Somewhere out there!

I just install the 3.2-beta of XenEnterprise by PXE. It was a faultless, follow the instructions process.  It is even possible to do an unattended installed. Even though XenEnterprise is a commercial product it has a certain linux-like quality which I find fits my preferred way of doing things.

Technorati Tags: xen

Couple useful articles on running windows with an existing install.

A useful looking appliance: Ultimate Deployment Appliance

The Ultimate Deployment Appliance will help you deploy your servers or workstations. The goal of the project is to be able to fully deploy a computer by booting to PXE and choosing the prepared operating system template. Of course this is already possible, but as I discovered, it takes a lot of time to setup a service like this. This appliance will do it for you. Windows, Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse) and Solaris X86 are supported.

From rtfm.

Early drafts avaliable online.

This has been sitting my drafts for a while. Might be useful.

I’ve collected a few interesting pages in providing remote booting with Vmware and Xen guests.

Using AoE and Etherboot. This is still work in progress.

http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/contrib/vantuyl/aoeboot.html

HOWTO: AOE in domU and boot from it. http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2006-07/msg00595.html

My target environment is XEN, and the relevent parameters to be changed are:

ramdisk = "/boot/img.aoe"
root = "/dev/etherd/e9.0 ro"

(or whatever your aoe target happens to be… I think that was the vblade
default example).

http://www.emboot.com/products_winboot_i_FAQ.htm#q6

Can I PXE boot to an iSCSI target from within a virtual machine from VMware or Microsoft?

Yes, you can use winBoot/i to network boot VMware and Microsoft virtual machines from an iSCSI target. HBA-equipped systems hosting virtual machines generally do not allow sharing (or virtualization) of the HBA-capability within the vm environment. We recommend using our Managed Boot Agent on Disk (MBAoD) for VMs to PXE-enable the virtual NIC within the virtual machine.

http://www.emboot.com/VMware_howto.html

A quick run on the Solaris method (Brandz) for running Linux. You can also do this with Solaris as a xen dom0.

Personally, I’ll stick to plain Solaris zones. I’m over the worst of the Solaris learning curve. I’m looking at Solaris for servers and most of the apps I want to run are open source. It’s a lot less hassle to build from source (or use blastwave) than to maintain Yet Another OS Instance just to run the same apps against glibc.

Zones gives you multiple environments without the hassle of multiple OSes to maintain, which most virtualization solutions seem to overlook. In addition, Solaris resource management is very fine grained inside a zone (per-project limits can co-exist with per-zone limits). I can’t say the same for other OSes I’ve tried. This helps to minimize the number of zones you need.

Haven’t got to this point in my Solaris experience yet, its a heavy learning curve. Especially without something decent like Running Linux. Work in progress as I say.

Some tips for using VMware server in production.

Technorati Tags: vmware, tips

KVM was announced a few months ago, it’s already in the Linux kernel and now has live migration:

Techworld.com – OS and Servers Insight – Linux-kernel virtualisation — finally on the fast track:

On the other hand, KVM appears to be on the fast path. This project first surfaced in October 2006; it found its way into the 2.6.20 kernel a few months later. On 25 February, KVM 15 was announced. This release has an interesting new feature: live migration. The speed with which the KVM developers have been able to add relatively advanced features is impressive; equally impressive is just how simple the code that implements live migration is.

Technorati Tags:   kvm, linux, virtualisation

This graphic is very interesting.

‘Virtualization’ Is Pumping Up Servers
There was a surprising slowdown in unit sales of x86 servers in the fourth quarter, according to two prominent research firms, Gartner Inc. and IDC. For example, IDC found that sales grew just 1.1% to 1.85 million units, compared with 8.8% growth in the third quarter. That is the worst performance for the market segment since the dot-com bust, and IDC analyst Matt Eastwood lays the blame largely on virtualization.

Technorati Tags: xen, virtualisation, hardware

I was trying to find out how to prevent users for accessing the VMware tools in a Windows 2003 Terminal Server. Seems this is actually a security bug.

I’m running Windows Terminal Server on top of Debian with VMware Server. My solution was to add an explicit DENY permissions to the WTS_Users group I had added to the TS machine’s “Remote Desktop Users” group. I changed these permissions in the locations mentioned in the securityfocus message.

Technorati Tags: vmware, tools, windows terminal server