USENIX Update

Todd Deshane and Patrick F. Wilbur are co-authors of the book “Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization” and at LISA’10 they will teach the class “Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor”. I had a chat with them and talked about their book, their class and how they updated their material for the cloud computing age.

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Marius Ducea: Todd, Patrick, why don’t we start by having both of you quickly introduce yourselves to our readers?
Todd Deshane: Sure. I’m a recent graduate from Clarkson University, where I got a Ph.D in Engineering Science; I’ve been a member of xen.org community for quite sometime, basically ever since it came out.
Patrick Wilbur: I’m a graduate student, Ph.D in Computer Science at Clarkson University, I’ve been involved with Xen for a couple of years, and this is related to the research that I’ve been doing at the university, and with Todd we are both co-authors of the book “Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization”.

MD: You mentioned your book; I’m curious how did you guys end up writing a book? Can you talk about your experience in doing that?
TD: Since we were involved with Xen in our research and published a paper right after Xen came out, the publishing company thought that we were the best ones to write this book external to the group at Cambridge that developed Xen, so they contacted our advisor Jeanna Matthews and a group of people from our lab were interested to work on this and write the book. This is how it all started.

MD:There are seven co-authors to your book; how did you collaborate with so many people working on this?
TD: It is a lot of work to write a book. We spent a lot of time working on this, and split the chapters based on the expertise each one of us had in different areas. Of course later we had to get together and read each others chapters and make it a uniform book. This was challenging as there was quite a large group of people involved.
PW: As Todd mentioned, it was definitely not easy, but it was really a good experience, working with a great group of people.

MD: You have a training class this year at LISA “Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor”; can you briefly tell us what will this cover; also how is it different from your previous trainings at LISA?
TD: Me and Patrick presented first this material at USENIX’08, and this was at that time heavily based on the book, because the book itself is a hands-on guide for new users, for people that don’t have experience with Xen and we would basically take you from zero to running virtualization in your datacenter. This year we updated the content to the current times and extended it to the cloud technologies where people are using virtualization to run their public and private clouds, and many times a hybrid mode between them. Also we’ve added the Xen Cloud Platform that is also new; we’re still going from zero to virtualization, but this time we are going from zero to the cloud.
PW: Also, I would like to add that one of the neat things of this version of our class will bring in new technologies like the cloud computing, and this is relevant even for system administrators that have only a few machines (even if they don’t administer a cloud it is very valuable to understand it as consumers) but also for the enterprise administrators that use virtualization a lot even if they don’t use the term cloud, but will find platforms like Xen Cloud Platform very interesting.

MD: You guys also have a BOF: “Open Source and Open Standards-based Cloud Computing”. Can you talk about that a little?
TD: What is great about the BOF is that it will be an extension of our tutorial. This means that if you were in our session you will be in the right spot; if you haven’t, still you’re in a great spot because we are going to cover the basics for the Xen Cloud Platform again to make sure everyone is on the same page. Also we are going to have Ben Pfaff from Nicira Networks and he’s going to talk about Open vSwitch and what they are doing to take network virtualization to the next level; Jason Faulkner from Rackspace will talk about OpenStack and their efforts to create an open standards for cloud computing.

MD:You mentioned OpenStack; another similar project would be Eucalyptus. Such abstractions are built on top of the virtualization layer and hide many things to the administrator; is it still relevant to have a basic Xen understanding and knowledge?
TD: The main reason why we started teaching about Xen it was because it was difficult to setup and use, it wasn’t polished, it wasn’t quite user friendly; it was not the product it is today. Nowadays people spend less time getting it to work, and the focus is on different levels of the stack and using them, and we’ve updated our tutorial to take this into consideration. We still teach you all the things you need in case you have to debug it.

MD: We’ve seen a lot of traction related to KVM; many distros have switched to KVM instead of Xen. Why do you think that happened?
TD: The basic reason why KVM got popular quickly is because it is a simple Linux virtualization system that is integrated into the kernel itself. It relies on Linux and QEMU and it is not a stand-alone hypervisor. The reason why many Linux distributions currently have KVM support and not necessarily Xen support is that KVM is fully integrated in the mainline kernel (it comes with the Linux kernel). Xen domain0 support (Linux as the Xen management domain is in progress), but Xen (the hypervisor) is not intended to be included in Linux, but is a stand-alone hypervisor, which allows for various management domains to run on top of it (for example, Linux, Solaris, BSD). Linux distributions will (and many already are) starting to add Xen support back into the their standard distributions.

MD: You guys will be busy with a class and a BOF; I’m curious if you come to LISA just for teaching those, or if you stay around for other talks?
PW: I will be there for the whole week and will attend several different sessions. Actually I will be sticking around after LISA also for CHIMIT 2010, that will be located in the same area as this is a good opportunity to attend both conferences.
TD: Unfortunately myself, I will not be able to stay all the week, but I would have liked to been able to attend some of the many great talks, but I will not be able to do it this year.

