LinuxTag 2006 Report Continued
The after party... somehow we ended up sitting at the same terrace having dinner as some of the other Linuxtag people ..
The result being that our tables eventually merged into a fun talk with Philip Copeland (Bryce) the ocfs2 guy ..and some late night open air irc session with seklos
who apologised for having to send someone else to actually give a talk. Philip tried his best to give a good talk.. but as posted earlier.. it is difficult to do so when it's not your talk.
I hope to see him give one of his own talks one day .. promises to be really good.
On saturday morning Ruediger was so kind to fill in the open spot we had which saved the audience from a 4th rerun of my Xen Deployments talk , I managed to miss half of his talk however.. kind of annoying...
Then time to introduce Werner.. who really is giving a talk I have been proposing to different conferences lately.. except that I was focussing on GFS and Xen where he takes a more general approach. Should be really interresting... As Werner mentions a problem with virtualisation .. when you consolidate.. and one machine fails it's actually more machines that fail.. therefore the need for ha becomes important. which is also one of the reasons why I am looking at the topic.. that and many-2-one ha setups which I think can save us a lot of idle hardware.
Werner mentions 5 possible setup .. he wonders why people would want to failover from virtual to physical, the only reason I can come up with for now is someone who has a lot of old machines and buys one new bigger machine where he consolidates his apps. Some different virtual machines might have a physical failover on an older left over machine. Looking at it from a budget point of view it makes sense.
Werner is doing his storage mirroring on his physical host , I've been looking at mirroring storage between virtual machines or between physical and virtual machines (certainly in a many 2 one setup) , this definitely needs more thinking, and more work to be done on testing integration between Xen and different clusterfilesystems ocfs2, gfs etc.
Time for me to check out of the hotel and do some small shopping (food) before heading back to the Xen talk ... not by Ian this time... but by Steve Hand, a nice change to see this presentation given by someone else who's equally skilled and involved into the stuff. I sneaked out for 5 minutes to see how crowded the other talks are... Mark's talk was crowded... you couldn't get into the room.. As the Xen talk is also rather crowded one can only assume that this last day at Linuxtag is really crowded ..
After the Xen talk I took some time to talk to Aaron about our ideas on openQRM and SystemImager, talked some more with Werner Fisher about Virtual Clusters tried to get back into the talks but sat down with Steve Hand for some Xen chat instead (I really got to look into buying a new Laptop :))
But luckily I got into last talk by Klaus Rabbertz on Software Deployment in Grids. Problem sounds familiar... solution doesn't.. it's really grid specific. Juliux really needs to take off soon :) Some interresting tought on using different RPM databases on one machine however. I need to buy some time somehwere to have a look at how stuff they have been building can be used in a broader area.
LinuxTag 2006 is over now.. I`m satisfied with it.. met some interresting people and learned some new stuff .. after all that's why you go to conferences isn't it.
I've seen LinuxTag from different viewpoints already.. as a regular visitor, as a speaker and this year as a programcomitee member. Depending on location and time I assume this 6th linuxtag I visited certainly won't be the last.