Review at amazon: VirtualBox 3.1 - Beginner's Guide

Many postings on this blog are related to virtualization technology. Some about VMWare and most about VirtualBox. This weekend i read this book:

Here a summary from packtpub.com about this book:

• Download and install VirtualBox in a Windows/Linux environment
• Create your virtual machine on VirtualBox, using Ubuntu Linux Desktop/Windows XP as the "guest" operating system
• Share folders and pass information between the host and the guest operating systems
• Explore the Hardware 3D Acceleration feature available in Windows and Linux guests
• Revert the state of a virtual machine using snapshots
• Architect a virtual machine using fixed and dynamically expanding hard drive images and choose the appropriate hard disk controller
• Clone hard disks using the Virtual Media Manager
• Connect a virtual machine to the Internet and a local network using the default NAT mode
• Illustrations for using WordPress, Drupal, and File Server virtual appliances
• Set up a headless server and create, manage, and run virtual machines in that server from a remote PC

But in this list there are some important points missing like

• Using Seamless Windows (using windows from the virtual machine within the host desktop)
• Shared folders between guest and host
• Configuring the disk controller type for a guest (IDE <-> SATA <-> SCSI)
• Snapshottings guest machines

My summary: VirtualBox 3.1 is a good book with many configurations including detailed screenshots. For Beginners it is very easy to get everything running. Experts should skip the chapter 1 to 3, because there you can only find howto install a guest (like ubuntu, windows 7, damn small linux) or how to browse inside a guest or using openoffice. But the rest even experts should read!
If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (It is written in german, sorry).

"Oracle has finalized the Sun transaction and the deal has closed."

The title of this blogging is from the offical website from oracle "Overview and Frequently Asked Questions for the Developer Community".
So what are the important answers for these questions?

For the near future, all these sites [Sun Developer Network, java.sun.com, and BigAdmin] will remain in their current form.

Java.net is an important part of the community, and Oracle will continue
to invest in it—as well as look for new and better ways to support its
membership

NetBeans.org will continue to be available at the usual URL—no changes.

We will also communicate important admin/Solaris-related news through
BigAdmin's existing newsletter.

But what has changed with closing the deal?
If you try www.sun.com you get redirected to www.oracle.com and you can find the hardware here:

And after some clicks you will see something like this:

If you want to get the sun hardware more quickly, you can use http://catalogs.sun.com.

Sun's hardware at Oracle: cont'd

After my last posting there was another announcement from Oracle regarding SUN hardware and Oracle software:

At http://streaming.oracle.com/ebn/download/8176478.pdf the full presentation is provided by Oracle.

Please note that Exadata Version 2 consists of

x86 CPU cores

So Oracle does not only commit the SUNs SPARC architecture...

VirtualBox 2.2: Network configuration (Bridged, NAT, ...)

This week SUN released VirtualBox 2.2.

Many features were added (copied from www.virtualbox.org):

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export (see chapter 3.8, Importing and exporting virtual machines, User Manual page 55)
• Host-only networking mode (see chapter 6.7, Host-only networking, User Manual page 88)
• Hypervisor optimizations with significant performance gains for high context switching rates
• Raised the memory limit for VMs on 64-bit hosts to 16GB
• VT-x/AMD-V are enabled by default for newly created virtual machines
• USB (OHCI & EHCI) is enabled by default for newly created virtual machines (Qt GUI only)
• Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts
• Shared folders for Solaris and OpenSolaris guests
• OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests (see chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), User Manual page 70)
• Added C API in addition to C++, Java, Python and Web Services

Very useful are the changes for network configuration. Before version 2.2 configuring the network was a complex task (e.g. ubuntu documentation).
Now you can enable the networking via GUI:

You can choose

• Not attached (ok - this worked before)
• NAT
  
• Bridged Network
  
• Internal Network
• Host-only Network
  

After that the screwdriver leads to the following window:

After this window you have to start your guest system and the network should be up and running...

For installing VirtualBox read this posting. If you want to migrate a VMWare image to VirtualBox click here.

