Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

When I tell people that the concept of copying VM's around as frequently done in the VMWare world is one of the most stupid ideas on this planet, I get the weirdest looks.

In my world it is, I want my infrastructure to be reproducible , I want to be able to throw any machine in my infrastructure out of the 10th floor of a building and be up and running again in no time. If I spread a bunch of VM copies around who knows what kind of life they start leading. Some will get upgrades, some won't ..
If I get an image from someone, how did he get there ? Nobody knows ..

To me Image Sprawl is more than not being able to to manage your Virtual Machines, it also matters for physical machines that are being deployed using a golden image.

Now rewind back about 4 something years.. back then I wrote a paper for LinuxKongress titled Automating Xen Virtual Machine Deployment which described a Hybrid way of Bootstrapping an infrastructure.
Quicly summarized, you use the benefits of images to quickly deploy a minimal image which
Luke today calls a Stem Cell then go on using centralized package management and a configuration management tool to keep them up to par. There are 2 things that changed in between,
we replaced CFEngine with Puppet , and the fact that today some people do care a bit more about the infrastructure side of the web, guess we have to thank Amazon and the Cloud Hype for that

But fundamentally .. not that much changed :)

This was not a CloudCamp !

Don't get me wrong, it was a great event and I met lots of interesting people , but it was not a *camp.
The idea was there to have an unconference after the formal sessions, but the formal sessions ran out and there was no time because of food and bar duties.

The event was a mixture of regular Belgian Campers, Virtualization geeks, Open Source folks , obviously there were a couple of "lost" americans , and the crowd from up North :)

The location was weird to say the least, what if the boat hat floated off on the river :)

It's obvious the world doesn't have a fixed definition for "Cloud Computing" yet , Tarry really made a safe bet by cut and pasting the definition from WikiPedia but the thing that really worried me was that when Raph asked if the audience could define Open Source they couldn't either.

Given the audience it's really hard to understand why they couldn't explain what Open Source is .. they should be able to. As the biggest chunk of Cloud Infrastructure is based on Open Source , the audience of a CloudCamp should be able to define Open Source, but then again there was quite a number of suits around that weren't expected to understand what it is all about :)

The fact is that a the cloud today still is a bit of undefined, different marketeers are grabbing the opportunity to rebrand their longtime existing product as fresh and hot cloud.

The interesting part of the Cloud to me is the mix of Virtualization, Scalability, Automation , Large Scale Deployment , playing the puppetmaster, and High Availability ..

It's stuff I have been doing for ages , it's the stuff this blog has been covering since the beginning ... but I don't plan on renaming my blog .. as afterall the whole cloud issue is just a Freaking DNS Problem

Pictures of the event are here

or timebound ? or don't you have any load on your DB at all ?

I personally don't see many reasons to virtualize your database, apart from the , we plan to start small and scale out, or the we need it now and we don't have the hardware yet , putting your database on a virtual platform where you have to share resources with other virtual machines doesn't really sound like a tempting proposition to me. Small, almost idle databases , maybe. But enterprise production level databases no thnx.

Sheeri Cabral also mentions the above reasons .. and there also .. Enterprise Production use isn't listed.

Databases typically require a good amount of memory , and steady disk access.
So if you are in a production environment with a fairly loaded database, would you want a 4Gb machine with full direct memory access, Or 3.5Gb of virtual memory that can be ballooned to 3 if underused. My pick is at the 4Gb real memory.

The original article at Sun argues the use of Virtual Harddisk to move around workloads between different servers or even Virtualization platforms. But it fails to describe the guaranteed performance penalty of not using raw disks but a filesystem on top of a loopback device. How many layers do you want before actually write to the disks. Good practice in a virtual environment is to dedicate full disks or LVM parts to the virtual machine hence lowering the overhead, but most (default) setups do the opposite.

And don't get me started about the myth of using virtualization for high-availability :)

Now can somebody please remove all the clueless marketing people from planetmysql.org , thnx. (they can be identified with by a blogs.sun.com source and posts that mainly talk about Sun products including only a slight hint to MySQL)

(PS. What's a Market Development Engineer's job description anyhow ? , that's just a different name for Marketing Assistant right ?)

Alan just coined WholeSale HA. The idea of rebooting a whole virtual machine rather than just failing over 1 service.

He wants to have the best of both worlds in 1 framework, he however doesn't specify what parts he likes from the WholeSale HA setup

Yes you want to use it coupled with hardware predictive failure analysis tools. In order to achieve Higher Availabilty, but I don't think the WholeSale HA part is real HA.

WholeSale HA isn't going to be fast enough for most of the business critical environments.
You simply cannot afford to reboot or even boot a full machine and the related downtime that brings for your service.

So yes a best effort combination, but with a strong focus on the application state would be preferred. WholeSale is a good start .. but it's definitely not where you want to stop.

I've just placed the presentation I gave both yesterday at the Open Source Days in Copenhagen , and last week in Zurich at the Open Expo , about Open Source Virtualization online.
The presentation is based on a series of articles I wrote earlier this year for Virtualization.com

You can download it here

The presentation covers a fairly complete overview of what's around in Open Source Virtualization tools and and their Management frameworks.

I will be giving the same presentation again at the end of the month at T-Dose in Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Zennoss has announced the entries for their zenpack contest . What strikes me is that there is not a single entry that plans on monitoring Xen, KVM, VirtualBox or any of the other Open Source virtualization technologies .. Not in the contest entries and not in the existing community packs .

This sounds like a big opportunity to me :)

Over at OReilly GMT I listed lots of upcoming European conferences .. lots of interresting ones but I can't go to all of them .. well not till someone starts paying me for that ;)

So I won't go to Drupalcon , and Tom will be presenting at the Nagios Conference

I will however be talking about Open Source Virtualization at OpenExpo in Zurich , and one week later at OpenDays in Copenhagen. The talk will be based on my series of Articles on the History and Future of Open Source virtualization earlier this year at Virtualization.com

Given that those 2 conferences are week after week and LinuxKongress Hamburg being exactly a week later , this year will be the first since many that I'll have to miss LinuxKongress. I had a topic in mind, but time just didn't allow me.

T-Dose is also on my list and there is some talk about an upcoming CloudCamp in Berlin , but no final plans there yet.

My Conference schedule is growing again. In about 2 weeks I`ll be in Ottawa at the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

I`ll be giving 2 talks there, the first at the Virtualization Miniconference where I`ll be discussing the new openQRM 4 and it's new Drupal style plugin management.

And my second talk will be together with my collegue Tom and we'll be talking about Systems Monitoring We'll be looking at how you can keep an eye on your infrastructure with open source tools

So after 2 talks at the LinuxKonference in Germany a trip to Linux.conf.au I`ll finally be visiting OLS :) I've looked a the OLS schedule and it obviously looks very interesting.

In september I`ll be talking about the Open Source Virtualization landscape at Open Expo Switzerland in Zurich .

If you run into me don't hesitate to chat .. always interrested in meeting new people.

Yesterday I took part in an interesting conf call with different Virtualization Security Industry leaders and Analysts

I`ll be processing the confcall logs and publish them over at Virtualization.com

Hmm.. need to find one to go here