1. Eucalyptus – is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces
2. SystemImager – automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment
3. Cobber – is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environment
4. LinMin – Unattended, Remote, Native Operating System Installation for Servers, Blades, PCs & Virtual Machines

Application Configuration

1. Puppet – rovides a means to describe IT infrastructure as policy, execute that policy to build services then audit and enforce ongoing changes to the policy
2. CfEngine
3. OpenQRM focuses on automatic, rapid- and appliance-based deployment, monitoring, high-availability, cloud computing

• Web based management – this beats having to Remote Desktop to the host operating system to manage virtual machines.
• Virtual guest OS can access 8 Gb RAM – assuming that your host is a 64bit OS (otherwise you are stuck with only 4Gb addressable memory).

Here’s a screenshot of the web-based management interface on VMWare Server 2.0. It prompts you to install an ActiveX control in order to view the server console. There used to be an annotation feature in 1.x server, so that you can write comments against a virtual machine. This useful feature seemed to have been dropped in 2.0.

The performance of the viewer is not as good as Remote Desktop, although it’s comparable to VNC. There is a full screen option, but it needs more work before final release. It messes around with the resolution of my second monitor. The folks over at 4sysops don’t think too highly of the new VMWare web-based user-interface, and I’m afraid I too concur. It simply takes a little too much screen estate, especially with the frameset in the web pages, plus the space used by the browser chrome. I hope they fix that before the 2.0 release proper.

P2V assistant is now free

The physical machine to virtual machine converter is now free. It’s known as the VM Converter, and is available for download free. I haven’t had the need to use this yet, but I’ll look to using it when I migrate off the laptop I’m writing this post on.

Review of the Scripting Interfaces on VMWare Server

The virtual server now supports VIX API 1.2. The documentation for the VIX API is here. I’ll post more after having a play around with it. The API itself is quite useful, as it permits automation of processes running in the guest. The following function names give an indication how what you can do with the API:

• CopyFileFromHostToGuest
• RunProgramInGuest
• OpenUrlInGuest

Ubuntu will not install properly from LiveCD (which is the default download) when the virtual hard disk is 2.0 Gb. Grub

With clustered hosting, every website is served by every box, using a fast SAN. This means that for shared-nothing applications like PHP, your website is able to take on bursts of traffic without everybody else on your box suffering from a “bad neighbour” effect. 10 years ago, one only has to worry about slashdotting. However, with social media on the rise, websites are just so much more susceptible to traffic surges.

Offerings:

• ElasticLive Xen + Amazon EC Clustered Hosting
• Amazon EC2 - strictly not managed hosting. This is really DIY
• LayeredTech Grid Layer
• Hosting Zoom Clustered Web Hosting CPanel (Actually it’s more like failover than grid)
• Concentric clustered hosting
• Netfirms
• Cartika Hosting Interesting – will dynamically move to dedicated server when there is a traffic burst
• DataReturn
• Mosso
• Media Temple has some solutions which support clustering for Ruby On Rails, which means processes have to be provisioned on boxes

Please leave a comment if you are aware of other hosters. Thanks.

Platforms: AppLogic Amazon EC2
Source: Netcraft – Price Competition in Grid Hosting

1. apt-get install samba
2. sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf
3. comment out

   invalid users = root

   … otherwise you can’t add machine account from a client computer

4. wins support = yes
5. security = user (i.e. no anonymous access)
6. domain logons = yes (otherwise it won’t be a domain controller)
7. domain master = yes (a primary domain controller)
8. preferred master = yes (master browser for netbios)
9. add user script = /usr/sbin/useradd -m %u
10. add machine script = /usr/sbin/useradd -s /bin/false -d /dev/null -g machines %u
11. uncomment [netlogon] section
12. uncomment [profiles] section

Troubleshooting

1. XP Explorer crashes twext.dll http://support.microsoft.com/kb/903234/
2. Samba 3 supports sign-and-seal. No need to tweak any registries to support Windows XP or Windows 2000.
3. smbclient is your friend in troubleshooting.
4. smbclient -U root //yourserver/sharename
5. smbclient -L yourserver
6. Terpstra’s Samba-3 by Example
7. Troubleshooting samba checklist, Troubleshooting and here. I wish someone would turn this into a script. It’ll save a lot of troubleshooting.

I had to use a colleagues desktop, running Linux with a Windows running in VMWare which then had a remote desktop connection to a server in the server-room upstairs. It was a tough exercise, because Gnome sidebars kept popping up whenever I hovered to close to the edge, and email messages from Evolution causes me to lose focus on my current window. I had to give up.

I’m not affliated with VMWare in any way. If you haven’t signed up for the VMWare e-mail newsletters, go do it now. It’s not spammy, and has plenty of meaty technical material.

The latest e-mail points to the VMWorld 2005 Conference Sessions. There are free audio downloads for you to listen on your MP3 player. Hint to VMWorld: Make a RSS Feed for the sessions.

