many have come to expect in public cloud architectures with shared-resource efficiencies, utility computing and flexible scalability that delivers better total cost of ownership (TCO) and simplicity of deployment. Private cloud also gives companies more options in security, compliance and infrastructure customization. In other words, IBM Cloud Private helps provide the flexibility and security you desire in concert with our other data-focused solutions.
For example, running IBM Db2 on IBM Cloud Private offers choice in terms of deployment flexibility and security without sacrifices. At its core, Db2 still maintains the performance that enterprise users have come to expect: it’s fast, always available, secure, and flexible. The built-in IBM BLU Acceleration MPP architecture supports in-memory speed to get insights to those that need it faster. Its compression technology increases performance while simultaneously reducing storage requirements and giving you the opportunity to reduce storage costs. None of those key features go away when Db2 is running on IBM Cloud Private, but enhancements are made in two areas.
Data management flexibility complemented by container technology
Db2 is extremely flexible on its own. Thanks to the common SQL engine it shares with the entire IBM family of hybrid data management offerings, you can use data of various types sitting in a multitude of on-premises and on-cloud locations. The Db2 deployment is also flexible thanks to its ability to be deployed within a container. This is where IBM Cloud Private’s additive effect comes into play. IBM Cloud Private is built with two of the most popular container technologies at its base: Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Deploying Db2 using these technologies opens up the ability to maximize performance and efficiency by more closely aligning usage with company needs.
IBM Cloud Private also opens up the possibility of optimizing your infrastructure costs by offering the right mix of transactional (IBM Db2) and data warehousing solutions (IBM Db2 Warehouse) that adhere to the software-defined architecture. This provides the flexibility of managing your infrastructure needs via simplified deployment and efficient management of the same.
Built-in security bolstered by your own firewall
The built-in security features of Db2 help you deliver the protection that your customers, industry regulations, and other stakeholders demand. It begins with strong encryption capabilities included, so you can address compliance concerns. Then it goes further to provide centralized key management to heighten security and ease of use. IBM Cloud Private enhances this level of security by providing more control. Since IBM Cloud Private sits behind your firewall, it is protected by the security features you have built and integrated over the life of your company. Perhaps most importantly, you get to decide what level of security you need and adjust as necessary. The choice is in your hands.
IBM Db2 running on IBM Cloud Private delivers on the idea of choice without tradeoffs, cloud flexibility with on-premises security. Using IBM Cloud Private takes the extraordinary performance, flexibility, and security customers are accustomed to with Db2 and improves them.
To learn more about IBM Cloud Private and all the ways in which Db2 can benefit from running on that platform, read our solution brief. You can also register to attend our webinar and hear from the experts.
The post Does your data deserve a private cloud? appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

My First Contribution to ManageIQ

In this blog post, I am going to share my experience on how I made my first contribution to ManageIQ, the upstream open source project for Red Hat CloudForms. The post explains how I encountered and investigated an issue, and finally fixed it thereby sending my first “Pull Request” to ManageIQ repository.
 

Issue
When an infrastructure provider like VMware is added to CloudForms/ManageIQ, a user/admin have an option to put host(s) into maintenance mode. The “Enter Maintenance mode” option is available in a dropdown list when “Power” button is clicked on the host summary page, as shown in below image,
 

 
The following image shows a host in maintenance mode from Red Hat CloudForms. The host goes into maintenance mode but never “exits” the mode when selecting “Exit Maintenance Mode”.
 

 
As see below, the request to exit maintenance mode was successfully initiated from CloudForms user-interface.
 

 
However, the host still remains into maintenance mode, and we can validate this state from the VMware vSphere client.
 

 
Now that we have identified the issue, we can look at its possible cause(s) by troubleshooting Red Hat CloudForms.
 
Debugging an issue
A good place to troubleshoot is to look into standard log files under /var/www/miq/vmdb/ on the CloudForms appliance. Below is short description of few important log files:

production.log: All user Interface activities from Operations as well as Service UI are logged here.
automation.log: As the name suggest, all automation logs are collected in this file.
policy.log: This is a good place to look for logs related to events and policies.
evm.log: This file also covers automation logs as well as everything else. This file can be large in size and probably the first log file to look for errors & warning messages.

 
As you can see below, the evm.log file contained warning messages every time “Exit Maintenance Mode” request is initiated,
 
[—-] W, [2017-12-20T16:32:02.557678 #2197:1090af0]  WARN — : MIQ(ManageIQ::Providers::Vmware::InfraManager::HostEsx#exit_maint_mode) Cannot exit maintenance mode because <The Host is not powered ‘on’>
 
The log message clearly shows that the host attempts to exit maintenance mode but fails as it is not powered on. At this point, we can ask ourselves why is the task failing with this warning? Isn’t the host supposed to be in maintenance mode? We suspect something is not right with the logic behind this action. To dig deeper we can look into the host.rb file available at ManageIQ GitHub repository.
 

 
Looking at the logic in host.rb file, the method enter_maint_mode() is triggered when “Enter Maintenance Mode” request is made. This in-turns validates the maintenance mode using method validate_enter_maint_mode() which basically checks the power state of host using method validate_esx_host_connected_to_vc_with_power_state(). The arguments passed to this method are ‘on’ or ‘maintenance’.
 
 

 
A similar logic should be applied to the  exit_maint_mode() method. However, the method calls validate_enter_maint_mode() instead of calling validate_exit_maint_mode(), which causes the issue. The validation fails as the host is in ‘maintenance’ mode and not in ‘on’ mode as we can see below,
 
 

 
A simple fix is to call validate_exit_maint_mode() instead of validate_enter_maint_mode() each time “Exit Maintenance Mode ” request is made. This fix should validate the host to exit maintenance mode successfully.
 
Test
To verify our analysis, We can replaced the validation method call from validate_enter_maint_mode() to validate_exit_maint_mode() and restart evmserverd on the appliance using,
 
systemctl restart evmserverd
 
This time the host successfully exits maintenance mode
 
CloudForms User Interface:
 

 
VMware User Interface:
 

 
Creating a Pull Request
A “Pull Request” is a way to propose a change in code on GitHub. For those who don’t have an GitHub account, you can create one by following https://github.com/join. Once the account is created we have to fork the repository by clicking “Fork” button as shown below,
 

 
Next step is to clone the repository to our local machine so that changes can be made. Click on “Clone or download” button to copy the https URL link.
 

 
We can clone the repository by using the command
git clone https://github.com/imaanpreet/manageiq.git
 
Once our clone is completed, we can create a new branch using,
git checkout -b validate_exit_maint_mode
 
Make required changes and commit the changes using,
git add app/models/host.rb

git commit

 
Once changes are committed, it is time to send back changes as “Pull Request”, this can be done by pushing changes to the newly created branch,
 
git push origin validate_exit_maint_mode
 
The process to create a pull request is documented here.
 
Conclusion
The Pull Request is merged in the manageiq repository and the bug is currently being worked on. This was a great experience and I enjoyed the process of debugging, investigating, and fixing a bug in ManageIQ. I hope sharing this experience in this article will be useful for other readers, and will encourage them to submit more Pull Requests.
 
Quelle: CloudForms