Open Source Meets Business - Day 3 (final)

(continued from here) The last day of open source meets business had presentations in the morning and put a spotlight on Microsoft in the afternoon.

Systems monitoring with open source

Again, a talk about Nagios. And again, Nagios was choosen for its cost effectiveness. It seems like most commercial monitoring tools charge per monitored device - customers really dislike this. Oberschwaben Klinik uses Nagios to monitor interfaces, infrastructure, services, applications and devices distributed across 200 hosts, 500 services in 6 locations. Total deployment time for Nagios was a single month:

• 3 days initial setup
• 1 week learning the tool
• 2 days adaption to infrastructure
• 3 weeks betaphase (getting the alarm thresholds right)
• 3 days finetuning

And they only needed about one week of external consulting. Besides Nagios, the use Cacti for QoS monitoring.

Software for knowledge worker

Peter Pfläging, working for the City of Wien, pointed out that job roles have changed over the years from being topic specific towards knowledge workers, which he characterizes as

• having many tasks
• no applicable standards to approach problems
• coerced to lifetime learning
• lots of brainstorming to find solutions
• decisions makers

and having to explain the stuff to upper management. They all face the problem of organizing information, prioritizing tasks and documentation (for themselves and others). Peter presented (his choice of) open source tools supporting this style of work on multiple operating systems.

1. Mind maps OPML: xml data format, Freemind, DeepaMetha, WikkaWiki, Pimki
2. Task prioritization GtD, ThinkingRock, d3/dcubed.ca, gtd-php, (Bloggers note: Tracks)
3. Wiki Personal Wiki, Moin Moin, TiddlyWiki
4. Blogging Weblog with private entries, document your knowledge. WordPress, Typo, Blojsom
5. Desktop search For Windows there is Google desktop and Copernic. On Linux Beagle doesn't have a real competitor.

You should also prevent others from changing your document by using signed pdfs. Creating pdfs is a breeze on Linux but one needs PDFcreator on Windows. Then you can use Peters PortableSigner for signing.

LiMux

Here one learned about the current state of LiMux. The City of Munich choosed to develop their own 'base client' (running on Debian Linux) One thousand workstations are currently migrated (first 100 in 2006, 900 more last year) and about 5000 PCs already use OpenOffice. The base client is 'usability TUV IT certified' (Gebrauchstauglicher Basisclient) and their Linux Lernwelt learning tool won the European E-Learning award last year. The 'base client' core consist of (Debian) Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox and Gimp. Specific applications run browser-based, vintage (windows based) applications use Wine, virtualization or terminal server. The clients are managed by GOsa using FAI for deployment. GOsa itself is a set of PHP5 scripts used for deployment and configuration management (users, groups, mail, dns, dhcp, ...) using LDAP as a central CMDB. For update deployment FAI is currently used, doing inventory, license managementt, log analysis (audit) and hardware-monitoring. The upcoming version 2.6 of GOsa will support scheduled and load balanced mass deployment, replacing FAI.

Nagios at Stadtwerke Amberg

The city of Amberg suffers from an understuffed IT department and outsourced monitoring. This works fine with Nagios and the external consulting company is soo great, blah, blah, blah ...

How open is Microsoft after the EU ruling ?

This was mostly about the Samba/Microsoft agreement as detailed on Groklaw. Conclusion: with the current business model (public company, maximizing shareholder value), Microsoft will not open up too much.

Open source and Microsoft

Sam Ramji, director Open Source and Linux Strategy at Microsoft, tried to put his employer in a good light by pointing out that 50% of all open source deployments are on Windows. Half of all sourceforge projects run on Windows, 3000 are for Windows only. He continued to outline Microsofts open source strategy with Windows at its core, surrounded by OSS applications. (see also this post) A Microsoft based infrastructure (Active Directory, Systems Center, SQL Server) will grow Windows with help of OSS applications. Microsoft will develop free software to support the interface layer between the free and the proprietary world. This is done in the Open Source Software Labs (OSSL), currently established in Redmond and Cambridge, Mass. These labs focus on strategy, technical research and development of document formats, network protocols, security&identy, systems management, virtualization and application platforms. The long term goal is "respectful relationship to produce insights and technology to compete, interoperate and collaborate". Best quote (Ramji on Ballmer): "Its time to reset peoples perception of what he means when he talks"

Panel Discussion: Microsoft and open source

Dr Oliver Diederich (Heise Verlag) assembled Roger Levy (Novell), Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation) , Paul Cormier (RedHat), Sam Ramji (Microsoft) and Dr Johannes Helbig (Deutsche Post) to discuss the relationship of Microsoft and the open source movement. The complete discussion was recorded and is available here.

