In cooperation with the openQRM-Team Sivakumar Shanmugasundaram successfully ported the openQRM-Server to the Solaris Operation System.
Click here for the official announcement
Big thanks to Siva for this great contribution !!
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007
Pross.eu virtualisation conference
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"
Please find more details about Profoss.eu at :
http://www.profoss.eu/events/january-2008-virtualisation/
cu in Brussel !
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
self balancing robot
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 :)
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 :)
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Make a phone call with the Wii
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.
enjoy,
Matt
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.
enjoy,
Matt
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Report: T-DOSE 2007 / openQRM presentation
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 !
Matt
urls:
T-DOSE 2007 - http://www.t-dose.org
openQRM - http://www.openqrm.org
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 !
Matt
urls:
T-DOSE 2007 - http://www.t-dose.org
openQRM - http://www.openqrm.org
Saturday, August 18, 2007
openQRM and Iscsi courses at Linuxhotel
Just arranged two courses at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany.
The first one is about Iscsi and cluster-filesstems (from the 8.10. to 10.10.2007), the second about the openQRM data-center management platform (from the 26.11. to the 28.11.2007).
You can find more details about these two courses at :
http://www.linuxhotel.de/kurs/openqrm/index.html
and
http://www.linuxhotel.de/kurs/san_und_cluster_dateisysteme/index.html
The courses are planned to be held in german language. Anyway please do not hesitate to join even if not familiar with the german language. I am sure we can arrange something for english speaking participants.
Hope to see you at Linuxhotel !
The first one is about Iscsi and cluster-filesstems (from the 8.10. to 10.10.2007), the second about the openQRM data-center management platform (from the 26.11. to the 28.11.2007).
You can find more details about these two courses at :
http://www.linuxhotel.de/kurs/openqrm/index.html
and
http://www.linuxhotel.de/kurs/san_und_cluster_dateisysteme/index.html
The courses are planned to be held in german language. Anyway please do not hesitate to join even if not familiar with the german language. I am sure we can arrange something for english speaking participants.
Hope to see you at Linuxhotel !
Saturday, August 11, 2007
How openQRM helps to save the climate
Everybody is talking about the climate change and how to save the world by reducing pollution and energy-consumption. How openQRM can help ?
I thought about it a while and came to the conclusion that openQRM actively supports reducing the power-consumption by its following key features:
1. Server consolidation
With its automated provisioning technics openQRM takes server consolidation to the next level. By abstracting the data-center services into virtual environments including their hard- and software-profile plus deployment parameters such as number of systems, cpu/memory requirements, high-availability and eventual service-level agreements openQRM assists the system-administrator to find unused and/or under-utilized resources to either power them down or to migrate their services to other servers.
2. Service consolidation
openQRM supports to automatically consolidate critical services in a high-available way. In an active/passive setup openQRM will automatically fail-over its server-services so that services integrated within openQRM via a plugin automatically gain high-availability.
Let's have an example with the following critical services in a data-center :
dhcpd-server for ip-address assignment
tftp-server for network booting
puppet-server for configuration management
nagios-server for enhanced monitoring
linuxcoe-server for automatic installations
Normally a system-administrator would setup 5 dedicated servers plus 5 hot-standbys to provide high-availability in active/passive mode.
==> This means 10 physical servers.
With openQRM you have (at least) 2 options :
I) Consolidating all services on the openQRM-server
1 openQRM-server with the dhcpd-, tftpd-, puppet-,
nagios- and linuxcoe-plugins installed
1 hot-standby for the openQRM-server
In case of a fail-over openQRM will automatically take over the services from all installed/enabled plugins.
==> This would reduce the amount of needed systems from 10 to 2
II) Using the high-availability pool of openQRM
1 openQRM-server
1 hot-standby to have high-availability for the main management system.
5 dedicated systems to deploy the dhcpd, tftpd, puppet, nagios and linuxcoe server
1 hot-standby for all managed servers.
==> This would reduce the amount of needed systems from 10 to 8
with the option to add even more services in high-availability mode without the need to add more hot-standbys (of course it is an option to add more hot-standbys)
3. Migrating to virtual-machines
Another possibility to consolidate services of a data-center is to migrate them from physical systems to virtual machines using various, different virtualization methods. openQRM support all current mainstream virtualization technologies (VMware, Xen, Linux-VServer and QEMU/KVM) and gives the system-administrator a strong tool to move from physical to virtual. openQRM's unique virtualization layer, called "partition engine", is a logical abstraction to physical and virtual resources and conforms the different virtualization technologies within a single management platform. That means the system-administrator can select the virtualization method which fits best for each specific service and may decide at any time to migrate it from p2v, back from v2p and also from one virtualization type to another by just changing the resource-type of a virtual-environment in its profile.