Using VMWare Images with Virtualbox

After installing VMWare 2.0 and VirtualBox 2.0.2 i wanted to make a comparison of both virtualization engines. I thought about installing the same guest in both software stacks. But this seemed like too much work ;-). So i started to google about migrating a guest from VMWare to Virtualbox.
I found this helpful blog.
So it is very easy. I created a new Virtual Machine like shown in my posting about VirtualBox and at the step Virtual Hard Disk

i chose Existing...

and added the vmdk-file from the debian-guest, which i used with VMWare Server 2.0.
So i thought, everything was ready but after pressing start the system stopped with:

Waiting for root file system

After a short search, i found out, that VMWare prefers guest systems with SCSI hdd controllers and VirtualBox can only mount IDE hard disks. But this was not really a problem. I started the guest on VMWare and changed the following lines:
in /boot/grub/menu.lst
from kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro
to root=/dev/hda1
and i changed in /etc/fstab all entries with sda to hda. After these changes, the guest bootet without a problem in my VirtualBox.
But it is clear, that with this configuration, it will not run on VMWare. So i changed in the .vmx file all entries form scsi0:0 to ide0:0 and in the .vmdk file the parameter adapterType=lsilogic to ide. Now the guest os is able to start in both virtualization servers.
So everything is ready for a comparison and there is an easy way for migrating from VMWare to VirtualBox, if i want to move...
If you to know how to configure networking via GUI, read this posting.

SUN: Solaris Cluster (SUN Cluster) is now Opensource

SUN released the source code of the Sun Cluster on www.opensolaris.org under the name High Availability Clusters.
The project page can be found here.

If you are really interested try the wiki or the related blog.
The Open HA Cluster source code is available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). For more information follow this link to wikipedia.

Here some statements from sun about Solaris Cluster:

Previously known as Sun Cluster, the Solaris Cluster framework extends high availability features of Solaris - it includes Solaris Cluster, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, developer tools and support for commercial and open-source applications through Solaris Cluster agents. The integrated software provides high availability and disaster recovery for local, campus, metropolitan and worldwide clusters.

By tightly coupling Sun's servers, storage and networking solutions, Solaris Cluster provides the maximum level of service availability and performance for a cluster system.
The servers (nodes) in a cluster communicate through private interconnects. These interconnects carry important cluster information (data as well as a cluster "heartbeat"). This heartbeat lets the servers in the cluster monitor the health of the other servers within the cluster, ensuring that each server is "alive". If one of the servers goes offline and its heartbeat disappears, the rest of the devices in the cluster isolate the server and "fail-over" any application or data from the failing node to another node. This fail-over process is quick and transparent to users of the application. By exploiting the redundancy in the cluster, Solaris Cluster ensures the highest levels of availability.

Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition software enables a multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed Solaris Clusters. In the event that a primary cluster goes down, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition enables sysadmins to start up automatically business applications with replicated data on the secondary Solaris Cluster.

I think Solaris Cluster is an alternative solution to Oracle Clusterware to achieve high availability for your software stack. But keep in mind, that the configuration of these cluster software stacks has to be planned and maintained carefully...

SPARC IIIi: End of Life for SUN Fire V125, V215, V245 and V445

SUN Microsystems announced end of life (EOL) for V125, V215, V245 and V445. For SUN Fire servers powered by UltraSPARC IIIi last shipment is July 11, 2008. After this date only SUN Netra servers with UltraSPARC IIIi processors will be available.
If you are interested in the SPARC family follow this link to wikipedia.
SUN provides several upgrade paths:

Move to UltraSPARC T1 or T2 if single thread performance is not critical (e.g.:Sun Fire T1000 Server, Sun Fire T2000 Server)

Move to SPARC IV+/IV single thread performance is critical and you have to stay on SPARC architecture (e.g.: Sun Fire V490 Server, Sun Fire E2900 Server)

Move to AMD Opterion if single thread performance is critical and you only have to stay on Solaris (e.g.: Sun Fire X4200 Server, Sun Fire X4200 Server)

SUN: open sourcing Small Programmable Object Technology

Today SUN announced that they are going to open source SUN Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT). For the press release take a look at the SUN press room.



