Vmware is the leader in the infrastructure Virtualization space with industry’s first bare-metal X86 architecture that was launched in 2001, and now into the fourth generation of Vsphere infrastructure suite. Vsphere is now a fully mature production ready enterprise class Virtualization solution with a customer base that includes all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies. Their solution stands out in terms of reliability, scalability, flexibility and efficiency.

We’ll now see what are the key differentiators that gives Vmware its competetive edge over other virtualization solution providers like Xen or Hyper-V.

• Vmware’s greatest advantage is its bare-metal Hypervisor that lays the foundation for its Virtualization platform. The hypervisor with a small disk footprint of 70Mb and its non-reliance on any general purpose OS makes its less error prone, coupled with the direct driver model that gives it higher performance and greater virtual machine density.

• Its a highly reliable platform that gives maximum uptime advantages by making use of technologies such as distributed resource scheduling, logical resource pools, Vmotion, hot-add resources and Storage motion, HA , Fault tolerance and NIC teaming. Many competetors such as Xen or Hyper-V do not come with the complete capabilities or offers limited features compared to whats offered by Vmware.

• Vmware’s management tool or the vCenter is a comprehensive and completely SLA-driven virtualization management platform catering to all requirements of managing the datacenter such as cluster and resource pool management, BCDR setups, DRS, HA and Fault Tolerance, Vmotion rules, patch management, vmSafe and vShield zones and distributed virtual switch and NIC teaming rules.

• Vmware also offers the largest hardware compatibility list compared to other competitors supporting more than 1000 servers, 500 HBAs, 300 network I/O cards and more than 53 guest operating systems, the highest in the industry. It also has partnership alliances with more than 400 enterprise software vendors giving it the broadest support for applications.

• Though Vmware’s per license costs may look to be more expensive than Xen or Hyper-V solutions, on the long run Vmware offers unparalleled Return On Investment (ROI), lowered capital expenditures (Capex) and reduced operating expenses (Opex) in the data center and above all, lower cost per application by utilizing features such as CPU and memory Over-Commit,transparent page sharing, thin provisioning of virtual disks giving Vmware a very high VM density ,better performance and consolidation ratios.

Vmware is by far the most trusted and reliable Virtualization platform available now for production systems and reported by Garnet as the leader in this industry. The stability of Vmware was rightly said by Redmondmag.com that the least stable part of ESX is usually the administrator. The code is virtually bomb-proof. Citrix Xen and Hyper-V are catching up with their virtualization features but still comes with a lot of limitations that needs to be taken care of to bridge the gap with Vmware.

If we can get the Ubuntu 10.04 latest server edition, this can be done easily. As it comes with an option to select whether we need to setup a normal server or Ubuntu Cluster. On the main cluster controller we can select the cluster option and also need to specify the IP range needed for the nodes. So, once the cluster server is setup, while installing on nodes, it automatically detects the node and necessary ssh-key authentication also will be done. We just need to give which IP from the range has to be used for the node.

Before starting would like to mention that, Eucalyptus has 3 major packages.

Cluster Controller:  provides support for the virtual network overlay

Cloud Controller: includes the front-end services and the Walrus storage system.

Node Controller: that interacts with XEN to manage individual VMs.

While doing the setup from package installation:

Cloud/Cluster/Storage/Walrus Front End Server(s)

1. Need to install Ubuntu server 10.04.

2. Necessary packages has to be installed

sudo apt-get install eucalyptus-cloud eucalyptus-cc eucalyptus-walrus eucalyptus-sc

While installting these packages we would be getting options to define the IP range and to specify the server’s hostname.

3. On the nodes also we need to install the server and update the archives.

4. Necessary packages has to be installed.

sudo apt-get install eucalyptus-nc

5. Next we need to set the primary interface of the node as a bridge. While creating virtual network interfaces, the node controller will add it to this bridge. Usually a bridge can be set by making below given modifications in the /etc/network/interfaces file.

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0
bridge_fd 9
bridge_hello 2
bridge_maxage 12
bridge_stp off

Once this is set need to restart the networking daemon.