MD: What other interesting things are you working on these days?
TD: I’m doing some interesting work these days in a consulting project, where we are taking their Xen deployment more into the cloud dynamic type of environment: hadoop clustering, Xen Cloud Platform, OpenStack, puppet are things that we are working on, setting up hybrid cloud deployments with public clouds like amazon, rackspace, and private clouds. I’m also working on a very interesting research project where we are trying to combine an organization’s mission space with cyber space. Finally, I’ve been spending more time helping the xen.org community and I will be taking on the role of Technology Evangelist for Citrix/Xen.org. We are also looking to hire a new community manager for xen.org.
PW: I’m looking into the usable security space, where human computer interaction meets security and actually I’m working with virtualization to segregate users applications into different privilege spaces and isolate various applications. Related to this I’m also hosting another BOF at the end of the week on Thursday “Human-Computer Interaction: Experiences and Difficulties in IT Management, Security, and Privacy” that should be interesting to meet and exchange ideas with different people in the usable security space.

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I want to thank Todd and Patrick very much for their time. You can register for their class on Sunday at LISA’10 in San Jose, California.

Registration for LISA ‘10 is still open at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/

Anyone who has attended LISA in the past few years is undoubtedly familiar with Tom Limoncelli.  Tom’s not just a LISA fixture, he’s also a widely-respected author of two books (Time Management for System Administrators and The Practice of System and Network Administration) and a contributor to the Everything Sysadmin blog.  Over the weekend, he sat down with me for a few minutes to share his thoughts about LISA ’10.

Ben Cotton: You are, quite truly, an expert on everything sysadmin.  How did you reach that status?

Tom Limoncelli:  I’m honored by the question but the name “EverythingSysadmin.com” comes from my co-author (Christine Hogan) and I trying to come up with a domain name that was related to our book, but wasn’t really long.  Since the book tried to touch on a little of everything, we came up with EverythingSysadmin.com.

BC:  So would you consider yourself a generalist or do you have a few fields that you feel you’re truly an expert in?

TL:  I do consider myself a generalist.  I think that’s because when I got started in system administration you had to be.  Now things are different.  Now people tend to specialize in storage, backups, networking, particular operating systems, and so on.  Remember that The Practice of System and Network Administration has three authors; we only know “everything” when all three of us put our brains together.  I guess you’d have to say that my specialty is in always knowing someone that can find an answer for me.

BC:  That’s an excellent lesson.  You’re scheduled to conduct several training sessions on time management during LISA ’10.  What would you say is the biggest lesson to be learned from them?

TL: The biggest lesson is that humans are bad at time management, and that’s OK.  The great thing about being human is that we can build tools that let us overcome our problems.  The class that I teach has very little theory. It’s mostly a list of techniques people can use to solve specific problems. Use the ones you like, ignore the rest.  The one that most people end up using is finding a good way to manage their to-do list.

BC: If someone’s taken your time management training before, what do you have new for them this year?

TL: I have an entirely new class this year.  It’s a “part 2″ kind of thing, though you don’t have to have taken part 1 to take it.  In the morning I’ll be teaching “Time Management for System Administrators” which is basically the same half-day class I usually teach.  The afternoon, however, is all new.  It is “Time Management: Team Efficiency”.

The thing about Teams is that there are certain things you do that waste time for everyone else.  You might not even realize it.  In this class, I’m going to cover a number of techniques for eliminating those things.  You save time for others, they save time for you.  It’s like “time management karma”.  What goes around comes around.  For example, meetings are often a terrible waste of time.  I’ll talk about some red flags to help you figure out which meetings to skip, and if you run meetings you can figure out if you are creating these red flags.  If you can’t fix a badly run meeting, I have some tips on how to negotiate so that you don’t have to attend. For example, why send your entire team to someone else’s boring meeting?  Send one person to take notes and report back to your team.  If you can’t get out of a meeting, I have techniques for avoiding them. For example, when you enter the room tell the facilitator, “I have a conflict for the second half of the meeting.  Can my agenda items be first on the list?” After your item is covered, stand up and leave.  It isn’t unethical or dishonest: the “conflict” you had was your urgent need to escape badly run meetings.

BC: You’ve been a regular fixture at  LISA.  What keeps you coming back?

TL: LISA is like telescope that lets me see into the future.  Every year there are presentations that describe things that the majority of all system administrators won’t be exposed to for 2-3 years.  When I come back to work I have more of a “big picture” than my coworkers that didn’t attend.  For example, it was at LISA that I first heard of CFEngine, Puppet and other “Configuration Management” (CM) tools.  Lately people talk CM as if it was new.  It’s certainly much more popular now, but people that have been attending LISA conferences have been benefiting from CM tools for more than a decade.

