Hybrid cloud wizards: CloudVelocity and Ravello Systems

CloudVelocity's One Hybrid Cloud

CloudVelocity's website offers two basic operations: watching and cloning. The company is able to do this because it has built a little tool that digs deeply into the operating system and siphons the performance statistics -- CPU load, as well as memory and bandwidth usage -- to CloudVelocity's servers. The graphs are similar to the basic results you get from the average monitoring program.

But CloudVelocity also builds a virtual machine that's an Amazon-based clone of your current machine with all the data, ready to go. It does this by copying all the files that make up your current instance, right down to the OS kernel, to an Amazon EBS volume. Then it creates a new AMI (Amazon Machine Image) with those files. The Dashboard tab lists every soldier in your clone army, while the Cloning tab lets you create a new copy in seconds.

The GUI makes it easy to specify which hosts will get new, public IP addresses -- just drag them to the "public" side of the firewall. Hosts on the "private" side of the firewall will keep their existing internal IPs.

The cloning process lets you duplicate multiple machines in one click. If you have a MySQL server, a MySQL mirror, three application servers filled with business logic, and a load balancer, you can group them together as one "application." One push of the clone button creates six new machines.

CloudVelocity automatically creates the Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and the necessary security groups based on the services in your application. If you want to change those security rules, you can do so directly through the CloudVelocity GUI.

Thereafter, if you like, CloudVelocity can keep your Amazon clones continuously updated with any changes to your on-premises machines (but not vice versa). You can also define subsets of machines and replicate/synchronize them as needed. CloudVelocity offers a fairly elaborate way to group together your virtual machine collection, and keep the files in Amazon EBS in sync with their on-premise counterparts.

Thus, CloudVelocity also offers a way to provide disaster recovery in the cloud. The company's literature suggests this can help with failures in both the cloud and local machines. You might want to keep the main servers in-house but have CloudVelocity's clone army ready to go in case your in-house machines fail. Or you might want the Amazon clones ready for action in case your Rackspace machines go offline. After all, CloudVelocity can clone machines on Rackspace as easily as those in your data center.

CloudVelocity's cloning tool is powerful, but it's not omniscient. It won't track changes in memory, so your clone won't be an exact replica. This probably isn't important because the software should be writing anything valuable to disk in any case.

CloudVelocity integrates with MySQL to synchronize database transactions to the cloud site, but if you have your own way to create live backups of your MySQL instance or use a different database, CloudVelocity can kick off your scripts and ship the backups as required.

CloudVelocity supports the major Linux distros, including Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Amazon. Windows is a work in progress. Of course, thanks to the magic of bitrot, my experience wasn't perfect. I tried cloning a CentOS 6.4 machine from Joyent only to have the machine lock up. Joyent uses a version of CentOS with a kernel that's been modified just enough to mess up everything. When I switched over to a Rackspace machine, it all went swimmingly.