6. In the /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf VNET_BRIDGE has to be changed to $bridge. Then restart the node controller using

/etc/init.d/eucalyptus-nc restart

7. Now, the cloud controller and the all other controller like node, storage and warlus controller should be able to communicate each other via ssh keys. This has to be enabled. While installing cluster using 10.04 UEC cd, ssh-key authentication is done automatically.

To enable ssh keys, on the target controller (node, storage or warlus)

-> temporarily set a password for the eucalyptus user

sudo passwd eucalyptus

-> Then from the cloud controller

sudo -u eucalyptus ssh-copy-id -i ~eucalyptus/.ssh/id_rsa.pub eucalyptus@<IP_OF_NODE>

-> Then we can remove the temporary password.

sudo passwd -d eucalyptus

8. Next step is to define controller’s IP Addresses in the eucalyptus configuration file and then register

In /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf file on the cluster controller

Define the shell variable CC_NAME in /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus-cc.conf

Define the shell variable CC_IP_ADDR in /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus-ipaddr.conf, as a space separated list of one or more IP addresses.

Define the shell variable WALRUS_IP_ADDR in /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus-ipaddr.conf, as a single IP address.

Define the shell variable SC_IP_ADDR in /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus-ipaddr.conf, as a space separated list of one or more IP addresses.

9. Now for each controller, we need to start the publication

sudo start eucalyptus-walrus-publication (Warlus controller)

sudo start eucalyptus-sc-publication (Storage controller)

sudo start eucalyptus-cc-publication (Cluster controller)

sudo start eucalyptus-nc-publication (Node controller)

10. Need to start the listeners on the cluster and cloud controllers

sudo start uec-component-listener

The regitration process can be verified by checking the log file /var/log/eucalyptus/registration.log

11. Now since the cloud is setup and the controllers have started communicating, the users of the cloud would need to donwload thier login credentials.

From your web browser access the URL: https://<cloud-controller-ip-address>:8443/

For the first time, username ‘admin’ and password ‘admin’ can be used(you will be prompted to change your password).

Then follow the on-screen instructions to update the admin password and email address.

Once the first time configuration process is completed, click the ‘credentials’ tab located in the top-left portion of the screen.

Click the ‘Download Credentials’ button to get your certificates

Save them to ~/.euca

Unzip the downloaded zipfile into a safe location (~/.euca) unzip -d ~/.euca mycreds.zip

12. Next need to setup EC2 API and AMI tools on your server using X.509 certificates.

For this on the cloud controller sudo apt-get install euca2ools

13. Next step is to install necessary images on the nodes. There will be few default stored images, we can either use it or else usually an image according to the needs would be created and installed.

The cloud is setup and applications are deployed to it, we would need to make changes accordingly.

The main advantage of cloud computing is that both small and medium sized businesses can instantly obtain the benefits of the enormous infrastructure without having to implement and administer it directly. This also permits accessibility to multiple data centers anywhere on the globe. It also means that as the need for resources increases, companies can add additional service as and when needed from the cloud computing vendor.

Xen is a virtual machine monitor that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.

Here are the steps to install Xen on CentOS:

1. Execute the following commands to install Xen and Xen kernel.

[root@localhost ~]#yum install kernel-xen xen
Installing: xen-libs ######################### [1/9]
Installing: kernel-xen ######################### [2/9]
Installing: dnsmasq ######################### [3/9]
Installing: libvirt ######################### [4/9]
Installing: libvirt-python ######################### [5/9]
Installing: python-virtinst ######################### [6/9]
Updating : util-linux ######################### [7/9]
Installing: xen ######################### [8/9]
Cleanup : util-linux ######################### [9/9]
Installed: kernel-xen.i686 0:2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 xen.i386 0:3.0.3-80.el5_3.2
Dependency Installed: dnsmasq.i386 0:2.48-1.el5.rf libvirt.i386 0:0.3.3-14.el5_3.1 libvirt-python.i386 0:0.3.3-14.el5_3.1 python-virtinst.noarch 0:0.300.2-12.el5 xen-libs.i386 0:3.0.3-80.el5_3.2
Dependency Updated: util-linux.i386 0:2.13-0.50.el5
Complete!

