xen

Mar 24 2009

UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference , here we come

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 !

Oct 28 2008

Virtualizing MySQL , are you stupid ?

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 ?)

Oct 20 2008

I wrote more books than I remember

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 ..

Oct 04 2008

Open Source Virtualization

I've just placed the presentation I gave both yesterday at the Open Source Days in Copenhagen , and last week in Zurich at the Open Expo , about Open Source Virtualization online.
The presentation is based on a series of articles I wrote earlier this year for Virtualization.com

You can download it here

The presentation covers a fairly complete overview of what's around in Open Source Virtualization tools and and their Management frameworks.

I will be giving the same presentation again at the end of the month at T-Dose in Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Sep 02 2008

Xen Summits

Stephen , good thing you think about touring to Europe again for the Xen Summit.

Colocating with LinuxTag or LinuxKongress would really be a good idea, but make
sure to organize it the day before or after , not during the congress :)
On the other hand .. you wrote LinuxKongress, but you probably meant Linuxconf.eu didn't you ?

But then again Cambridge is also a lovely place for a summit ;)

Aug 25 2008

Where are the Virtualization Zenpacks ?

Zennoss has announced the entries for their zenpack contest . What strikes me is that there is not a single entry that plans on monitoring Xen, KVM, VirtualBox or any of the other Open Source virtualization technologies .. Not in the contest entries and not in the existing community packs .

This sounds like a big opportunity to me :)

May 22 2008

Distro Synchronisation

Look Mark , Red Hat and Novell have Synced their releases :)

Well.. not really .. even different Xen versions :)

Apr 21 2008

Remus got awarded best paper

The Remus paper I blogged about earlier seems to have won the Best Paper Award at NSDI. Good to hear .. err read ! :)

Apr 07 2008

Xen and the art of

Some of you already notice a lower posting pace on this blog, and wondered why..

Well the answer is pretty easy .. I've started writing for Virtualization.com and my Virtualization content is now living over there. Well, at least the one that is suitable there :)

The latest in a series of articles about , Open Source Virtualization. it's history and what's happening with Xen has just been published.

So head over there !

Mar 12 2008

Upcoming Talks

A bit short notice but I`ll be giving a Xen talk tomorrow evening at the OSBC event in Eindhoven

Next week I`ll be talking to the interrested crowd about using openQRM to Manage your Datacenter at Linux World Expo Brussel

At LinuxWorld expo there are also other talks about OpenDoc Society, Drupal, Centos etc. The event is free .. so drop by if you are in the neighborhood.