VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen - again!

The locations of this years VMworld 2011 have been announced at the vmworld.com site. It will be in Las Vegas (like in 2008) from August 29-September 1 and in Copenhagen, and I assume it will be in the Bella Center like last year, from October 18-20.

I did hear some rumors about Barcelona for the European conference but I must admit that, even though it's not as exotic, the conference in Copenhagen was very well organised with nice facilities and easy transportation.

Online backup for personal computer

For a while now I have been trying to persuade myself to start using an online backup service for my private documents, pictures, emails etc. The thing is that over the years I have, like most others I guess, built up quite a lot of personal data which it would be impossible to recreate should it be lost.

Until now I have backed up data to from the laptop to an external USB drive. This method works smoothly with the built-in backup software on the USB drive from Seagate. And I will be able to restore data should the disk fail or if I lost the laptop. However, for the most part the external disk with the backup data was, and is, lying just next to laptop. So in case of a break in, a thief would most likely take both the laptop and the usb disk. Or in case of a fire or other such extreme cases both laptop and backup will be lost. The risk is small but the impact, from my personal perspective, is rather high.

After looking online backup I found the following things which was reassuring:

Online backup seems to be a relatively mature market. There are quite a few players, and prices seem competitive. A one year subscription ranges from 50-100 US$.

Security seems to be in adequate . Most providers encrypt data before, while, and after it has been uploaded. Unfortunately, encryption is only protected by password (at least for the solution that I chose) so it's not this double security approach where it's something you have (like a RSA token or PKI) and something you know (the password). However, for my chosen solution, I first have to log in, and then I have to provide a strong password, which is not stored at the service provider, to acutally restore data.

Of the bigger players can be mentioned IDrive, Mozy, Carbonite, Crashplan, and BackBlaze. I read a few reviews and it seems that, a part for some minor differences, they offer pretty much the same service, so one should be pretty safe to choose either one of them.

Here's link to two reviews: From Notebook Review and from Digital Inspiration

I was leaning towards Crashplan mostly because the interface appealed to me and a colleague recommended it. However, I ended up choosing IDrive for the following reasons:

• It's been around for longer than the other players (you don't want your backup provider to go out of business).
• Phone support (when trouble hits it's always nice to be able to call someone...)
• Price was right for my needs (50 US$/year for one computer and 150 GB storage)
• Online browse and restore of files
• Continuous backup and file versioning
• Sufficient security
• Status reports via email

My experience after a weeks use is that maybe it is not the fanciest of interfaces, b

ut it gets the job done. After three or four days I had uploaded my ~25 GB of data over the ADSL connection and I have tested restore of files from the web interface successfully. And email notifications work.

On a final note I can mention that I have been using Dropbox for a while to be able to share files between computers and to be able to reach files online. It's limited to 2 GB in the free edition but it can be highly recommended. It supplements the backup application but it cannot substitute it in my opinion.

Installing a web server on an Amazon AWS free VM

In the previous post I described how you get a free linux VM in the Amazon AWS cloud up and running. This post will describe how you can use it for something practical.

Apt-get is not installed on this Micro Instance VM. So at first I tried to do a manual install of Apache by simply uploading the .tar.gz files to the VM via WinSCP and tried to run the .configure file. This didn't work as a C compiler was not installed on the system. I went on to look for GCC and got that installed and then I could install Apache. For some reason it didn't quite work, though. And also it's mayby a little too much work to get a web server up and running...

Then I stumbled upon the Yum command which is similar to Apt-get and which is actually pre-installed in the VM and is working out of the box.

With Yum, installation is a breeze. Issue the following commands:

#sudo yum install httpd
#sudo chkconfig httpd on
#sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start

The sudo command will not prompt you for a password but will let you execute commands as root. You can't su -root... (alternatively, you can try sudo -i to get a root shell)

If it complains about a missing C compiler, then install it this way:

#sudo yum install gcc

The web server installs its .conf file in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. There's is the usual test page displayed until you place an index.html file in the /var/www/html folder.

Free linux cloud VM with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Recently, Amazon announced that you can get a free linux VM for one year in their public cloud solution - Amazon Web Services (AWS). They call it a Micro Instance and it's got something like 1 vCPU, 600 MB of memory, and 10 GB storage, see specs here. You get full access to the VM via SSH but there's no console access as such.

So I decided to give it a try.

First, you need to create an AWS account (there's a link on the front page..). They need a valid creditcard for that. Then you log into the AWS Management Console. This requires you to register again. They had implemented a rather odd security feature where they call your mobile phone and you have to punch in a pin-number to confirm. I must admit that, for testing purposes, this wasn't the most smooth registration process.

Once into the AWS Management Console you're presented with a number of tabs. The first one is Amazon S3 which is an online file placeholder (i guess like an FTP server). To create your VM, go to the Amazon EC2 tab and click on Launch Instance (see below). This process is fairly simple. It is not quite easy, though, to see exactly which one is the free edition, but I just chose the minimum specs available to be on the safe side. And look for something like linux and Micro Instance.

