Fred’s Notes

I’ve been working as a Technical Support Engineer for VMware since July 2009 and my work life is virtualization, storage and solving stuff everyday. I felt the need to document information and new things that I’m learning, so instead of using a notepad, why not put it on a blog? Let’s get virtual with All Things Virtual. Cheers.

My day was saved by this piece of software: pen (tcp load balancer). My kudos to the author. Long live good software (and opensource, too). It’s simple and it works.

Wow, exciting news today. Rackspace bought both Slicehost and JungleDisk. These are two excellent startups with great products that I liked a lot. This will have implications on Mosso, the Cloud offering of Rackspace? On the storage front, I would like to know how Rackspace will support future Mosso storage offers, besides Amazon’s S3. Very interesting and I think it’s a great move from Rackspace.

Do you think your hardware is bullet-proof ? Well, think again.

After dropping the support of Xen for RHEL (well, not really, they will still support it, but not as passionate as it was in the past), RedHat buys Qumranet (KVM) and becomes a new player on the virtualization market, specially with Virtual Desktops (watch SPICE). As a sidenote, I’m a very big fan of KVM. And RedHat also. KVM is also part of the stock kernel since 2.6.20 (as a module). If there were some doubts about the future of KVM, well, think again.

Everything you have to know about EBS is written here.

Meet CherryPal:

The CherryPal™ C100 desktop is about the size of a paperback book, but has the performance you would expect from a full-size desktop computer. Freescale’s fast triple-core mobileGT processor delivers exceptional multimedia performance and feature-rich user interfaces, while only consuming as much power as a clock radio. CherryPal uses 80 percent fewer components than a traditional PC, and because it has no moving parts, it operates without making a sound and will last 10 years or more.

You pay $249 for a small black box with external VGA, 2 USB ports, 256M ram, 4G NAND, 400 Mhz processor and internal wifi card. This thing will consume about 2 watts of energy (they say). This acts as a thin client, as you run all of your application on your virtual desktop, in the cloud. And you get 50 Gb of free storage. Hope it’s not 100% based on S3 :-). And they let you run Opensource applications like OpenOffice, IM, mail, etc. But they say they have iTunes also.

If you have a Intel Mac and you are in the need for virtualization, along with Parallels and VMware Fusion you have now a 3rd option: Sun XVM Virtualbox. And it’s free. Check it out. It looks good on the demo. From what I’ve seen, there’s no DirectX support for now (no hardcore games, sorry) and it will not work with Bootcamp. Have to try this and compare it with VMware Fusion. I would really like to see a real-world benchmark on Virtualbox vs Parallels vs Fusion.

Coming this year, Amazon EC2 will have persistent storage. Today the ‘disk’ per instance is ephemeral. If the instance gets a reboot or is shuted down, you lost all the information you had on that disk. So, you couldn’t use things like relational databases on EC2 without using some sort of S3 hack and play with MySQL replication plus the geographical feature of EC2. Basically you make incremental backups of the database to S3 every 10m, run a full backup once per day and launch another MySQL instance on a separate datacenter for mirroring. Now, you’ll have the possibility to buy a volume from 1G to 1T, mount it on your EC2 instance and there you go. Oh, btw, you have snapshots, too. Quoting Jeff Barr: 

In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you’d like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.You will also be able to perform “snapshot” backups of your volumes to Amazon S3. You can use these snapshots to create new volumes or to roll back your stored data to an earlier point in time.    

For now, a few lucky bastards are on the beta tests. They expect to open it to a wider audience later this year. World domination for Amazon? How can you compete in vm hosting business or cloud computing? Let’s have a look a the pricing numbers. Can’t wait.

There’s a new kid on the block in virtualization software, Oracle VM. I don’t know of the current prices (being Oracle, cheap will be not) or the technology behind it, but it seems to me that it will try to compete to VMware ESX or even XEN. From the news:

Oracle today announced Oracle VM, server virtualization software which supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Oracle VM offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization that is up to three times more efficient than existing products from other vendors. Key Oracle products, including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, are certified with Oracle VM. Backed by Oracle’s world-class support organization, customers have a single point of support for their entire virtualization environments, including Linux operating system and Oracle products.

Simplified installation — with single install, patching and upgrading for both Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Faster deployment — through pre-configured Virtual Machine images of Oracle Database and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Greater efficiencies — three times more efficient than other server virtualization products.
Linux and Windows support — support for Linux and Windows guest operating systems including: Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5; Windows 2003, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP (on HV capable hardware).

Update: Actually, it’s a nice GUI on top of Xen Hypervisor and it will be available for download at Oracle’s site starting tomorrow. Oh well.

If you have a Mac and you’re into virtualization, you must see this presentation on Google Tech Talks, made by Ben Gertzfield, the lead developer of Intel Mac virtualization at VMware. The title is exactly what you’ll expect, a true inside view of VMware Fusion. Oh, and by the way, Ben rockz.

Note: I’m a *very* happy user of VMware Fusion.