Novell Brainshare registration fun

Novell Brainshare will be held March 16-21. 2008 at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, UT. Registration is open now and you can also apply for Brainshare Connect to find other conference registrants with similar interests. The application form asks for your area of expertise, some work information, areas of interest and to choose your hobbies from a predefined list. Among this list are competitive eating and dumpster diving. I just wonder if these groups will do a BOF at Brainshare ...

Open Source Meets Business - Day 2

(continued from here)

Workflow management with BPEL

BPEL, the business process execution language, can be used as interface between management (defining/modeling process requirements) and IT (implementing services). Its object-oriented approach makes it possible to divide & conquer large tasks into Business/Architecture/Processes. BPEL allows to apply a consistent and repeteable processes which can be measured/monitored. The basic concept is SOA (service oriented architecture). Bpel adds a recursive aggregation model for web services and workflow mgmt. This all should allow for service orchestration and programming in the large. BPEL is standardized by OASIS as WS-BPEL). A graphical workflow designer and debugger is available through the Eclipse project. One can download an open source implementation of both the BPEL4WS 1.1 specification and the WSBPEL 2.0 standard at http://activebpel.org

OPSI - open pc server integration

OPSI is an open source desktop management system available at http://opsi.org While it is based on a Linux server its primary targets are Windows workstations. Written in Python, it provides inventory, deployment and patch & update management through a java UI. The presenter gave a short demo and highlighted the nice interface for composing database queries. Windows admins wanting to deplay opsi shouldn't be afraid of the command line, though.

Complete scalability with integrated virtualization

The title gave the impression of getting some facts and the presenters title of 'Solution Architect' made me actually believe this. Boy was I wrong. I couldn't stand half an hour of marketing fluff and 'Redhat can do it all' without any proof. Had to leave early...

VirtualBox

This one was nice. VirtualBox is (yet another) open source virtualization solution. Unlike Xen, it provides full virtualization and is able to run unmodified guest even without hardware (Intel-VT, AMD-V) support. So it plays in the league of VirtualPC, VMware or Parallels. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS and Solaris and supports all major operating systems (Windos XP, Windows Vista, Linux, Solaris, OS/2). I downloaded a copy and installed it on my OpenSUSE 10.3 laptop during the presentation and was impressed with its nice and intuitive configuration and management interface, highly recommend. VirtualBox is mostly used for windows virtualization and supports Microsofts RDP (remote desktop) protocol, implemented directly in the virtual graphics card. Then the VirtualBox server acts as terminal server, delivering graphical content to (a less powerful) PC. In this configuration, one can even use the USB ports of the dumb terminal, impressive. Other features are snapshots of running clients and shared folders between clients.

Collaborative Software Development

This talk, given by a consultant from McKinsey & Company, tried to put a spotlight on the influence open source has on traditional economies. It started to show how working in the open empowers individuals and communities through distributed co-creation, pro-sumption, firm of one / firm of one billion, interactions and collaborations It very much changes how people work and focuses on knowledge workers (see also 'Software for knowledge workers' on day 3) A couple of prominent development in the open projects were named

• Linux
• Wikipedia
• we>me textbook (collaborative creation of learning material, see here for a broader scope)
• oscarproject (open car engineering)
• loncin motorcycles china (Using an open development and manufacturing process, they have huge cost savings)
• prosthetics project (prosthetics cad design)

This new development style has a huge economic influence on the gross national product of countries (up to 15% are expected in the future). The presenter pointed out several times that working on open (source) projects is substantially different from traditional work. Only very few companies have realized this yet. All industries will be affected. First those with much IT, like Banks, Insurances, etc. Next are (car) manufacturers or similar companies with a big portion of high technology in the value chain. The media (broadcast) industry was also named. Big changes ahead.