Firewall rules are easy to configure via the web interface. You can add some pre-defined ports such as mail, web, etc. Port 22 is enabled by default.

A KPI keyset is generated (for authentication purposes) and you can download the .pem file to your local harddrive. They give an example of howto login via ssh from a console and use the generated key. Example:

ssh -i keyname.pem root@vmname.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

If you use this command will receive a login error as root cannot login directly. So just change 'root' in front of the @ with the, in the error message, suggested 'ec2-user'.

Once logged in you can execute commands as root with the 'sudo' command. It will not prompt for a password. Or alternatively use sudo -i to get a root console. But you can't su - root.

If you want to use Putty to acces the VM directly, then you have to convert the .pem file to a .ppk file. This is easily done using this guide.

To use the .ppk file, open Putty and go to SSH -> Auth and browse to the directory where you stored the file. And then you connect to the VM (saving the profile will save you some time at next login..). There's no password.

The same .ppk file can also be used for WinSCP which is handy for uploading files directly to the VM.

As you have a public DNS name, this can be used to create an eiasier to remember C-name DNS that you can point to the generated machine name.

So far so good. Now there's access via SSH. Then I tried to configure a simple web server. I'll describe that in the next post.

vMotion between firewalls

Currently, I'm setting up a new VMware cluster as the exsiting hardware needs to be retired. The new cluster is in another management zone (and in another vCenter). To minimise downtime I looked at doing vMotion between the two clusters.

What I did was to disconnect one host from vCenter. Then add the host to the other vCenter directly on the ip number. The host was not added to the newly created cluster, only to the datacenter. And then drag and drop VMs between the clusters (EVC was enabled).

There was a couple of things that had to be tweaked before it worked.

vMotion had to be done between firewalls. When doing this, there are two important things to remember:

1. Set the default gatway of the vMotion interface (via vSphere Client)

2. Open inbound/outbound on port 8000 TCP in the firewall (see ESX configuration guide, page 150).

Furthermore, I encountered another issue. A number of VMs had a vmxnet NIC (it's some old VMs...). When starting to vMotion there was a warning that vmxnet is not supported on target host which is ESX 4 (source was ESX 3.5). However, after vMotion, the vmxnet NIC still worked. I tried to update VMware Tools and virtual hardware version to v7 and that also worked. vmxnet is kept as NIC after upgrade.

Hands-on labs - that I did...

This post is mostly for myself to keep track of the labs that i did at VMworld 2010 and what struck me as useful features...

vSphere 4.1 - new features

Storage IO shares and limits. They're not quite there yet with Storage DRS but this is a first step.

DRS feature - possibility to keep one or more VMs bound to a specific host. This is practical in relation to licensing issues where you pay per physical core/socket in a cluster.

8 concurrent VMotions!

Better HA info with new Cluster info link. It will aggregate relevant HA info and display it in a window.

Scripting ESXi installation with PXE boot and get the files over the network from a tftp server looked pretty straight forward.

VMware View 4.5 - install and configure

Components: Main View Manager server (not the correct name, I believe..). Transfer server for offline clients. View agent installs on the VM. View client to connect to View Manager.

vCloud Director - install and configure

Basically a VM that install on top of your VI and communicates with vCenter. Works as administration unit and self service portal to customers/admins. Installs on a RHEL 5 U4 or up, 64-bit. Licensing is done per VM. vShield Manager is required.

Update Manager

Practical for host patching of course... Also relevant for upgrading VMware Tools and HW version. Tools and HW version can be done in a single script.

Thinapp 4.6 - new features

The new feature that IE6 can be packaged easily is very useful. If you package an app on WinXP it can be run on other OS'es, e.g. Win7, without modification. Every time I play around with Thinapp it always strikes me why we don't use it more...

PowerCLI 4.1

One of the first examples is a script to go through your VMs and find and delete all snapshots older than a given date - e.g. older than seven days. This example is spot on and something that we're working on imlementing as well.

vShield Zones

One thing that I noted in this lab is that vShield has a built in load balancer which was easy to configure. This could probably be a good substitute for MS NLB.

VMworld 2010 - Hands-on labs, first impressions

There's been a lot of talk about the hands-on labs at this years VMworld. Here in Copenhagen there are around 240 thin clients with each two screens running up against two datacenters in Florida and Virginia with a dedicated 100 Mbit line over the Atlantic. There's also a fail-over possibility to a datacenter in Europe, should an issue occur. The whole solution is based on a number of Lab Manager installations with a custom interface on top of it which has been built for the purpose.
So far, I have taken four labs, and I must admit that I'm impressed. It works so well that you're not even thinking about what is going on under the hood. What you're actually experiencing is that as soon as you're choosing a lab, then almost instantly you have two ESX servers and a number of VMs provisioned for you. A VMware employee told me that part of the custom code is calculating the most popular labs, and then pre-deploying a number of these up front as to reduce waiting time.
Furthermore, the whole user experience is pretty cool. They've made a GUI for choosing the labs, and on flatscreens around in the room you can see statistics such as most popular labs and total number of VMs created and labs completed (see pictures below).