Using a Xen virtual appliance to manage your VMware servers

One of the great things about virtualization is the amount of money you can save companies, not just in hardware costs, but also the on going costs of keeping machines in a data centre and a rack, and feeding them with power and air conditioning.

Well, I built several ESXi servers for the current bank balance filling company, and they needed an easy and affordable way to manage them on the cheap. Now, I have always thought that VMware workstation is very affordable, so I built a Vmware virtual appliance to look after the servers with Vmware vSphere client. This however proved too expensive for them and they wanted something at zero cost to the company.

It is obvious that the management virtual appliance has to be on a different virtual infrastructure to that which it is supporting, so I built another virtual appliance , this time on our Xen server. As the virtual appliance has to be built with windows XP as it's base and then security hardened, the Xen server has to have the Intel processor enhancements turned on in the BIOS, otherwise it just won't fly.

The Xen server is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which comes with a lot of enhancements to the virtual machine management program - virt-manager, and it is very straight forward now to configure new virtual machines.

All I had to do to allow remote management of this appliance was to turn on the terminal services process within XP, and now people can use the "remote desktop connection" program to access this VM and control the ESXi servers using vSphere client.

Xen offers great performance, and this solution works really well, and didn't cost a penny.

Playing with Google Chome OS in a virtual machine

After watching the Google announcement on Thursday, I decided to build a virtual machine and compile the operating system from source. I used an Ubuntu 9.10 virtual machine , as that is what they recommend, and then followed the build instructions from the developers web site. Eventually after an hour or so of compiling , it spits out an image you can put on a USB stick.

I then booted another virtual machine from this USB stick and built the following image. You log in with your Google account and away you go. I have to say considering this is an alpha release, it works and is not that slow to have a look at. I'm really enjoying the chess game, it really shows what can be done on this platform, and anyone who thinks this OS is just going to stay on netbooks is deluding themsleves.

I would have to say, that unless you like playing with the source code, which I do, then there are lots of people publishing pre-built virtual images for you to play with, and that would be a lot easier way just to have a look. If you do want to do the compiling yourself, then here is the link - building Chrome OS from source

Here's the screen shot:

Chrome OS built from Source

Here is the demo.

If you want real virtual speed with your Jumpbox appliances use Xen not ESXi

As you will have seen on my blog recently we had a situation that meant I had to move one of our Jumpbox virtual appliances from a failed Xen server to a new ESXi server. Now these servers are exactly the same specification, HP DL380 G5 with 32GB RAM and 2 x Dual Core Intel Xeon CPU's , so not exactly supercomputers, but more than enougth to do what we want with them.

Well here is the thing, Jumpbox say that VMware are one of their main supported platforms and , Tier 1 partners I think they call it, and open source Xen is Tier 3. So how come then the virtual appliance runs significantly faster on Redhat Enterprise than it does on Vmware ESXi? When I say significantly, I'm not joking. The virtual appliance is the moinmoin wiki. On the ESXi platform trying to edit a post is painfully slow, 30 seconds to open the editor. On Xen it is 1-2 seconds at most, so I don't need a stop watch to see something is wrong.

I have gone through the settings for the Vmware server, something I don't have to do with Xen, and given it garanteed resources and CPU power, no difference. I could, if I fancied wasting a small part of my life, investigate the Advanced settings for the ESXi server, but again why would I when with Xen it just flys?

I don't know the answer thats for sure, and especially when you know that the Jumpbox appliance is running with the QEMU hardware emulator on Xen, as it's not para-virtualized! Emulators as I'm sure you know are not supposed to be that fast.

I think I'm going to chat to Jumpbox about this, as it really does seem odd. The only thing that may have affected the performacne is the fact that I had to migrate the appliance to ESX format from Server format, but surely once this process is completed the virtual image should be good to go.

Google Chrome OS is alive and open to the community to develop

I sat and watched the webinar this evening that launched Google Chrome OS into the wild at Google's headquarters in California.The news about their new web centric operating system is very good indeed, and they truly have thought the concept through.