What's next for Open Source

Given by Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, a company selling 'shrink-wrapped' open source solutions, this presentation had a similar topic like the previous one. Key messages were open source is disruptive, dramatic market evolvement, huge effects on global economy. She continued to talk about here company (yes, one can make money with open source) and the usual marketing fluff. Coming trends will be

• mass market devices (Google adroid)
• proprietary and o/s convergence (Novells 'mixed source' strategy came into mind)
• virtual appliances
• online marketplaces (Amazon is Linux based)
• consolidation plus proliferation

Open Source Barometer

Alfresco does open source enterprise content management based on a good deal of market analysis. The talk was a preview o the annual open source barometer focussing on the european and german open source market. Lots of graphs, trends and colorful view on the survey results. Looking at Alfresco deployments, there is Windows and Linux equality as an evaluation platform but Linux wins clearly when it comes to actual deployments. Looking more closely at Linux (for hosting Alfresco), SUSE Linux wins over RedHat by a factor of five. However, globally (looking at Linux in general) RedHat has four times more systems out there. Overall, Linux raise is undamped but the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement resulted in a clear kink for SUSE.

Linux System Management at Rewe

Yeah, great title and bad content (pure RHN marketing blurb). Go here if you really want more.

Nagios at Bundesstelle für Informationstechnik

Driven by ITIL, this german government agency needed

• consistent monitoring, platform independent
• fast deployment, extensibility
• transparency
• acceptance by people
• Integration into HP Service Desk + HP Network Node Manager
• Support for UC4

Main reasons for Nagios were cost effectiveness (cost for one server: 1500EUR with a commercial suite, 25EUR with Nagios), api, extensibility, scalability, integration in existing environment and ongoing development.

Open Source Meets Business - Day1

Heise Verlag held its annual Open Source meets Business conference in Nuremberg last week.

The conference was quite well attended, reportedly over 700 participants with approximately 699 from Germany, all in business suites ... Redhat was present with a booth (showing olpc, http://laptop.org). Novell was nowhere to be seen - strange.

Most presentations had about 80% marketing content, 10% about the business model and 10% actual information. Redhats virtualization talk was especially contentless, a marketing talk given by a 'solution architect'. I had to leave early.

Presentations where limited to 30 minutes (incl. Q&A), with 6 to 7 tracks in parallel. I tried to choose the one with systems management or software architecture relevance.

Presentations - Day1

REST

Ralf Wirdemann gave a good and easy to follow introduction to the REST architecture style. Nothing new, but its good to see that such topics are presented to (reportedly) CIO level management.
Too bad he had little 'real world' experience with either REST or Rails as his (non-)answers to questions showed.

SugarCRM: Is open source a viable business model ?

Short answer: Yes. Look at recent acquisitions: RedHat/JBoss 420M, Citrix/XenSource 500M, Sun/mySQL 1B. Nothing about SugarSRM as a product, but about the development (open) and business model (service & support).

Network Monitoring with Nagios

This was the first of four (!) talks about Nagios.
Monitoring is a hot topic for most IT admins. The presenter spend most of the time fighting the incompatibilities of MacOS Powerpoint with Windows Power Point and OpenOffice (doesn't show speaker notes ;-))
Filtering out the company marketing blurb, one learned that Nagios allows for cross-platfrom device and service monitoring. It uses its own client agent (available for Linux, Unix and Windows) but can also process SNMP management information from network devices. The client agent has a pluggable API for gathering information and there is a whole website dedicated to plugins.
The Nagios server, running on Linux only, provides the management infrastructure including a sophisticated alarm and notification system.
Customers seem to be quite happy with Nagios and only miss a reporting function. But this is planned for the future.

WS-Management

I presented my favorite topic, Web Services for Management. A remote management protocol providing true interoperable management capabilities between Linux and Windows.
Slides are available in german (I said it was a german conference, didn't I ?)