90% of what is interesting in system administration relates to scaling: More machines, more RAM, more storage, more speed, more web hits.  Many years ago there was a presentation by a web site that was managing 1 million web hits per day. At the time this was huge achievement.  People that saw that presentation were in a great position a few years later when all big sites scaled to be that big.

BC: What are the big scaling challenges?

TL: Everything we used to know is about to change because of SSD.  Everything I know about designing and scaling systems is based on the fact that CPU caches are about 10x faster than RAM, which is 10x faster than disk, which is about 10x faster than networks.  Over the years this has been basically true: Even as RAM got faster, so did disk.  SSD is about to change that.  The price curve of SSD makes it pretty easy to predict that we’re not going to be using spinning magnetic disks to store data soon.  All the old assumptions are going away.  At the same time, CPUs with 16+ and soon 100+ cores make other assumptions change.  Things get worse in some ways.  These are the hot topics that you hear about at a conference like LISA.

Just the other day a very smart coworker said something to me that implied that with the new generation of 100+ core machines we could “just run more processes” and not have to change the way we design things.  I was floored.  That’s like saying, “Basketball players seem to be able to jump higher every year.  Why can’t we jump to the moon?”

BC: As an avid basketball fan, I find that idea intriguing.   It’s obvious attending LISA can be very beneficial. As an experienced attendee, what advice do you have for people who may be going to their first LISA conference?

TL: First: Talk to random people.  When you are on line, introduce yourself to the people next to you.  A big chunk of the learning opportunity is from talking with fellow attendees.  Sysadmins are often introverts, so it is a bit difficult.  Someone once told me that it’s always ok to start a conversation with a stranger by sticking out your hand and saying, “Hi!  My name is Joe.” (if your name is Joe).  Unlike some conferences where the speakers are corralled into a “green room” and never talk with attendees, at Usenix conferences you can talk to anyone.  At my first Usenix experiences I met Dennis Ritchie, one of the inventors of Unix.

Second: plan your days.  There are activities from 9am until midnight every day.  Read the schedule beforehand and make a grid of what you want to attend.  Saturday night is a session for “first timers” which is a great way to get an overview of the conference.  During the day there are usually 3-4 things going on at any time.  At night there is an entire schedule community-driven events.  You don’t want to be picking what to do next at the end of each session.  Also, plan some down-time.  Take breaks. Get plenty of fluids.  It is a full week.

BC: Any other thoughts you’d like to share?

TL: There’s also a lot of great security talks, and an entire track of Q&A sessions with experts answering questions about everything from storage to disaster recovery to consulting.  The last thing I’d like to say is, “see you there!”

Registration for LISA ’10 is still open at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/.  You can find Tom’s training courses on the training page.  He’ll also be presenting two technical sessions.

Rudi van Drunen is the LISA’10 program chair, and it was my pleasure to interview him for the USENIX Blog readers, and to try to understand what challenges the organizers are facing when putting on such a huge event as LISA’10.

Marius Ducea: Rudi, could you please introduce yourself, and give us some details on your background, and how you got involved with LISA?
Rudi van Drunen: Sure. I’m the CTO of Competa IT, a medium size consulting company here in Netherlands, where we design, implement and maintain large IT infrastructures. I’m also the owner of my small consulting company: Xlexit Technology. As for my background, originally I was a hardware guy, but during university I become interested in Unix and open source. My first LISA was in 1998, and after that I got more and more involved with USENIX, doing invited tech talks, presenting and teaching, and in general trying to help with anything I could. This year I’ve been given the biggest challenge so far in being the program chair for LISA’10.

MD: Can you explain some of the responsibilities of the program chair?
RvD: As program chair you are the head of the program committee; the program chair builds the program, picks the keynotes and with its committee selects the papers that are going to be presented at the conference. USENIX staff does all the hard work to actually run the conference, and this is great, as it lets the program chair focus on building the program. Of course you get all the help and support from USENIX staff with any logistics you might need.

MD: LISA is a huge conference. Can you share with us some of the challenges the organizers have putting on such an event?
RvD: as I mentioned, USENIX staff do most of the work in setting up the conference. LISA being one of the largest conferences, normally 900+ attendees, here everything needs to be perfect; everything needs to be organized and in place. I would say that one of the biggest challenges the organizers have is finding the proper venue that can accommodate all the attendees, and setup the logistics needed for the conference. This is very complex, and it is far more than making a few phone calls . For example, we have 48 tutorials over the course of the conference, and this results in many rooms to be organized and prepared for the trainings. One other challenge is setting up a good wireless internet connection at the hotel for all the attendees. With so many people concentrated in a single place this is not always so simple.

