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

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“

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

I followed the steps outlined below on my Windows XP laptop and got the details right through trial and error. I did paste screen shots initially to make the narrative more visual but I eventually took them off because their resolution did not promote clarity

Download Tools

• Download ElasticFox, a Mozilla FireFox extension that will allow you to interact with ec2 from the Firefox browser.
• Download PuTTY, a SSH and telnet client that is transparently used by ElasticFox for establishing a remote connection with ec2.
• Also download PuTTYgen, an RSA and DSA key generation utility from the same download site.

Connect with EC2

1. Start FireFox and load ElasticFox from its Tools menu.
2. Click the single blue Credentials button on the top L of the ElasticFox pane. A Manage EC2 Credentials dialog box pops up. Enter an Account Name of your choice and provide the AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Access Key for your ec2 account from the aws site.
3. Open the KeyPairs tab and press the middle green Create a new keypair button on the top L of the KeyPair pane. Once you provide a name for the key pair, e.g., pevans,  and click OK, it will generate a key pair, pevans.pemand save it in c:documents and settings<user name>ec2-keys. Note that you can change the location for the ec2-keys folder by clicking on the Tools button on the top R hand ElasticFox pane.
4. Start PuTTYGen, load the pevans.pem file created in the earlier step and generate a private key pevans.ppkfrom it. ElasticFox uses PuTTY internally for establishing a SSH connection with EC2. The private key generated in this setp will be used by PuTTY for this connection.
5. Open the AMI and Instances tab and select any public AMI from the Machine Images pane, which packages the OS and apps , e.g., Fedora, Apache and mySQL, that you require.
6. Click on the green Launch Instance button on the top L of the Machine Images pane to launch an AMI isntance 
7. You should see a new AMI appear in the lower Your Instance pane. it should start up in the lower panel with pending status (takes a minute or two)
8. Select the AMI and click on the fifth green Connect to Instance button 
9. A telnet window should appear with you logged in as root into the shell.
10. If the shell prompts you for a username and password, then the private key generation was not done correctly and should be redone with care