Report from Management Developers Conference

About Management Developers Conference

Management Developers Conference (ManDevCon, MDC) is the annual conference of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
The DMTF is the leading industry organization for interoperable management standards and initiatives. Mostly known for their Common Information Model (CIM) and the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) standards.
The full conference schedule can be viewed here.

I already had the opportunity to attend this conference last year. This year, I was accepted as a speaker with two presentations about WS-Management.

Conference overview

The conference has three blocks, one for learning ('university day'), one for demo and interop ('interop lab') and one for presentations.

It was interesting to see how the conference topics changed year over year. Last year, protocols and APIs were still under discussion. In 2006, the WS-Management and WSDM (OASIS Web Services Distributed Management) protocols were still competing. This year, working implementations of various standards dominated.
From a protocol perspective, WS-Management is the clear winner with virtually every systems vendor showing implementations. Microsofts adaption of WS-Management for all remote management on Windows (WS-Management comes build into Vista and is available as an add-on to Server 2003 and XP) was probably the driving force here. Openwsman, an open source implementation of WS-Management provided by Intel, is also picked up by lots of embedded vendors.

The interop lab revolved around implementations for CDM, DASH and SMASH.

CDM, the Common Diagnostic Model, is a CIM extension for diagnostic instrumentation. Its primary use is for vendor-agnostic remote health evaluation for hardware. Hewlett-Packard uses this extensively for their systems and requires each of their component suppliers for test routines available through CDM.
DASH (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware) and SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware) target management and monitoring of hardware components based on the WS-Management protocol.

Attended presentations

• Opentestman

Opentestman is validation test suite for ws-man, ws-cim and dash-1.0. Its a (wild) mixture of bash scripts and java based utility tools. Tests are described in xml-based 'profile definition documents' (PDD), making the tests data-driven. It currently covers all mandatory and recommended features of the WS-Management and WS-CIM standards. More than 160 test cases exist for all 14 DASH 1.0 profiles. [DASH 1.1 was released early December]
[Hallway discussions showed, that the current implementation of Opentestman is in urgent need of refactorization. So don't look too close at the code or it might hurt your eyes.]


• ITSM and CIM

ITSM, Information Technology Service Management, can be described as managing the systems management. The presentation gave an overview on existing technologies and asked for participation to model this topic in CIM. Currently, several (policy/modeling) standards exist for this topic, e.g. Cobit (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology; mostly US, covering business and process mgmt), ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library; mostly Europe, covering service and process mgmt) and CIM (resource mgmt). IT process management has seen a big push recently. Lots of tools and companies appeared in the last couple of years offering services.
With SML, a service modeling language exists. Other areas like availability management, performance/capacity management or event/incident/problem management do not have any established standard.


• Using the CIM Statistical Model to Monitor Datapresentation

Brad Nicholes from Novell showed recent work to integrate existing open source solutions (using non-standard models and protocols) with CIM.
Ganglia, a "scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids" uses rrdtool (round robin database tool) to view stastistical data with different granularity.
One feature of Ganglia is to provide trending information (as opposed to simple alerting) to support capacity planning.
Ganglia consists of a statitics gathering agent (gmond) running on every client. These agents are grouped in clusters, sharing all information within the cluster to ensure failover capabilities. The statistics aggregation agents (gmetad) run on specific managment servers, reporting to an apache web frontend.
Brad has defined a CIM model and implemented CIM providers to access the data. Its basically rrdtool access, thereby drastically reducing the amount of data transported over CIM.


• CIM Policy Language

This was a report from the DMTF policy working group defining CIM-SPL.
SPL, the simplified policy language, defines more than 100 operators to express relations (examples given: os 'runsOn' host, os 'hasA' firewall) and actions (Update of CIM properties, execution of CIM methods).
There exists a cli tool and an Eclipse plugin for developing and testing policies. The Apache Imperius project is about to release a sample implementation. Similar plans exist for the Pegasus CIMOM.


• Nagios through CIM

This was another example of bringing open source, but non-standard implementations and CIM together.
Nagios is a very popular monitoring and alerting framework. It comes with a rich set of data gathering plugins, available on nagiosexchange.org.
Intel has developed an adapter layer to expose Nagios data through CIM. One can also mix a traditional CIM provider with a Nagios plugin, filling only particular properties from the plugin.
The source code is not available publically (yet...).


