I’ve got a couple XenServer vms that I never migrated to ESX. Time and complexity got in the way. In fact one of the reasons why I dislike XenServer is that fact that way it ran disk images was not portable.   Where as with ESX and KVM I can migrate disk images between the two hypervisors without needing to chance anything in the guest. With XenServer at the time this was not easy. XenOSS has a similar issue with PV domains, although with KVM+xenner  is meant to be able to run these.

Anyway here are a few links for converting disk images between formats.

• Running a JumpBox with virt-image and libvirt
• Converting VHD to raw disk images, or even VMDK.
• convert .vhd (VirtualPc) files into .vdi (VirtualBox) files

I found though in the end that kvm-img or qemu-img has able to handle all the images I use: VHD, VMDK, RAW, and QCOW2. For example kvm-image convert disk.vhd -O raw disk.raw will work.

This leads to the nicest thing I found about KVM. With either ESXi 3.5 or vSphere 4 ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 VMDK files I was able to: kvm-img convert -O raw disk.vmdk disk.raw. Then run this new disk in raw format with KVM plus virtio drivers and do so without any changes in the guest.

This truely is disposable computing!

I’ve started running KVM recently and I’ll post a review at some point. I’m finding it very flexible and much much easier to use that Xen.

There are still a few questions regarding file caches and disk images. In general I’m happy that it’s ready for production.

Watch this video. There is a lot I could say, but it’s best to watch the video. Google Wave covers most of my vision of how communication should work, but extends it further in directions I haven’t considered.

• Inline replies
• Simultaneous online interaction 
• Wiki like behaviour
• Data interface linking.
• Drag and drop.

The whole agent/robot functionality is very exciting.

There is quite a bit of commentary about Sun and Oracle.  It think it is quite clear that Java is probably the number one reason why Oracle was interested in Sun.  This Computerworld article makes an interesting point:

… And we just picked a number — $500 seemed like a magic threshold,” Ellison said. “And Scott McNealy got very sarcastic and said, ‘The heck with $500, how about $200?’ Shut up, Scott.”

But what McNealy understood was that it wasn’t in the DNA of enterprise IT vendors like Oracle and Sun to market low-cost computers for school kids. The Network Computer needed to be a thin client for corporate networks. Two years later, in September 1999, Sun introduced its Sun Ray thin client. And that’s what will fulfill Ellison’s hardware dream.

Sun’s server business does absolutely nothing for Oracle. Unix servers are a dying breed, and Intel/AMD-based servers are a commodity. Oracle will almost certainly ratchet that business down as quickly as possible, or sell it off outright, perhaps to Fujitsu. But the thin-client business is a different story. It’s not difficult to see that the future of corporate computing lies in the cloud, and that a thin-client architecture will seed it.

My main concern is zfs. But if Oracle decides to delivery application appliances with Solaris/x64 hardware, I suspect future Solaris development should be fine.

Clever tip for using vim on zipped files. ie Openxml or ODF.

I haven’t seen much yet to confirm this deal, but if it does happen next week it mark an interesting change in course.  The thing that would interest me greatly would be zfs on linux – with Sun owned by IBM and their investment in Linux it might lead to a reconcilation between Sun and Linux licenses.  While Solaris has come a long way in the last couple years, but the only reason why I use solaris is zfs.  Linux is still a much more flexible, effective and deployable solution. 

I had some TLS incomming connection issues with my Zimbra (5.0) mail server.  Some but not all TLS connections where having this problem:

Apr  3 15:04:30 mail postfix/smtpd[7305]: timeout after DATA from

I haven’t found a conclusive solution, but the either restart postfix or adjusting the MTU on the mail server interface may fix the problem.

Some references:

1. http://www.zimbra.com/forums/administrators/11840-solved-some-outside-emails-being-delayed-4.html#post61541
2. http://www.irbs.net/internet/postfix/0511/1168.html

This is something that everyone should read about the publishing industry:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

From Professional VMware blog, here is another method to fix your lost Ethernet device on Ubuntu.

Another method of doing this, is to edit the ‘persistent-net-generator.rules’ file to include something similar to:

# ignore VMware virtual interfaces
ATTR{address}==”00:0c:29:*”, GOTO=”persistent_net_generator_end”

Couple article with interest methods for leveraging cloud computing.  Both of these talk to my concept of disposable computing.

Do the maths correctly for cloud computing.

Look for applications that leverage Amazon’s ease of use: EC2 instances can easily be brought up and quiesced; it’s not necessary to keep an instance up and running 24/7. Unlike a data center, where once a server is installed it’s easier to keep it running than to power it up and down, Amazon is ideally suited for applications that are used in a transient fashion, or even a temporary fashion. For example, one company I worked with had an application where it needed to test a system with 100 simultaneous browser instances. The company fired up 100 Amazon EC2 instances, ran a browser script on each one overnight, and completed the test the following day, whereupon it shut down the instances and discarded the systems. It accomplished all of this over a period of three days. Imagine how long it would take to do this in a traditional IT environment. Even better: the total cost for the simulation: $100.

Virtual Stress-free Testing in the Cloud.

Throw-away boxes
It was funny when I was talking to some developers about testing. One of the developer jumped and said “If you mess up the configuration, simply dump the instance and start a new one. Time is precious, dude!”  I knew developers from server-less start-up companies in our ecosystem, who start their dev boxes every morning and run it for 12 hours (the average developer uptime) per day and shut down every night before they go home. But I never thought that one can actually use Amazon EC2 to create thousands of Test environments in the Cloud – all fresh and new – and dump them, if they mess up and/or recreate it in the next test/sprint cycle. When you are testing your mobile application on different device platforms or testing your database-agnostic and app server-agnostic middleware app on different deployment configurations, the Cloud becomes an ideal platform to create-dump-recreate environments as you need.

…

Mechanical Turk for Innovative Testing
Using the on-demand workforce to help you in testing your app:

1. Workers create actual test scenarios (Selenium)
2. Workers enable Usability testing
3. Worker help analyze results from Cross-browser testing (present a screenshot and ask a turker to compare the pages)
4. Worker analyzes your test results/log files
5. Worker tests for broken links on your website
6. Workers participate in surveys that rate look-and-feel, navigation, search features of your website

You will find variety of customer stories and actual HITs on Mturk.com. Last year’s Start-Up Challenge Contest nominee UserTesting.com uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to create real videos to capture user behavior.