Posted by on October 28, 2008 under Uncategorized | 
UPDATE: Apparently, the Codeweavers website is getting hammered due to this free offer. Click the link below to connect DIRECTLY to the registration page. Once registered, you are locked in - but you only have until midnight on 10/28 to register.
Its true! Codeweavers is offering Crossover for Linux and Mac for free (including support) - but for today only. Check it out at Click Here to Register. Crossover is an application that allows certain Windows applications (including games) to run natively on Linux and Mac. I’ve already got my copy.
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Posted by on October 27, 2008 under Uncategorized |
As I mentioned to some of my peers at the Round Table, I think Microsoft will eventually dominate the Virtualization market, and quickly start taking big chunks of VMWare’s customers away. Here is some evidence: HyperV 2.0 Features Announced.
Now, if you know me, you know I am partial to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software - not necessarily free as in price), and Microsoft is not FOSS. I tell you that as a disclaimer, so you know I am not a Microsoft fan trying to sell you on HyperV. In IT, it’s a Microsoft world, so I have to study it, understand it, and use it. I have been working with Virtualization in production environments for about 5 years now, most recently testing the viability of ESX and HyperV for our production use.
To the uninitiated, it is easy to pick HyperV. I have already seen engineers, who would not otherwise consider virtualization, move to it ever since HyperV was made available as a part of the 2008 OS. It makes sense. With just a few simple clicks, suddenly you can run multiple OSes on your PC or server. Dead simple. It is also easy to use, and has some useful features already included. The management console, snapshots, and import/export tools are of great value, and I would argue that it’s Quick Migration (as opposed to VMWare’s VMMotion or KVM’s Live Migration) is practical and meets almost all requirements.
To the better informed, a closer look is needed, and that is what I have been doing for the past few weeks. I can tell you straight away that HyperV suspiciously looks like Xen… a lot (With Windows 2008 as Dom0). An interesting footnote: Microsoft’s longtime buddy Citrix purchased Xen Source last year. Theoretically, that purchase would allow MS to obtain a private license with Citrix to use Xen code outside the open source license under which it was developed, and under a different license. I can also tell you that side by side HyperV doesn’t match up as well with ESXi. Even with similarly configured guests with identical host hardware, the tests I performed showed that ESXi was plain faster (on a side note, KVM was faster than both). And the ESXi management features are impressive with the detail that you can manage your Guest VMs. ESXi does binary translation, whereas HyperV requires virtualization extensions. This means that ESXi will run on older hardware as well.
So if ESXi is technically better, than whats the deal with HyperV? For evidence, see the above referenced article. Microsoft will continue to work on HyperV, and will very quickly include all the features that the Enterprise requires (read that as all the features that VMWare has). On top of that, it is included in their OS (akin to how Internet Explorer took over), and costs almost nothing to install it. To the average IT person, this is a no-brain-er, and is a VERY easy to path to virtualization. I can tell you that when I first started Virtualization 5 years ago, if HyperV existed and was as easy to install (and as functional) as it is today, we would be all HyperV by now. That is saying a lot, coming from me. And the performance difference, while noticeable, wasn’t so great as to exclude HyperV from consideration.
I hope VMWare can come up with a good way to compete with this juggernaut. I think in time KVM will silently become the standard, especially in large production data centers, much like Apache and Linux are today. But for other corporate uses, VMWare is going to have to complete heavily with HyperV.
For now, for us, KVM is our standard VM platform, and we will start using ESXi to fill in some holes (especially with older equipment). By comparison, HyperV just doesn’t meet our requirements… yet. But I have seen it already working well for others in production environments, and can only guess at what the future holds.
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Posted by bitbud on October 3, 2008 under Bitbud Blog |
SAN for ALL!
The paradigm has shifted (some time ago), and centralized storage is now a requirement for any organization to most efficiently run their infrastructure. The ability to pool your storage resources, especially as data storage requirements explode, is invaluable. No longer being tied to how many hard drives a single server can hold, but instead having expandable storage easily accessible via a network. Today, iSCSI is the standard bearer (sorry FC, AoE), and many organizations see the need for implementing it. However, the most common roadblock to implementing a SAN…
$$$ (cost)
There are other impediments, but cost is easily the biggest. It almost hurts to read about such great technology, to work with it in the business world every day, but not be able to afford it for your church. The features and the capabilities that are gained from a well implemented SAN add so much value to IT, they cannot be ignored. When IT works more efficiently, that helps them fulfill their role to support the ministries of the Church, which in the end is all that matters.
The cost factor is especially true for a small church (like mine), where there is no IT budget, where the infrastructure is built almost exclusively on donated, older computers. In those situations, the necessity to be good stewards of limited resources is highlighted. For a church of any size good stewardship is important, but for a church with no financial resources to contribute to the cause, it seems as there is no opportunity. But that isn’t the case…
This is for those church’s who see the need for the technology, and have the time, but almost no resources to devote to the effort. This is also for those that see the need, have the time, and the resources, but want to save some money, and gain a greater level of understanding, experience, and flexibility - the typical DIY-er. You too can have a SAN, with every feature available to you in commercial SANs, for little to no cost. The only thing you sacrifice is performance - at least for the SAN that costs nothing. However performance can be improved to be on par with commercial equivalents for minimal amount of cost.
I’m going to break this down into several posts covering multiple options for configuration, features, costs, and performance. Let me start with an example:
At my church, I recently implemented a new SAN for $476, using two donated PCs. You could get by for less $$ if your PCs already have SATA hard disks of the capacity you want, but these were oooolllllddddd computers, so some minor upgrades were needed:
- 4 * 500GB SATA II drives @ $80/ each
- 2 * SATA II 4 port @ $18/ each
- 4 * Intel Gigabit PCI@ $40/ each
So - what did we get for all this?
- approximately 1/2 TB of disk space
- RAID 1 (mirror)
- FT/ HA (fault tolerant/ high availability)
- Dynamic resize
- Snapshot
- multi protocol (we use NFS and iSCSI, you could also use AOE, CIFS, etc)
- encryption
- cuts your grass
- makes your coffee
- …i might have forgotten something
How does it work? The two PCs are each running 2 500GB drive in a RAID 1. They are also connected to each other in a network RAID1. Using HA, they are providing network services(NFS, iSCSI) in a primary/secondary fashion. Dynamic resize and snapshots are provided via LVM, for the NFS shares I used XFS.
The FT/HA adds a bit more complexity, and may be overkill for many. The rest of the features though are important. An alternative to HA would be to simply use the 2nd PC as a backup system of the first, using simple replication.
These system were put in place to support the virtual servers that will be running all the back end systems.
In the next post I’ll go into the details of installing and configuring iSCSI on Ubuntu.
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