If you think that CPU virtualization (AMD Pacifica and Intel Vanderpool Technology) will kill VMWare’s business, think again. The bar to virtualization is going to be lowered and will allow customers to focus on high availability, regulatory compliance (HIPAA, SOX), and clustering. Link

I’m listening to the one on Security Best Practices for VMWare. You should start at 8 minutes mark, because before that it’s general administration for the conference. Interesting: the virtual machine is locked from spoofing virtual MAC addresses, and is unable to sniff traffic from other virtual machines running off the same network card.

VMWare’s web site boasts of a case study where AXA saved $550k in hardware through virtualization. With savings like that, one cannot ignore virtualization, especially given that VMWare Server Beta (download) is now free. VMWare Player is still free, and this review aims to cover the differences between the Player and VMWare Server. There are some security issues that you should also be aware of.

Downloading

VMWare server is large. It is 140Mb compared to VMWare Player (40 Mb). The download is much bigger because it includes Server Management console, which can connect to VMs running on other hosts. It also includes sophisticated tools for creating virtual networks, which allow you to set up test environments which are isolated from the rest of your network. On top of it, the installation gives you scripting APIs so that you can manipulate your guest VMs in Perl or VBScript.

Installation

Installation was straightforward, although I’m not entirely pleased that the installer put two icons on my already cluttered desktop without asking. They have been promptly dispatched into the Recycle Bin. There was an option of installing additional management tools. Unfortunately it requires IIS to be installed. No go for me.

Security

Looking through the documentation, you can’t have VMWare player and VMWare server installed on the same machine. Make sure you install the beta on a firewalled machine. The beta ships with denial of service vulnerabilities in the linked OpenSSL libraries CAN-2004-0079, CAN-2004-0112, and CAN-2004-0081.

VMWare Server Console

The most visible difference of Server as opposed to Player is in the VMWare Server Console (see screenshot).

As can be inferred from the Server moniker, the product is intended for hosting several instances of VMs. You can create new VM images with VMware Server, unlike VMware Player, where one has to resort to using QEmu to set up a basic virtual disk.

Note the Switch Host option on the console, which allows you to connect to remote VMWare Servers to manage VMs running on that machine.

A less visible extra that the Server installation included is COM interfaces for managing the VMs. Running up VB6 shows up five new type libraries. I will cover these later:

1. vmappsdk 6.0 vmappsdk.dll (VMWare Server directory)
2. vmdbCOM 6.0 vmdbCOM.dll (VMWare Server directory)
3. vmserverdWin32 1.0 vmserverdWin32.exe (VMWare Server directory)
4. VMware net 1.0 vmnetbridge.dll (Windows\System)
5. VMware VmCOM 1.0 (VMware VmCOM Scripting API)

The technical documentation for VMware Server beta is incomplete, but the website advises that one "can use the documentation for VMware GSX Server as a guide", so I guess that VMware Server is a new release of GSX server.

Installing a new OS

P2V Assistant, a tool used to rehost legacy systems in a virtual environment is not free. Given that installing a new operating system is as exciting as visiting a family dentist, I decided to run a prebuilt machine from one of the many on the Virtual Machine Center. I wish Microsoft could make it easier to install their OSes (Note to self: check out Unattended Window Installation).

Luckily, Debian server-based software downloaded quickly (180 Mb for an OpenACS image, with PostgreSQL installed and configured. What can I say? Sweet).

Running as a service

VMWare Player is not useful for running a production server, because the GuestOS is running as a foreground application. When the current user logs out, the GuestOS is shut down as well. VMWare Server automatically alerts the user that the Guest OS will be shutdown when user logs out, and offers to run the VM as a service instead.

Scripting interface

This section is more of interest to developers. Feel free to skip to the next section.

Unfortunately, the VMWare Server beta did not included any documentation on the scripting APIs. The VMWare Scripting API documentation is available on the web (1.2Mb PDF).

There is a sample VB program with source, installed on

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VmCOM Scripting API\MiniMUI

Looking through the sample and the class library, the interface is pretty basic.

set vm = new VmCtl
set cred = new VmConnectParams
cred.hostname = "localhost"
cred.username = "myuser"
cred.password = "pw"
vm.Connect cred, "my_vm_name"
vm.Start
vm.Suspend
vm.Stop
vm.Reset
vm.Heartbeat ' Interesting !

There are also a few crude properties and methods to interact with the prompts such as PendingQuestion and AnswerQuestion. Not a real problem, but could have been a bit cleaner though.

The VMServer daemon type library – vmserverdWin32

I was hoping to get something meaty from this interface. Using the VB Object Browser, I observed that

vmserverdWin32

didn’t expose any public classes or methods. Shucks. I guess the server itself wasn’t meant to be scripted directly.

Getting to know VMWare better

If you are interested in deployment considerations for VMWare, I have catalogued a few useful resources from the VMWare site.