The target of SPOT is

Sun has been very successful in spreading Java to over 6 billion devices throughout the world. Well over a billion cell phones run Java. We in Sun Labs are interested in what comes next. In order to help make sure that the next generation of gadgets is based Sun technology, we developed Sun Small Programable Object Technology (SPOT)

If you are interested you can order a development kit for 299$ and you will get two SUN Spots and a base station. Bot devices with processor, radio, sensor board and battery and the base station only with processor and radio.
Here the parameters of the device:
180MHz 32-bit ARM920T core processor
512K RAM
4M Flash
2.4GHz radio with an integrated antenna

But if you only want to write software without getting in touch with the hardware you can try to use the emulator (read this pdf)

The API and some tutorials are available at this site. So if you are interested in programming a PDA like device download the SDK and the emulator and go ahead...
For more appetizers take a look at this site (some movies about SPOT at youtube).

I hope this was enough to start you up ;-)

SUN buys MySQL

Just read on Jonathan Schwarz Blog that SUN buys MySQL.
SUN will pay 800.000.000$ for this aquisition.
Why have they done this step? Jonathan Schwarz says:

This puts products like MySQL in an interesting position. They're a part of every web company's infrastructure, to be sure. And though many of the more traditional companies use MySQL (from auto companies to financial institutions to banks and retailers), many have been waiting for a Fortune 500 vendor willing to step up, to provide mission critical global support.

and

With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. For startups and web 2.0 companies, to government agencies and traditional enterprises. This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. There's opportunity everywhere.

So we have four big players: Microsoft (SQL-Server, Windows Server, .NET), IBM (DB2 / Informix, AIX, Websphere), SUN (MySQL, Solaris, Sun Java System Application Server / GlassFish), and Oracle (Oracle DB / Berkeley DB / TimesTen, Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle Application Server). Each competitor has its own VM concept (for Oracle and SUN see further posting).
But the world does not is not only made of DB, OS and AS....

2XK is over...

The second xyna conference (2XK) is over. On the gip web pages you can take a look at the
official press release and get an impression.
There were keynotes given from SUN (a very humourous lecture about Wonderland Inc. from M. Jeske about second life for business), CISCO, Fokus and Oracle. AND of course the keynote from the director of the GIP research institute B. Reifenhäuser.

Here a short summary from the official agenda:

Xyna Service Factory: The fractal Telco-factory as the answer to the challenging defiances within Telco industrialization

Network abstraction as integral building block for fractal factories: Cisco next generation device and network management

Project Wonderland Inc. (Sun Laboratories): Web 2.0 for Enterprise Environments

From MetaSolv to Oracle Communication Service Fulfillment Suite: Driving Service Delivery Innovation in Communications

New FOKUS Open SOA Telco Playground: Evolution of Telco Service Platforms in Face of Network Convergence and SOA Principles

There are the first photos (including the party) available...

Sun Virtualization

Hmmm.. now i am getting confused:
At the Oracle Open World has Jonathan Schwartz (SUN CEO) announced SUNs Virtualization solution.
So this week Oracle launched its OVM as well as SUN launches its SUN xVM.

Here are some statements from SUN:

Host Windows, Linux and Solaris guest operating systems
Built using technology from the Xen open source project as well as Sun's Logical Domains
High availability and scalability
Advanced CPU and memory handling capabilities

At this link you can read further details about the SUN solution.
There is a community site at http://openxvm.org/.

So let's start with xVM? or OVM? or stay at VMWare or M$.....
(I am waiting for IBM eVM or iVM?)

IBM supports Solaris

What a strange world...
Have you read this press release?

IBM promotes Solaris on its xSeries server. Wow...
First SCO looses its battle against Linux and now IBM sells Solaris on its servers. What will happen tomorrow?
AIX on SPARC? MacOS on Itanium? MS Office on PalmOS?

Everything is possible ;-)