2012 r2 series: open source

i keep catching myself getting far wordier than intended in these “summaries.” i’m going to work on that! catching up though. this makes 4 of 9 in this series. remember the days when microsoft was all about NOT developing for competing platforms to edge them out of the market? well, this post titled enabling open source software is all about the loving embrace of open source.

 

open source with windows

common engineering criteria (cec) drives consistency across products by requiring engineering compliance on a variety of factors with goals such as integration, manageability, security, reliability, etc. this same concept extends to all things cloud – private, hybrid, or public.

so what’s all this cec stuff do for open source, you say? well, it means having the same goal. single pane of glass administration, things that work in one environment should translate pretty easily to another, etc. here’s things microsoft has been up to:

• linux community. microsoft has been pretty involved lately. in fact, they’re even checking in their stuff into the main kernel source code base. i guess “lately” isn’t exactly fair. they started doing work with this kind of stuff back with opsmgr.
• drivers. ms has created what is called linux integration services (lis). basically, it’s a set of drivers for virtual devices. it contains stuff that allows such things as network and disk operating at near bare hardware performance and support for time sync, shutdown, heartbeat, live backups, and live migrations.
• r2 updates. supports dynamic memory allocation based on guest need, 2d video drivers, vmbus updates to spread interrupts across multiple virtual cpus, and kexec to support the ability to grab crash dumps.

data center abstraction layer (dal) is a common management abstraction for everything in the datacenter. it’s os agnostic, uses existing dmtf standards-based management. open management infrastructure (omi) is basically the implementation for linux. what started off as a movement in opsmgr has grown to configmgr, vmm, and dpm.

• opsmgr. nothing new here really. if you are an administrator of opsmgr, then you’re probably already aware of opsmgr’s ability to manage more platforms than just windows.
• configmgr. i knew this work had extended to managing platforms in configmgr but only recently learned that anti-virus protection is also available.
• vmm. personalize linux during deployment. deploy from templates (think of sysprep with linux), use a mix of linux and windows in service templates.
• dpm. live backups of linux guests. file system consistent snapshots (buffers are flushed, capable by linux integration services).
• powershell cmdlets. these cmdlets actually let you manage any cim based system.

CommandType     Name                                               ModuleName
-----------     ----                                               ----------
Cmdlet          Get-CimAssociatedInstance                          cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Get-CimClass                                       cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Get-CimInstance                                    cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Get-CimSession                                     cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Invoke-CimMethod                                   cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          New-CimInstance                                    cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          New-CimSession                                     cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          New-CimSessionOption                               cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Register-CimIndicationEvent                        cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Remove-CimInstance                                 cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Remove-CimSession                                  cimcmdlets
Cmdlet          Set-CimInstance                                    cimcmdlets

 

open source on windows

• common open source application publishing platform (coapp). essentially a package management system like the advanced packaging tool (apt) on linux. coapp packages can be included in visual studio projects.
• community collaboration. check out the azure gallery. it contains open source apps. also, recently, php was released on the same day for windows which included some significant performance improvements. the real story though is that a windows-version of php was released on the same day other os versions were.
• oracle. on hyper-v? yup. not just database… but java and weblogic, too.
• azul systems. jdk will be made available allowing customers to deploy java apps on windows azure using open source java – on both windows and linux.