Image Sprawl , and the new cure ..

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:24:43 +0000

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 :)

Xen Summits

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:52:01 +0000

Stephen , good thing you think about touring to Europe again for the Xen Summit.

Colocating with LinuxTag or LinuxKongress would really be a good idea, but make
sure to organize it the day before or after , not during the congress :)
On the other hand .. you wrote LinuxKongress, but you probably meant Linuxconf.eu didn't you ?

But then again Cambridge is also a lovely place for a summit ;)

Summer of 2003 again

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:31:01 +0000

Weird.. I feel like the summer of 2003 again .. working on a conference paper with a deadline almost impossible to reach...

Worked out fine back then ..let's hope it works out fine now also..

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - LinuxKongress

Image Sprawl , and the new cure ..

Xen Summits

Summer of 2003 again