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?

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.

 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

Total VM’s on VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace : 2560
Number of distinct download sites providing these appliances : 674

The following table lists the compression formats used for 408 appliances we have examined:

Amongst the compression formats, zip is the most popular one (42%), with 7z the next in sequence (23%) for Windows; gz is the most popular one for Linux (18%)

We intend to publish more statistics over the next few days. Watch this space.

virtualization.info is reporting that a glimpse of the Cisco, VMWare, EMC strategy has emerged in a post on the personal blog of Chad Sakac, Sr. Director VMWare Strategic Alliance at EMC.

Upon reading Chad’s blog, my impression is that a partnership ecosystem seems to be emerging between Cisco, VMWare and EMC for supporting private clouds within an Enterprise and public clouds, a la EC2, through

• A deep integration with the VMWare Hypervisor or “VMWare’s cloud operating system” using standard API’s
• A broad integration to provide a cross-vendor management fabric that spans across management tools of the respective vendors and enables management of VM’s/Virtual Appliances, the underlying host servers, storage and the network.
• VM/Virtual appliance portability across the private and public clouds

This management layer will permit control over individual VM’s and groups of VM’s within this cloud and permit applications (virtual appliances) to be deployed using Just Enough OS’s (JeOS)

EMC’s internal goals (and perhaps VMWare and Cisco’s, too) seem to be

1) To Drive 100% virtualization

Requires A Virtualization Layer that can literally meet the scaling, performance and availability goals of any x86 workload.

EVERY EMC product is being turned into a Virtual Appliance.

Physical adaptability (i.e. increase/decrease CPU/Memory model) needs to extend into the Networking and Storage stacks. People will REALLY start to see “purpose built servers/network/storage” for VMware in 2009

2)  To drive API Integration

Streamline the integration of existing management tools and capabiities with VMWare’s management tools and capabilties.  

These are about making sure that virtual world is able to do everything the phyiscal world can do.   They make sure that the datacenter CAN be 100% virtualized

3)  To create infrastructure that understands and responds to “VM/Application objects”

the next phase is where things really get blended – where thin provisioning is integrated, where management tasks are integrated, where “VM object awareness” is added, and where networking policy portability really takes off.

vCenter is surely a critical new management point – so expect to see core management capability for EMC storage integrated into vCenter in the very near term. … We’ll leverage existing open APIs to create plug-in extension models. BUT at the same time – we will continue to integrate into the vCenter APIs for integrated views in management frameworks that are “home” to people other than VMware Administrators.

Epilogue

Done right – the Private Cloud and Public Cloud can share the applications transparently, and the “Public Cloud” infrastructure layers can “read the same bar-codes”  Clearly the infrastructure needs to be a bit different (management model, federation, multi-tenancy, scale and price points are all different), but they need to be linked.

This ain’t about consolidating servers (though includes that too!).   It **IS** about the next big transformation we all see coming in the IT space we deal in.   We’re gearing up, and as leaders in our respective spaces, focusing our resources, and driving towards a vision. 

If Cisco, VMWare and EMC indeed work together on this, they will be able to dominate this market for years to come. Very cool, Chad! Thanks for sharing your views.