Share Virtual Machines

I have reviewed several appliances in the Secure Content and Threat Management and Identity, Access and Vulnerability Managament categories of the VMware Appliance Marketplace to identify the Top 20 appliances. Here are the steps I followed for selecting the appliances listed below:

• I have relied on the Average customer Rating, expressed as a 5 star, or a 4 star, etc., rating (you may wish to review my analysis of VMware’s ratings)
• I discarded all virtual appliances that solely package OS distributions, primarily, ubuntu, fedora, etc. My rationale is that an OS by itself provides low business value to an IT Administrator. While an IT administrator can use these just as if they were using a ghost image, these virtual appliances neither package applications in a usable form, nor simplify the task of installing and configuring the applications that provide business value. Besides, the base OS virtual appliances are available in a category by themselves
• I also discarded several appliances rated 4 star or less, which are present in the directory but have either broken or stubbed out download links. They seem to have been retained in the directory to beef up the appliance count, however, they are not useful to the community.

Which virtual appliance do you use the most and why do you like it?

I have reviewed several appliances in the IT Administration and Systems Infrastructure categories of the VMware Appliance Marketplace to identify the Top Ten and more appliances. Here are the steps I followed for selecting the appliances listed below:

• I have relied on the Average customer Rating, expressed as a 5 star, or a 4 star, etc., rating (you may wish to review my analysis of VMware’s ratings)
• I discarded all virtual appliances that solely package OS distributions, primarily, ubuntu, fedora, etc. My rationale is that an OS by itself provides low business value to an IT Administrator. While an IT administrator can use these just as if they were using a ghost image, these virtual appliances neither package applications in a usable form, nor simplify the task of installing and configuring the applications that provide business value. Besides, the base OS virtual appliances are available in a category by themselves
• I also discarded several appliances rated 4.5 star or less, which are present in the directory but have either broken or stubbed out download links. They seem to have been retained in the directory to beef up the appliance count, however, they are not useful to the community.

Which virtual appliance do you use the most and why do you like it?

What should you do when you run out of virtual disk space and have to expand it? Here is an iinsightful article that describes the gymanstics.

During the past week, I was analyzing the recently revamped VMware Appliance Marketplace. My analysis is summarized below:

Salient Statistics

• 9% are top-rated, i.e., have a Star Rating of 5
• 41% have a Star Rating of between 3 and 4, i.e., this cluster may be providing the most value to its users, even though it is not top-rated.
• There is a steep drop-off in the number of appliances that have a Star Rating below 3
• 31% are unrated, which seems to indicate that a significant majority has been submitted recently
• Only 3% (40/1227) have Reviews – this is a very small number. The number of reviews have to grow substantially to indicate that a vibrant community, like Amazon.com reviews, has formed here

Transparency

I feel there is a greater need for transparency. What do the Star Ratings mean?

• Are they correlated with the number of downloads for that appliance?
• What is the impact of reviews on these ratings?

Beware Star Ratings alone! The following appliance rated 4.5 has 4 reviews, read them and you will know what I mean.

As a member of VMware’s Technology Network community, I will urge VMware to provide greater transparency around how these ratings are computed/awarded. It will greatly help the users understand the ratings system.

What do you think?

Data

I found Dropbox, a nifty service for storing files online, keeping their copies on several of your own computers in sync, or sharing some of them with your friends.

• You download the Dropbox client (supported on Windows XP and Vista (32 and 64-bit), Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, as well as Ubuntu 7.10+ and Fedora Core 9+)
• 2GB of free storage provided with it
• You can then drag and drop files that you want to store online or share into the Dropbox.
• Dropbox maintains a snapshot of files
• If any of the files get updated, it sends only blocks that have changed
• It also offers the ability to undelete and restore files from the copies that are stored online.
• You can create Public folders for sharing, files in Public folders have URL’s that you can share with your friends.

While the company seems to be consumer-focused, the service is usable for dull and boring corporate stuff, like instantaneous automatic backups of files that change and also enables disaster recovery.

Someone has used Dropbox for syncing and sharing VM’s. This is an interesting use case, however, readers should pay heed to the transfer times as image sizes grow

Here are the Top 10 posts for Q1 2009, the numbers of views are in parentheses.

1. Defragment Ubuntu, Fedora, ext3, ext4 (2247)
2. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for IT Administrators (2186)
3. VirtualBox – setup, share, shrink, convert (842)
4. How to convert a VMWare VMDK to a Microsoft, Xen VHD? (810)
5. How does shrink with vmware disk manager work? (614)
6. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for Security (607)
7. Pre-configured VHD (Virtual Appliance) available from Microsoft (593)
8. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for Web Apps (558)
9. Virtual Machine Disk Image Compression (320)
10. rsync vm, vhd for backup, disaster recovery, ec2 (317)

Defragmentation of virtual disk files remains the dominant theme. There is an equal amount of interest in virtual appliances, particularly those for system administrators.