2. Once the installation is over, you will find the new kernel “Xen kernel (vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.1.4.el5xen)” in the grub.conf file.

[root@localhost xinetd.d]#cat /etc/grub.conf
default=1
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,7)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /xen.gz-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5
module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
module /initrd-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen.img
title Linux (2.6.18-8.el5)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-8.el5.img
title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

3. Change the default value to 0 in the file ‘/etc/grub.conf’

default=0

4. Create an nfs mount /root/install and copy the contents of the CentOS DVD contents to /root/install directory.

[root@localhost ~]#mkdir /root/install
[root@localhost ~]#mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd
[root@localhost ~]#cp -prf /mnt/cd/* /root/install
[root@localhost ~]# vi /etc/exports

/root/install *(rw,sync)

[root@localhost ~]# exportfs -a

5. Create a new directory for a virtual machine “/vm” and reboot the server.

6. Once you reboot the machine, the system will now have the new Xen kernel.

[root@localhost opt]# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen #1 SMP Thu May 7 11:51:15 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

7. To check if Xen has started, execute the command :

[root@localhost ~]# xm list
Name ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 736 2 r—– 300.4

8. You can use the tool “virt-install” for creating virtual machines as follows :

[root@localhost ~]#virt-install

It will come up with a few questions such as :

What is the name of your virtual machine?
vm01

How much RAM should be allocated (in megabytes)
256

What would you like to use as the disk (path)?
/vm/vm01.img

How large would you like the disk (/vm/vm01.img) to be (in gigabytes)?
5

Would you like to enable graphics support? (yes or no)
no

What is the install location?
/root/install ( This is the nfs mount)

9. This would create the vm01 configuration file /etc/xen/vm01 for us (in dom0).

It should look like this:

[root@localhost ~]#vi /etc/xen/vm01
name = “vm01″
uuid = “219eaf21-e688-611f-53ac-f28f44dd73e3″
maxmem = 256
memory = 256
vcpus = 1
bootloader = “/usr/bin/pygrub”
on_poweroff = “destroy”
on_reboot = “restart”
on_crash = “restart”
vfb = [ ]
disk = [ "tap:aio:/vm/vm01,xvda,w" ]
vif = [ "mac=00:16:3e:6d:88:1e,bridge=xenbr0" ]

10. To log in to the virtual machine, use the following command:-

[root@localhost ~]#xm console vm01

That’s it !

Some important Xen commands:

1. xm create -c /path/to/config

This command is used to start a virtual machine

For example, xm create /etc/xen/vm01

2. xm shutdown

Command to stop a virtual machine

For example, xm shutdown vm01

3. xm destroy

Stop a virtual machine immediately without shutting it down

For example, xm destroy vm01

4. xm list

List all running systems

5. xm console

Log in on a virtual machine

For example, xm console vm01

7. xm help

List of all commands

Image Source: Kannada Prabha

Owner of LxLabs, K T Ligesh (32) , passed away at his residence in Bangalore last night. Initial reports state that he committed suicide. As per the news-reports, it appears that Ligesh , who was a guitarist as well, was going through a difficult time personally.

LxLabs is the creator of HyperVM – optimized virtualization technology which runs on both Xen and OpenVZ, “Host In a Box” solution - LxAdmin/Kloxo for Web hosting companies, server owners, resellers etc. Recently, there have been some serious  vulnerability reports concerning their software.

Ligesh was an exceptional software engineer, and the mastermind behind all the well known software products his company produced. His stellar engineering talent is evident in the way he created innovative software products that were quick to rise in popularity and adoption within the industry, capturing the imagination of thousands of industry watchers. InstaCarma and its Directors shared a cordial relationship with Ligesh. His brilliance and intelligence always shone through in all our interactions with him.

Details regarding who will take over the operations of the company or the development/maintenance of the software is not available at the moment. Also, it is not known what the server owners who use LxLabs’ software should do in the wake of this news. While further updates are awaited, Ligesh is in our thoughts and prayers . May his soul rest in peace!