[cs615asa] [POSSIBLE SPAM] HW#N: Attend a relevant Meetup/Talk/community event

Mon May 2 17:02:50 EDT 2016

Hi all,

The title of the technical meetup I attended on April 20 is  "what's new in
Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)". The talk was given by Mark Baker. Mark is the
Ubuntu server and cloud product manager at Canonical where he has spent the
last 4 years helping drive the platform for next generation application
delivery. Prior to Canonical Mark worked at MySQL and Red Hat where he
enjoyed disrupting large Billion dollar incumbent technology companies.
With OpenStack and Ubuntu Mark continues to have fun following this same
path.

The reason why I attend this meetup is because I use Ubuntu a lot, it's my
favourite version of Linux system. My AWS was driven by Ubuntu.

Five software tools supported on Ubuntu 16.04 was introduced, including
LXD, OpenZFS, Snappy, Docker, OpenStack.

Canonical’s LXD is the next‐generation of container hypervisor for Linux,
it combines the speed and density of containers with the security of
traditional virtual machines. With LXD, you could launch a new machine in
under a second, and that you could launch literally hundreds of them on a
single server.

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed and
implemented by a team at Sun Microsystems led by Jeff Bonwick and Matthew
Ahrens. Its development started in 2001 and it was officially announced in
2004. In 2005 it was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris and released
as part of OpenSolaris. Currently, as of January 2015, it is native to
Solaris, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, illumos, Joyent SmartOS, OmniOS,
FreeBSD, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD systems, NetBSD, OSv and supported on Mac OS
with MacZFS. The name "ZFS" originally stood for "Zettabyte File System".
Currently it can store up to 256 ZiB (zebibytes).

Snappy Ubuntu Core is the perfect system for large-scale cloud container
deployments, bringing transactional updates to the world’s favourite
container platform.

Docker
Docker is somewhat like vagrant or VMware.

OpenStack is the leading open cloud platform.

Thanks to this talk, I learned something I've never expected to exist
before. For instance, launch a virtual machine in seconds.

yours,
Runxi Ding

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 4:16 PM, gbasile <gbasile at stevens.edu> wrote:

> I attended a webinar on VMware Mirage; a desktop management solution that
> stores OS instances in a cloud that can be quickly pushed to restore any
> desktop on the network. I chose this meeting because I am looking to
> implement a desktop management solution at the company I work for.
>
> About the environment:
> Automall 46 inc is a medium sized car retail and service enterprise with
> multiple locations and departments that have different end user use cases
> depending on the franchise the store is under (Nissan, Mitsubishi, or
> Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram) and department (parts, service, sales, finance or
> accounting). Different manufacturers all have different software products
> necessary to service vehicles, and order OEM parts. Each finance department
> works with various different banks that have certain security
> specifications for running customer credit and applying for financing. All
> stores and departments use CDK dealer management system for various tasks;
> archiving, invoicing, CRM, and inventory.
>
> The Problem:
> Currently, this company has 600 workstations, distributed across multiple
> locations, without any central management to deploy new software, or fix
> issues.
>
> Goal of the project:
> Deploy a centralized desktop management system. greatly reducing the labor
> intense task of managing each desktop individually.
>
> Constraints:
> - Solution must be cost effective.
> - The system must not create any new system wide issues that will effect
> business operations.
>
> How I am approaching the problem:
> I have been shopping for various solutions to this problem for the past 6
> months. Originally, I was looking at full desktop virtualization. This
> implementation ended up being extremely costly, when taking into account
> VMware licencing, repurchasing windows licences for mobility, networking
> costs, and physical server equipment. Full virtualization has many areas
> where the system can fail; hardware failure, or a network failure from the
> central servers to any location can result in a complete shutdown of a
> location's business operations. Fof this reason, I started shopping for
> systems that achieve the goals outlined above with more cost efficiency and
> reliability.
> Which bring me to the purpose of attending the talk on VMware's mirage
> product.
>
> What I learned from the webinar:
> Mirage provides unified image management across all PC workstations. It is
> designed for distributed environments, desktop recovery, and OS migration.
> The central admin can create images for multiple different use cases, and
> push them down to any workstation on the network without physically having
> to access the machine. The images are hardware and driver independent, thus
> a single image can be used over different PC makes and models. It
> accomplishes this using a layered model for creating the images, drivers at
> the bottom layer, OS on the next layer, applications on the third layer,
> and a user personalization layer for data. This layered model also allows
> for rapid OS migration without having to worry about reinstalling
> applications, or losing user data.
>
> From an infrastructure standpoint, Mirage is significantly less complex to
> implement than full virtualization. Mirage server nodes hold image data,
> and MSSQL servers hold user data for the personalization layer. The server
> nodes have minimal hardware requirements in comparison to servers for
> virtualization; a cluster of two servers with a single intel Xeon and 8GB
> of ram will suffice for 1000 workstations. In the case of a system failure,
> networking or hardware, business operations should not be significantly
> affected. Image synchronization will not be possible in the event a
> workstation needs to be restored during the downtime, but this case is
> considered to be a minor event with low probability.
>
> Mirage will not only be a sufficient solution to the problems listed
> above, but if implemented for automated image restoration during off
> business hours, can mitigate some malware security concerns. Working PC
> help desk for many years has lead me to a few conclusions. 1) A perfect
> malware prevention tool does not exist. 2) A perfect malware scan and
> cleanup tool does not exist. 3) Most modern malware has mechanisms to
> prevent a windows system restore operation. I can implement Mirage to
> automatically restore workstations to a safe working image on a scheduled
> timetable. Distributing the load of this task over each day of the week to
> avoid network congestion.
>
> Summary and Conclusions:
> Mirage seems to be the perfect product for my environment. Next week I am
> planning on negotiating the cost of licencing and equipment. After
> negotiating comes what i find to be the most difficult task in IT
> management; convincing the owners of the company, whom do not have any
> technical background, to spend more money on monthly overhead to solve
> issues that they are very far separated from. Unlike working at public
> companies whom have certain standards and guidelines for IT compliance,
> many private enterprises like like mine have no such standards, and it is
> up to you as the admin to create such standards given you have the proper
> funding for these operations. The ethical guidelines outlined in this
> course for an admin are often difficult to comply to in an underfunded
> department. It is up to you as the admin to educate the owners with our
> knowledge about the threats we face in the virtual world in order to get
> that funding.
>
>
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