MD: You mentioned that it is a challenge to find a good venue for such an event; I’m curious; how is the city hosting LISA chosen?
RvD: Well, there is some magic involved there. Of course there is the East of Mississippi, West of Mississippi rule: one year on the East, and the other on the West; for example last year we had Baltimore for LISA, and now we have San Jose. When choosing a city we are looking at a place that has an active USENIX community. We would like to have as many people as possible from the local area come to the conference as this will be more economical for them, as they don’t have to travel or have hotel expenses. So it is important to have a large user base in the area, like we have in the Bay Area for example. Also it is important to find a good and economical venue for our attendees. I mean, there are definitely some great hotels in San Francisco, but they are so expensive, and we need to keep this in mind when choosing the venue to be as affordable as possible for everyone that we hope to have in the hotel. We would like to have everyone in the conference hotel because this creates great networking opportunities during every conference day, but also during the evenings, at the bar and so on.

MD: How does LISA’10 compare with past LISA conferences? bigger? better?
RvD: Of course we don’t have yet a number on the attendees, but I hope that we can at least top Baltimore. Actually, I hope we are going to do much better this year now that economy is picking up a little. Maybe there is more room for companies sending their staff for professional training at LISA. We have a large number of tutorials and workshops and also very interesting tech sessions.

MD: Can you please explain what is the difference between a workshop and a tutorial?
RvD: Sure. A tutorial is like a vendor independent course; it is half day or full day, mostly one way traffic where the presenter explains its material to the attendees; while a workshop is far more interactive. You have more two way traffic and open discussions, where the presenter will normally have some slides just to guide the discussion.

MD: What do you think attendees can expect to get from LISA?
RvD: Depends on what they are looking for… If you have a technical problem, you can probably find someone at LISA, not necessarily from the speakers, but from the other attendees in the lobby, that will be willing to help you fix the issue. If you are looking for technical training that is not vendor driven, you can definitely find this from gurus in the respective field. You can also connect with other system administrators and from this point of view LISA is a great opportunity also. The LISA vendor show has tech people that you can ask tech questions; no sales people, just support people ready to respond to your hardware or software questions. In the end in my experience you will always take home something you never thought, after a week with all the gurus in the field.

MD: Rudi, again thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview for our readers. I know you are very busy, and we appreciate it.
RvD: My pleasure.

As part of my Large Installation System Administration (LISA) ’10 Blog Team pre-conference duties, I interviewed Anne Dickison, the Director of Marketing for the USENIX Association. As Director of Marketing, much of Anne’s work involves promoting this large annual event. With less than two months left until LISA ’10, Anne and her team have already been hard at work for several months, getting the word out and enlisting the aid of others (including the Blog Team). LISA ’10 work began shortly after LISA ’09 ended, with the Call for Papers. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to spread the word about large events.

The rise of social media has changed the lives of all marketers. Anne says she relies “heavily on social networking to get the word out.” With a small budget, “barter agreements and word-of-mouth” are invaluable to promoting LISA. Twitter and Facebook have shown themselves to be excellent tools for spreading LISA news, as well as giving attendees a chance to interact with each other before, during, and after the conference.

Last year’s introduction of the blog program was so beneficial that it has been expanded into a “full-fledged team”, and this year there’s a new feature in store. For the first time ever, LISA will have a UStream.tv chat and on-site interviews. Few details are available right now, but Anne said “I think it will be extremely helpful in showcasing the benefits of attending a LISA conference.”

There are many benefits for LISA attendees. A wide variety of technical sessions, training and vendor exhibits are scheduled, but perhaps the most beneficial events are more informal. Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and various activities provide opportunities to cultivate relationships that can be a source of personal and professional interactions long after the conference has wrapped up. Anne says “we try to make it as easy as possible for people to interact, [and] set up systems so that the discussions started at LISA can continue long after the conference, via mediums such as the sage-members mailing list or the Facebook page.”

With such a large amount of effort put into making LISA successful, the payoff is personal for Anne Dickison: “My favorite part of LISA marketing is hearing really positive feedback from a first-time attendee. It’s great to watch new people who’ve never heard of us discover how much fun they can have and information they can learn by attending the conference.” The uniqueness of LISA also allows more creativity than is sometimes permissible in traditional marketing. “It’s probably the most fun event we do,” Anne told me. “I have more leeway in doing fun things like the adventure theme of this year or the puzzle theme of ’05.”

Registration is still open at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/. Many discounts are available, including for hotel and airfare. Discounted is registration is also available to those who register online by October 18.

This post also appears on my own blog, http://blog.funnelfiasco.com.