shareVM- Share insights about using VM's

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (765)
2. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (566)
3. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (149)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (111)
5. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (101)
6. http://stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://sharevm.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/most-popular-vmware-virtual-appliances-for-it-administrators/ (84)
7. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (67)
8. http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/vmware-virtual-machine-to-virtual-box-conversion-how-to/ (66)
9. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (66)
10. http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2007/01/21/determining-file-fragmentation-on-ext3-file-systems/ (61)
11. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (52)
12. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (53)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers

I received the email annoucement from Amazon ec2 earlier today:

You can read the detailed announcement here and also download the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

Oracle Corporation has delivered a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), to make it easy for customers to get started deploying Oracle solutions on Amazon EC2. The following appliances are built on Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5 Update 2 as the base OS:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition – 32 Bit
• Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Express Edition – 32 Bit
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 64 Bit
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 32 Bit
• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Standard Edition/Standard Edition One – 64 Bit
• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition – 64 Bit

Oracle Secure Backup

For on-premise Oracle installations, AWS offers a dependable and secure off-site backup location through the Cloud Backup module, which is a part of Oracle Secure Backup – a tape backup management solution. It provides customers the flexibility to back up data to either tape or the Cloud.

Licensing

Oracle customers can now license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager to run in the AWS cloud computing environment. Oracle customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.

 Ubuntu JeOS

• How to develop virtual appliances using Ubuntu JeOS

VMWare Studio

• Studio: A Free Virtual Appliance Authoring Tool With Robust Management Features
• Videos: Learn how to build a VMWare virtual appliance
• Create your own Linux appliances

Parallels

• How to build a Parallel’s virtual appliances

rPath rBuilder

• rBuilder Appliance creator
• Best practices for building virtual appliances

Rightscale

RightImages provide ready-to-go base operating systems with core cloud software.

ServerTemplates also allow you to designate any number of scripts that you want to run at boot time, upon demand, or when an event is triggered.

RightScripts allow you to specify packages that you want to install before a script is executed and even allow you to upload and attach files directly to scripts.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

• Use an existing AMI
• Create your own AMI from scratch

IBM has begun offering IBM DB2, IBM Informix, IBM WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server AMI‘s on Amazon.com’s EC2.

IBM is providing several “Development” AMIs at no additional fee beyond Amazon EC2 charges for developers building commercial IBM-based applications.

AWS will also roll out pay-as-you-go pricing for the “Production” Amazon EC2 running IBM service, enabling you to purchase these services by the hour.

The groundbreaking development is that IBM has rationalized their licensing so the customers can use their existing licenses for virtual appliances

For customers that already have existing IBM licenses, you are now eligible to bring them to Amazon EC2 starting today. IBM has created a Processor Value Unit (PVU) conversion table that makes it easy to determine how your existing licenses apply to the various EC2 instance types.

Update : An interesting analysis of this announcement at CIO.com

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (546)
2. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (342)
3. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (110)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (59)
5. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/189804?tstart=0 (49)
6. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (42)
7. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (37)
8. http://wordpress.com/tag/vhd/ (33)
9. http://wordpress.com/tag/vmdk/ (32)
10. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (32)
11. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (32)
12. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (31)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers.

Mike Culver, technology evangelist for Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a web-based management console for ec2, the Elastic Compute Cloud.

The key features are summarized by James Urquhart and by Saad Ali Abassi.

Alan Williamson offers a visual tour of the new UI.

As an AWS customer, I feel heartened by this investment on Amazon’s part because it emphasizes their commitment to commoditize AWS and make its services widely usable. The AWS services will become cheaper as usage ramps up on the commoditization curve and makes “cloud computing accessible for the masses“

After having gone through the learning curve of setting up an application on Amazon’s ec2, I found it interesting that Jumpbox has released 38 open source applications, including SugarCRM, mySQL, Drupal, etc, as virtual appliances available on the ec2 cloud. This is an interesting play because it leverages virtualization to offer software as a service in the cloud and is of great benefit to SMB’s who can use these services right away, when they don’t have the IT infrastructure (staff, hardware, data center, etc.) to host it themselves.

Smart move, Jumpbox, you are a hip startup – the convergence of virtualization, SaaS in the cloud should help raise your market valuation.

1. Open ElasticFox; Open tab AMI and Instances
2. Select an AMI Instance to suit your needs and launch it as described here
3. You will be shown the Launch New Instance dialog box
4. Select the Instance Type as small or large
5. Select the key pair you want to use. There might be just one in the dropdown if you are the only user, otherwise there can be one per member of your development team.
6. Select the Availability Zone in the same zone as your primary services and data. We chose us-east-1c because that is the zone where all our VM’s are currently running.
7. Select the appropriate Security Group, I chose pauls-sandbox, which was created as described here.
8. Press the Launch button to launch an instance of this AMI
9. The AMI instance is shown as running
10. Right click on the running AMI instance and select Connect to Instance. This should bring up a terminal window

You have got to remember at all times that Amazon EC2 is stateless, it will not remember things between one AMI instance to the next unless you have allocated persistent storage in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and maintain state there, e.g., .bashrc, etc for logins.

1. Create a new volume in the Elastic Block Store (EBS) from the Volumes and Snapshots tab in ElasticFox
2. Attach this newly created volume as /dev/sdh with the AMI instance that you have just started
3. This causes the volume to be associated with the running instance

If you are a member of a development team that will be sharing code and data residing on shared storage in the cloud, you should create your own security group to isolate your VM and testing from others in your group. I learnt this the hard way when our development team was operating in the same security group and I accidentally terminated Harvey’s VM while he was rewriting the makefile. He lost all his changes.

1. Access the Security Groups tab in ElasticFox.
2. Create a new group and add new group permissions. I added a new group called pauls-sandbox and added group permissions for

• SSH (port 22),
• HTTP (port 80),
• HTTPS (port 443) and
• ICMP (port -1) for pings