Let's come back to our example. Here one more option using virtualization :
III) Using virtualization for service consolidation
1 openQRM-server
1 hot-standby to have high-availability for the main management system
1 system to deploy a virtualization-host on
1 hot-standby for the virtualization-host
In this setup the system-administrator will create and start 5 virtual machines on the virtualization-host. On each of those partitions of the virtualization-host one of the 5 servers (dhcpd, tftpd, puppet, nagios and linuxcoe) will be deployed. Additional the system-administrator may create additional 1-5 (or more) partitions on the virtualization-host acting as hot-standbys for the 5 critical (virtualied) servers. In case of a error e.g. of the puppet-server the puppet-server will automatically fail-over to another (hot-standby) partition. In case of a failure of the virtualization-host openQRM will automatically fail-over the virtualization-host to its extra (physical) hot-standby.
==> This would reduce the amount of needed systems from 10 to 4
with the option to migrate more services to virtual-machines.
4. Power-management plugins
Last but not least openQRM provides plugins for remote power-management of the managed systems. That allows openQRM to automatically shutdown and power-off unused resources and power them on just when they are needed.
5. Summary
All those abilities of openQRM allows IT-departments to decrease their number of physical systems while keeping, even increasing, the manageability, high-availability and automated monitoring facilities of their services by other, plug-able features for openQRM. This means less systems which are consuming power. It also means that less warmth is produced in the data-center. This again results that less energy is consumed by the cooling-systems of the data-center.
Link to the openQRM website
Link to the openQRM project
I thought about it a while and came to the conclusion that openQRM actively supports reducing the power-consumption by its following key features:
1. Server consolidation
With its automated provisioning technics openQRM takes server consolidation to the next level. By abstracting the data-center services into virtual environments including their hard- and software-profile plus deployment parameters such as number of systems, cpu/memory requirements, high-availability and eventual service-level agreements openQRM assists the system-administrator to find unused and/or under-utilized resources to either power them down or to migrate their services to other servers.
2. Service consolidation
openQRM supports to automatically consolidate critical services in a high-available way. In an active/passive setup openQRM will automatically fail-over its server-services so that services integrated within openQRM via a plugin automatically gain high-availability.
Let's have an example with the following critical services in a data-center :
dhcpd-server for ip-address assignment
tftp-server for network booting
puppet-server for configuration management
nagios-server for enhanced monitoring
linuxcoe-server for automatic installations
Normally a system-administrator would setup 5 dedicated servers plus 5 hot-standbys to provide high-availability in active/passive mode.
==> This means 10 physical servers.
With openQRM you have (at least) 2 options :
I) Consolidating all services on the openQRM-server
1 openQRM-server with the dhcpd-, tftpd-, puppet-,
nagios- and linuxcoe-plugins installed
1 hot-standby for the openQRM-server
In case of a fail-over openQRM will automatically take over the services from all installed/enabled plugins.
==> This would reduce the amount of needed systems from 10 to 2
II) Using the high-availability pool of openQRM
1 openQRM-server
1 hot-standby to have high-availability for the main management system.
5 dedicated systems to deploy the dhcpd, tftpd, puppet, nagios and linuxcoe server
1 hot-standby for all managed servers.
==> This would reduce the amount of needed systems from 10 to 8
with the option to add even more services in high-availability mode without the need to add more hot-standbys (of course it is an option to add more hot-standbys)
3. Migrating to virtual-machines
Another possibility to consolidate services of a data-center is to migrate them from physical systems to virtual machines using various, different virtualization methods. openQRM support all current mainstream virtualization technologies (VMware, Xen, Linux-VServer and QEMU/KVM) and gives the system-administrator a strong tool to move from physical to virtual. openQRM's unique virtualization layer, called "partition engine", is a logical abstraction to physical and virtual resources and conforms the different virtualization technologies within a single management platform. That means the system-administrator can select the virtualization method which fits best for each specific service and may decide at any time to migrate it from p2v, back from v2p and also from one virtualization type to another by just changing the resource-type of a virtual-environment in its profile.
Let's come back to our example. Here one more option using virtualization :
III) Using virtualization for service consolidation
1 openQRM-server
1 hot-standby to have high-availability for the main management system
1 system to deploy a virtualization-host on
1 hot-standby for the virtualization-host
In this setup the system-administrator will create and start 5 virtual machines on the virtualization-host. On each of those partitions of the virtualization-host one of the 5 servers (dhcpd, tftpd, puppet, nagios and linuxcoe) will be deployed. Additional the system-administrator may create additional 1-5 (or more) partitions on the virtualization-host acting as hot-standbys for the 5 critical (virtualied) servers. In case of a error e.g. of the puppet-server the puppet-server will automatically fail-over to another (hot-standby) partition. In case of a failure of the virtualization-host openQRM will automatically fail-over the virtualization-host to its extra (physical) hot-standby.
==> This would reduce the amount of needed systems from 10 to 4
with the option to migrate more services to virtual-machines.
4. Power-management plugins
Last but not least openQRM provides plugins for remote power-management of the managed systems. That allows openQRM to automatically shutdown and power-off unused resources and power them on just when they are needed.
5. Summary
All those abilities of openQRM allows IT-departments to decrease their number of physical systems while keeping, even increasing, the manageability, high-availability and automated monitoring facilities of their services by other, plug-able features for openQRM. This means less systems which are consuming power. It also means that less warmth is produced in the data-center. This again results that less energy is consumed by the cooling-systems of the data-center.
Link to the openQRM website
Link to the openQRM project
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