Please find an interview about the topics of the upcoming openQRM presenation
"Conform deployment of virtual and physical machines with openQRM and Xen"
taking place at Profoss.eu in Bruessels on the 22. and 23. january here.
Here some more infos about this upcoming event :
The european virtualisation conference organised by Profoss (http://profoss.eu) will take place on 22 and 23 january in Brussels, featuring non-commercial, informative talks by specialists in their fields (CEOs, analysts, technology specialists, developers, ..). The first day will focus on business and management aspects, the second day on technical aspects. Most of the important players of the market will be present. With the multiple discussion and coffee breaks, you should have time to meet and discuss with speakers, sponsors and attendants.
I fully agree with him about the challenge to adopt to virtualization today. It adds another layer of complexity to the IT infra structure which current tools are not ready to manage in a flexible and transparent way for the system-administrators.
Nowadays a common data-center is normally still very static, powered by lots of physical systems with a custom installation, configured and maintained by a couple of loosely connected tools.
Virtualization claims to provide the option to move to an appliance-based deployment via virtual machines to ease-up deployment and to better use the resources of the data-center. Since bringing up a virtual machine more or less just requires space on a storage for the virtual-disk the need for high-end NAS and SAN data-storage systems raises.
On the other hand virtualization adds another level of complexity. Systems and services migrated to virtual machines still needs to be setup, monitored and maintained just in the same way as for physical servers. With a raising number of servers (physical and virtual) it gets more hard to fulfill this task in a successful and efficient way.
Migration itself (e.g. from physical systems to virtual machines) can be a really tricky thing too since most virtualization technologies are still lacking this feature.
Another difficult task for the IT-department is to decide which of the current available virtualization technologies to use.
There comes the question if it is not a disadvantage to be limited to a single virtualization technology ?
To my mind it is because of two reasons :
1) Different virtualization technologies are available today. There is "full-virtualization" (e.g. Qemu/KVM), "para-virtualization" (e.g. Xen) and "light-virtualization" which is in most cases based on a process-isolation (e.g. Linux-VServer, Solaris Zones). Each technology has its advantages but also its "limitations". Now, in a common data-center we normally find lots of different applications with custom needs e.g. a web hosting company may have hundreds of "idle" customer web-servers plus a couple of in-house oracle data-base servers. For the web-servers it would make the most sense to choose one of the "light-virtualization" or "para-virtualization" technologies to limit the virtualization overhead to a minimum. Using "light- or para-virtualization" a single, physical machine can easily host several hundreds virtual partitions. (please see "Building a virtualized web-farm with openQRM")
On the other hand the data-base servers are CPU, IO and network intensive so choosing one of the "full-virtualization" technologies would be a benefit. So one reason that it is a disadvantage for the IT-department to limit themselves to a single virtualization technology is that the virtualization type should be selected according to the application needs.
2) The other reason is to simply avoid vendor-locking.
So if it would be best to choose the virtualization technology according the applications and services the IT infra-structure does not only need to support several different virtualization options but also provide an option to move from one virtualization type to another and also the possibility to migrate a virtual machine back to a physical system. Today, if you try to move a e.g. VMware-partition to Linux-VServer or a Xen-partition back to a physical machine, sure there are eventually some custom utils, scripts and howtos available which will help but at all this will be an "adventure".
Both situations, the common static data-center using physical servers and the new virtual-appliance-based infra-structure are already quite tricky to manage on their own but with the move to virtualization the system-administrator today even needs to handle "mixed environments", both physical and virtual.
To my mind we would need a tool which seamlessly integrates with the different virtualization technologies and conforms resource-planning, deployment and management of physical systems and virtual machines. This tool should also integrate with modern storage-systems to take the full advantage of fast-cloning servers for rapid and automated provisioning. It should have an open- and plugg-able architecture so that custom third-party utilities can be integrated in an easy way to combine them into a single-management console for the whole IT infra-structure.
If you are interested in such a tool you may want to take a look at the openQRM project which is exactly providing this kind of framework.
The Pross.eu virtualisation conference concentrates on participants who want to discover and study the available virtualisation options, and so determine which solution is best adapted to their environment. It will takes place 22+23 january 2008 in Brussel and I am happy to announce a presentation for this event which will be about :
"Conform deployment of virtual and physical machines with openQRM and Xen"
Got interested in "self balancing robots" and built myslef a "mylegway" based on the descriptions at http://www.philohome.com/nxtway/nxtway.htm Instead of using the NBC (next byte code) firmware of the original "NXTway" i developed my own balancing code using NQC (not quite C). What a fun :)
Yesterday i used our Wii to initiate a cheap phone call via voice-over-ip.
What a fun :) Here how it works :
- switch the tv to the Wii - start the Wii internet channel - go to www.voipstunt.com (our sip-provider) - login with your username and password - click on phone2phone - type your phone number in the first field - type the destination phone number in the second field - press "connect"
This will make your phone ring and when you pick up it will connect you to the destihnation number using cheap voice-over-ip rates.
... thought a bit more about it and it could also be used to make person A call person B which will kind of confuse them. (no, please do not ! I did not recommend this to anybody).
Anyway i found out that i can even initiate such a phone2phone connection via an SMS from my mobile phone. Very useful to save money for high international mobile phone rates especially when travelling.
This is a short report from the T-DOSE linux-conference which took place last weekend (13./14.10.2007) in Eindhoven/Netherland.Looking forward to the congress i arrived in Eindhoven on Saturday morning. Remembering the last year T-DOSE was a really nice and funny event so i was happy that i was invited to give a talk about "Automated rapid deployment in modern data-centers" there. (please find the slides here).
I found out was that T-DOSE moved to a new location at Fontys. ;) of course i first went to the old location to find out about that. Stupid Matt, better read the congress information more carefully next time. The new location was fine, a bit smaller but more comfortable. Directly joined the talk about Nagios and Cacti which was interesting. Met a lot of familiar people and also people i just knew from email until then. Always great and funny to actually meet those people in person. e.g. i met with Tarry S., a virtualization specialist, with whom i worked on some openQRM related projects before via internet. What a fun :) My presentation went fine and the audience happy. Here some pics of the talk :
Great to see people being amazed by openQRM's features. Happy that everything went fine with my talk i then fully enjoyed the rest of the T-DOSE conference. The social event in the evening was well organized in a nice Greek-restaurant. Later we went to an irish pub on the opposite of the street. Kris B. and me were actually the last guests there when they closed at 2.00 a.m.
On sunday i joined some more presentations, most interesting was the one from Daniel de Kok talking about "Virtualizaiton techniques in CentOS". At all i had a great time at T-DOSE and can just recomment this congress to anybody who likes high-quality presentations compared with nice social events.
Many thanks to the T-DOSE team, the friendly staff and especially to Jean-Paul for organizing this event !
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