Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

So you have this libvirt setup and you want to have a dhcp server on the virtual machines you are playing with , or you want to have all static IP's.

Libvirt uses dnsmasq to provide dhcp services etc and when you generate a config from the gui it will look like

<network>
  <name>piponet</name>
  <uuid>e87d3bf1-a2e7-96ca-e131-7ae51ac033f9</uuid>
  <bridge name='virbr2' stp='on' delay='0' />
  <ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
    <dhcp>
      <range start='192.168.100.128' end='192.168.100.254' />
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

<network>
  <name>piponet</name>
  <uuid>e87d3bf1-a2e7-96ca-e131-7ae51ac033f9</uuid>
  <bridge name='virbr2' stp='on' delay='0' />
  <ip address='192.168.100.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
     </ip>
</network>

Technorati Tags: dhcp ha kvm libvirt xen

by @botchagalupe
on Virtualization, Open Source tools and DNS Problems

Technorati Tags: dnsproblem drupal ha heartbeat linux-ha mysql pacemaker puppet virtualization xen

Over at Virtualization.com I asked the crowd what they planned to do when RedHat plans on finally migrating from Xen to KVM .. you can have your say too . :

Technorati Tags: kvm xen

Next month I`ll be teaching a course on Virtualization at the KULAK.

Apart from my training there is also a Puppet training planned in Belgium.

As I assisted Luke in finding a location for the training I tought it might be a good idea to have a Puppet Users meetup while some people are already gathering in Leuven

Current plan is to meet up somewhere in Leuven on the evening of the 25th , more announcements later ..

Technorati Tags: kulak leuven puppet training virtualization xen

So yesterday a 100+ crowd met in the Antwerp Zoo.
I heard different comments from that crowd... some of them liked the event, good networking, interresting topics , a broad overview, meeting new vendors active in the Cloud, others of them didn't .. it wasn't a real camp , just some vendors pitching, they didn't hear any new stuff , or we didn't touch the real stuff.

So different opinions from different expectations...

Anyhow for all those who could't read the slides :

Or here

Technorati Tags: antwerpen cloud marketeers virtualization xen zoo

So the cat is out of the bag,

As of today Inuits is rebranding to Pinuits,
The press release is here

We've had good feedback on the new name so far. Different people told me the name matched better to what we are doing . Actually my wife thinks our new name is much better as at least the Pin in Pinuits refers to our favourite Tux again ..

Finding an appropriate name for an Open Source consultancy company, with focus on Linux, Open Source Monitoring, MySQL, Open Source Virtualization , Large Scale Deployments , High Availability and Drupal, isn't easy .. you want to show both community involvement and professionality. And find a domain that's still available.

Technorati Tags: apache drupal inuits lamp mysql opensource pinuits xen

I've updated the slidedeck of my Open Source Virtualization talk, with the 2009 edition as I gave it last week at the UKUUG Spring conference.

Talk is up, both on my page as on SlideShare

Tom also updated our set of Open Source Monitoring Tool Shootout slides .
They are also on SlideShare

Technorati Tags: hyperic kvm opensource ukuug virtualization xen zabbix zenoss

I`ll be heading to bed early today as tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get up early to catch my flight to London where
Tom and I will be representing Inuits at the UKUUG 2009 Spring Conference.

Tom will be giving an updated version of our Open Source Monitoring Shootout talk again, I`ll probably be skipping a couple of his slides as right after that Jane Curry will be covering Zenoss in depth and on thursday there will be an OpenNMS talk too.

On Thursday I will be giving another session of my Open Source Virtualization overview talk .. and I also plan on skipping slides and referring to the next speaker, as Matt will be giving an openQRM talk right after me :)

See you there !

Technorati Tags: kvm openqrm ukuug xen zabbix zenoss

or timebound ? or don't you have any load on your DB at all ?

I personally don't see many reasons to virtualize your database, apart from the , we plan to start small and scale out, or the we need it now and we don't have the hardware yet , putting your database on a virtual platform where you have to share resources with other virtual machines doesn't really sound like a tempting proposition to me. Small, almost idle databases , maybe. But enterprise production level databases no thnx.

Sheeri Cabral also mentions the above reasons .. and there also .. Enterprise Production use isn't listed.

Databases typically require a good amount of memory , and steady disk access.
So if you are in a production environment with a fairly loaded database, would you want a 4Gb machine with full direct memory access, Or 3.5Gb of virtual memory that can be ballooned to 3 if underused. My pick is at the 4Gb real memory.

The original article at Sun argues the use of Virtual Harddisk to move around workloads between different servers or even Virtualization platforms. But it fails to describe the guaranteed performance penalty of not using raw disks but a filesystem on top of a loopback device. How many layers do you want before actually write to the disks. Good practice in a virtual environment is to dedicate full disks or LVM parts to the virtual machine hence lowering the overhead, but most (default) setups do the opposite.

And don't get me started about the myth of using virtualization for high-availability :)

Now can somebody please remove all the clueless marketing people from planetmysql.org , thnx. (they can be identified with by a blogs.sun.com source and posts that mainly talk about Sun products including only a slight hint to MySQL)

(PS. What's a Market Development Engineer's job description anyhow ? , that's just a different name for Marketing Assistant right ?)

Technorati Tags: i hate it when the marketeers join in marketing sucks mysql sun virtualization xen xvm

Well kinda, I contributed to more books than I was aware off. Couple of weeks ago we were having some fun Googling for pictures of collegues when Mario came up with a Link to a bookcover that had meta information with my name on.

"The Best Damn Server Virtualization Book Period"

I had never heard of the book, but it was published by Syngress with whom last year I worked on the Virtualization with Xen book. As the cover of the book on Amazon told me that I was involved in the book I set on to find a PDF of the book which one of the collegues quickly found. And indeed my name was in the book , and also the chapters I had written for the Xen book seemed to be inside.

So I contacted my editor at syngress again to get some more information and hopefully also the book.
And eventually they got back to me and send me a copy of the book

So with 2007 being on of my most busiest years so far I managed to do even more than I knew of .. I didn't write a significant part of just 1 book but 2.

Whow .. and all of that while I became a father, started a new company

Still not sure what to think about it ..

Technorati Tags: book damn syngres vmware xen