Now, I'm sure the open source community will take this rough diamond and turn it into a beautiful gem, but what has already been shown is interesting enough. The system is building upon the great work of many very successful open source projects like the Linux kernel, Ubuntu, Moblin, Webkit and of course Chromium. Once the system is booted and running, you wouldn't notice a difference between running the Chromium browser in full screen mode, which I'm doing now to type this. It is this envelope use of the browser to drive the whole experience which is new and cutting edge.

The new system will be free to download and install on any system, but is being aimed at a set of reference hardware that will have 100% compatibility out of the box , and is going to be offered by several major hardware manufacturers at launch.
This bringing together of the hardware and software offers major advantages, as Apple have found, so that the whole experience just works. They have also written there own BIOS, which again will work well with the other components.

Google have also thought long and hard about security which is designed into the system from the ground floor, with multiple layers of sandbox, to protect running applications, and the fact the OS checks for updates at boot. The speed to get to the browser has also been addressed and is a matter of seconds, so the whole suspend/hibernate cludge disappears in a cloud of blistering fast bits.

The number of applications with the new native client - think of Google gears on steroids - will be virtually infinite, and the ability of Google to create and grow a web store has already been proven with the fly away success of Android. If I were a web based developer, I know where I would be investing my energies over the next twelve months, as this could be a gold mine.

I have loved the Chromium browser since it arrived, warts and all, and I have no doubt that this new OS will find a place on my netbook. I agree with the usage profile discussed at the launch, and it is unlikely to replace Ubuntu on my laptop anytime soon, but my netbook is crying out for this.

To use a phrase that this launch fits well, the operating system has just evolved.

Mozilla Weave sync application heads towards version 1.0 release

After updating this extension for Firefox this morning I noticed the following information from the Weave team

"Latest Weave Update
Weave 1.0 beta 1 was released on November 16th, 2009

* Improved Firefox preference integration with sync direction choice on first-connect
* Fixed issue with connecting on Fennec 1.0b5
* Added an automatic on-demand sync if many changes are detected
* More comprehensive history sync (initially and continuously)
* Many added bugfixes

Release Notes

1. Upgrade all your clients to the latest version
If you are using Weave Sync on multiple computers, you will need to update all of them to the latest version. Weave Sync requires that you use the same version of the addon on all your computers that you want to synchronize data to/from.
2. Syncing tabs across multiple devices requires configuration
If you are using Weave Sync on only one computer, it will not sync your tabs. After you install Weave Sync on any additional computers, you can enable tabs sync. To do so, on your original computers, open Weave Preferences and ensure the "Weave will" option is set to Sync Everything. Force a sync by choosing Sync Now on all of your computers and you should now see tabs syncing.
3. Server APIs
For this version of Sync, Mozilla no longer supports the old database and server API versions (i.e. before 1.0). You will be unable to use any version of the Sync extension that is before 1.0 beta 1 with the Mozilla servers.
4. Hosting Your Own
If you are hosting your own Weave server, you’ll need to add an apache alias line for the 1.0 URL – your old server will still handle the same API "

It is worth noting that with this release you will need to update all your clients as they have obviously changed some components in the backend.

This is a great extension for Firefox, and I hope that the Chromium bookmark sync version will eventually offer the range of features that this does.

Extensions coming soon to Chromium on Linux so they are now telling us

The screen shot below says it all.

Extensions library

The launch of this may be timed with the big announcements coming tomorrow from the Googleplex or maybe it is completely unconnected, but all will be revealed tomorrow no doubt.

Google community looks ready to launch a new extensions site

With the latest builds of Chromium on Linux there is a new link that has appeared which is similar to the curtain for the themes that are now available.

At the moment it takes you to a Google search screen, but it is obviously limbering up to offer a whole new site full of Chrome extensions. To be fair, Firefox is not going to have to worry too much for the immediate future as they already have thousands of excellent extensions, and it will literally take years to get to that level.

Here is the link.