Search terms:

• ext4 defrag ubuntu
• ext4 defrag
• convert vdi to vhd
• e4defrag ubuntu
• virtualbox shrink
• rsync vmdk
• wubi
• defrag ubuntu
• defrag ext3
• windows 7 virtual appliance
• defragment ext3
• vmware appliances
• defrag ext4
• xen vhd
• ubuntu ext4 defrag
• defrag ext4 ubuntu
• vmware firewall appliance
• vmware appliance
• “vdi to vhd”
• convert vhd to xen
• ext3 defrag
• windows 7 beta vmware virtual appliances
• defrag fedora
• ext3 defragmentation
• virtual appliance windows 7
• ubuntu defrag
• hercules load balancer virtual appliance
• fedora defrag
• convert vmdk to xen
• shrink vmware disk

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

One of my earliest posts on this blog was about installing and configuring Ubuntu 8.10 within a VM, and my feeling that I did springboard into the deep end of a frigid pool on a frosty winter day. I am delighted with the experience of installing and using wubi- the ubuntu installer for windows, on my Windows XP laptop.

User Experience

wubi is an innovative approach towards introducing Windows users to Ubuntu Linux. It preserves the user experience of installing a Windows application using a standard installer and uninstalling it later from Control Panel >  Add/Remove Programs seamlessly.

• It provides an installation wizard implemented as a  standard Windows executable (.exe), double click on it and Ubuntu gets installed; users don’t have to deal with ISO images
• wubi installs ubuntu on the desktop as a NTFS file and uses the ext3 filesystem for its contents within (escalating file defragmentation needs, many of our readers visit this blog prescisly for this topic)
• NTFS-3G (Linux NTFS) driver with write support
• Grub4Dos as a boot loader – every time the laptop reboots, I am presented with a choice of whether I want to start Windows XP or Ubuntu
• Ubuntu appears as a program in the Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs.
• Uninstall removes all the artifacts cleanly

Pros and Cons:

• The Ubuntu GUI looks stunning , however, it is sluggish compared with the response time I get on XP (Harvey Su, remember him?, has a ghoulish imagination and he has by now trained all of us to view the background pattern as a giant lion that  has a void in its skull and a  skeleton dangling from its open jaws. Definitely PG-17 material)
• Ubuntu found the printers on our LAN (this blew me away), it even found the PostScript profile (.ppd file?) for our HP LaserJet automatically, however, I when I tried to install it, the installation failed with no diagnostics.
• It could not find the Postscript profile  for another Canon printer/copier/scanner, however, unlike Windows, it did not lead me to a website where I could download it from.
• It found a Broadcom wireless driver for my Dell laptop, I was able to install and activate it, however, some interaction with our Active Directory authentication prevented me from getting access to our secure wireless network. Once again, there was no diagnostic to indicate what went wrong.
• I would be glad to send the wubi developers log files except that I don’t know what to send to whom, however, it would be nice to have a utility that gathers all the relevant diagnostics and beams it up to “mother ship” over http.
• Update: It would be cool if I could share a folder between XP and Ubuntu so that I could install the ISO’s I had downloaded earlier on  XP.

In conclusion

There is an excellent how-to guide prepared by parthodeep for your reference.

Kudos to Agostino Russo and team for an outstanding job.

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) is offering over 1500 AMI’s (virtual appliances). It’s recent foray into Europe highlights its aggressive pursuit of a land grab strategy. So, what has its competition in the US been up to? Every major web hosting vendor has announced a cloud initiative:

• The Rackspace cloud is called Mosso. Its prices compare favorably with Amazon’s. Its pricing calculator and spreadsheets can be found here.
• Savvis has a VMWare ESX based offering for Windows and Linux
• AT&T is also offering VMWare ESX based hosting Windows, Linux and Solaris x86. They intend to offer Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V in the future. AT&T offers SLA’s for cloud services, a first.
• Terremark has also launced an Enterprise Cloud, which incidentally is a utility computing cloud sans virtualization
• IBM’s cloud initiative has its products available as AMI’s on ec2.
• Sungard has not yet publicly announced its cloud plans.
• Verizon is slated to announce its cloud initiative in Summer 2009

Amazon’s ec2 is nearly three years old now (Mar 2006) and competition has started appearing on the horizon just over the past year. If you look at the timescale of announcements,

• Rackspace’s Mosso is just over a year old (Feb 2008),
• Terremark’s cloud is nine months old (June 2008),
• AT&T’s cloud is seven months old (Aug 2008),
• IBM’s AMI launch on ec2 and Savvis’ cloud is three weeks old (Feb 2009).

Since ec2 was first to market, the Rackspace, AT&T and Savvis cloud offerings have a “me too” feel to them. However, unlike other vendors, Rackspace has published pricing on the Web and it appears to be very competitive with ec2. 

Unlike Amazon, Savvis and AT&T are going the buy versus build route to get fast time to market. They are initially launching their service using VMWare technology put together using Professional Services instead of following Amazon’s approach of building a proprietary infrastructure using Open Source software as its foundation. In fact, this may be the preferred route amongst the upper echelons of cloud service providers. There is optimism that providing cloud services is a growth business. I am noticing startups like Enomaly (“Build your own private elastic cloud”) and VMOps (“launch ec2 today”, aka public cloud) offering cloud infrastrcture products.

In conclusion, credible competition is emerging and there are real alternatives to ec2 available today. However, given the state of the economy, I think the market will begin to form by 2010 and should reach critical mass by 2011-2012.

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.