• Cimple and Brevity

Cimple and Brevity are code generator tools making it easier to develop CIM providers and tools. Cimple is a CIM provider generator. It takes a CIM class description (MOF file) as input and generates stubs for a CMPI provider. This way, a developer does not have to fight with the provider API but can concentrate on the instrumentation part. [The amount of code generated is still huge. For SLE11, Python providers are the better choice for most cases.]
Brevity tries to ease writing client tools. For people developing in C or C++, Brevity is worth a look.
[For modern scripting languages, better bindings exist. E.g powerCIM for Python and rwscim for Ruby.]


• Management Frameworks

This talk was meant as a call for help to collaborate on a client framework standard. There are sufficient standards and implementations for getting instrumenting managed devices. But on the management application side, everyone reinvents the wheel.
Mergers drive this on the side of traditional (closed source) vendors, else they end up with lots of different APIs.
The proposed 'integrated framework and repository for end-to-end device view' consists of an 'agent tier' (instrumentation), a 'service tier' (see below) and an 'application tier' (API for management applications).
Services can be divided into infrastructure (discovery, collectors (caching), notifications) and core services (data model, topology, policy, scheduling, security, framework service management, domain specific services).
This is ongoing work sponsored by Sun Microsystems looking for further participation.


• openwsman

Openwsman is an open source implementation of the WS-Management and WS-CIM protocol standards. Its currently at version 1.5.1 with 1.6.0 scheduled for end of year and 2.0 end of march '08.
It consists of a generic library, a client library and a server library and daemon. The daemon can be used in parallel to existing CIMOM implementations, translating between WS-CIM and CIM/XML. The mod_wsman plugin for Apache provides co-existance of WS-Management and the Apache web server through the same port.
Main features for next years 2.0 release are
• full compliance to the specification (The current WS-Management specification is still not final)


• WS-Eventing (asynchronous indications, for alerting etc.)


• A binary interface to sfcb (to connect to cim providers without a cimom)


• better support for embedded devices


• Filtering (CQL, cimom query language; WQL, WS-Management query language, xpath, xml query language)

Mapping the IT Universe

The annual Management Developers Conference organized by the DMTF started yesterday with the University Day.

DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) is an industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives. Its mission is no less than Mapping the IT Universe by standardizing an object-oriented model (CIM) and related protocols (WBEM).

The conference was opened by a reception celebrating 15 years of DMTF and 10 years of CIM. Winston Bumpus gave a short overview on the history of the DMTF.

The DMTF was founded in 1992 as the Desktop Management Task Force, focussing on standards for managing desktop PCs. Two years later, the Desktop Management Interface (DMI) was published and quickly adopted. After releasing DMI 2.0 in August 1996, their mission was accomplished and the board considered closing the DMTF.

At that point, Patrick Thompson from Microsoft proposed to extend the management standardization beyond desktops and to cover the complete IT landscape. The original proposal already contained the key aspects and architectural components which are still valid today:

• HMMS (Hypermedia Management Schema) — CIM today


• HMOM (Hypermedia Object Manager) — CIMOM today


• HMMP (Hypermedia Management Protocol) — CIM/XML over HTTP today

Initially a gang of five, namely BMC, Compaq, Intel, Microsoft and Sun accepted the proposal and continued funding the DMTF. In a tour de force with biweekly meetings over a period of 6 months the DMTF was able to present the Common Information Model 1.0 (CIM) in April 1997. It only covered the object-oriented modelling without any transportation protocol. This was added another year later (August 1998) with the Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standard.

In 1999, the DMTF was renamed to Distributed Management Task Force, keeping the acronym (and all the advertising materials).

Today more than 200 companies with over 4000 participants contribute to the ongoing standardization efforts. In the 'Industry Showcase' and 'Interop Lab' rooms of the Conference, a wide variety of devices, tools and applications based on CIM are shown.

With the broad acception of Web Services for Management (WS-Management) true interoperable systems management now becomes a reality. Implementation range from baseboard management controllers (see here for drivers) and embedded devices to Open Source stacks and Microsoft Windows.