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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.

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“

I use ftp to transfer large VM image of my code to a remote development team based in India and rsync for copying and backing up code, configuration and data from ec2. I researched the web for best practices that have evolved for speeding up large VM transfers. It seems there are none today, unless you are transferring VM’s on your company’s WAN and they are using WAN accleration to improve the transfer rate. However, I have found two models for using rsync with vmdk’s and  vhd’s. Here’s a sample of use cases:

Cloud-centric usage

rsync is used for copying and backing up code, configuration and data from cloud-based services like Amazon ec2.

• Here is an excellent guide to Backup with rsync and ec2
• rsync, s3 and backups
• Migrate to aws/ec2

Traditional usage

rsync is used for backing up large VM’s to a remote store or for disaster recovery

• rsync to offsite locations
• rsync virtual machine backups
• Staging a disaster recovery VM

Read about Backup, Disaster Recovery for Windows VM’s

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