Archive for August 2006
In my RSS feed from Slashdot I have just learnt that Xen and VMware are going to work together to create a common approach to the linux kernel and virtualisation. You can read about it here.
This is great news for reasons mentioned in the article. It’s also great news on another front, two companies (or sets of people) have realised that it’s better to work together for the greater good of their users.
Now I’m not so stupid as to think that’s the only reason they are doing it. It looks good and shows that they are listening to their customers (Oracle recently expressed its fustration at “their reluctance to work together”). But think about it this way – it’s better to have a percentage of a customers money than 0%. I’ve seen this in another company that I used to work for, they started to work with competitors letting them resell some of their products as part of a bundle with the competitiors products. Both companies won as both companies got a percentage of the profit instead of no money at all.
I suspect that VMware and Xen see it a similar way. By ensuring that a virtual machine will run on either companies product they get something instead of nothing.
For example, imagine a company starts to use virtual machines to run it’s servers. Previously they would have to select either of the companies products and that was used on all systems. One company gets 100% of the cost of this system. Now in the near future they will be able to pick the best bits from each of the companies products and each company gets a percentage of the cost of the overall system. It will be a smaller amount but at least they are getting something, and anything is better than 0%!
Everybody wins.
Now before somebody points out that Xen is free and you can download VMware Server for free please note the following:
- The artice is takling about hypervisors, and VMware Server is not a hypervisor. VMware ESX is a hypervisor and costs big bucks (Xen the product is open source).
- There is a lot more to a system than the actual product. Training, SLA’s and support are just a few examples of things that you may have to pay for.
Those things aside it’s good for us users, I just wonder when MIcrosoft will join the party…
For reasons I hope to announce in a few weeks I’m currently the owner of the the brand new D Sonny Ericson K800i. Don’t worry, I don’t have a new number 
I got the phone Friday afternoon and had a play with it that evening. Being a person who has always opted for Nokia phones in the past I did struggle with it for the first few hours. The naviagtion and layout of the menus is very different from a Nokia device. Still, I was able to work out how to do the important things, make calls, access my address book and send text messages.
On Saturday I continued to struggle until I came to the realisation that initial and main menu was designed like a computer, complete with Start Menu, task bar, and desktop shutcuts. With that and rapidly getting used to the keys I was able to use most functions of the K800i.
My primary hard disk has been on the blink for quite a while now, since at least the New Year. Once it’s up and running 8 times out of 10 it will be just fine, the other 2 times it crash with DMA errors in the logs and bring the whole OS with it. But if it doesn’t start up at boot time then I’m in for a 30 minutes of fun. It’s got to the stage now where I can’t put up with it any more.I had already moved /home onto another disk (actually I just removed the LVM partition from the LVM volume) so all that remained on it was the operating system. My plan was to move the OS from the primary disk to the second disk and then make that the primary disk. The current primary disk would then be left unplugged.
Yesterday I started by moving the important virtual machines to another computer, and the rest to my backup disk. This morning I did a backup of /home – once I managed to get the disk to boot! Then booting the Ubunut install CD I deleted the LVM volume, ordinarily I wouldn’t have to do this. On this occasion it was needed asI found the paritions on the second disk had become a little confused over where they were suposed to be. Once I had removed the LVM partitions and other partitions on the second disk I recreated them all, and rebuilt the LVM volume with partitions.
The current primary disk was mounted alongside the now empty second disk and a simple cp -axv oldroot/* newroot/ copied the OS from the primary disk to the second disk. Repeat for the /boot partition and the OS was on the new disk. The contents of /home where then restored from the backup onto the LVM partition.
I then shutdown the computer, unplugged the primary disk and made the second disk the primary disk. Booted the computer with the Ubuntu install CD again and mounted /boot and / onto top of the CD’s /boot and /. At this point the file system in /boot appeared at have a problem so I formatted it, rebooted with the original primary disk plugged in and copied it over again. This time it worked and I had a clean /boot file system. As I wasn’t changing where the disk would be booting from I didn’t have to change any boot files to point to the new disk, instead with help from the Gentoo wiki I ran grub and then typed
root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit
to install the MBR on the new primary disk. With anticipation I rebooted, only to be greated with “No OS can be found, please instert a medium to boot from and press any key“. Once again I booted from the Ubuntu install CD and mounted the partions. This time I tried the other suggestion on the Gento wiki: grub-install /dev/hda.
It worked! After rebooting the Grub screen came up and then started to boot Ubuntu, it stopped and scanned /home but once complete I was greeted by the logon screen. Success. I’ve now copied over the virtual machines and got these working. On the next reboot/shutdown I’ll unplug the old primary disk as I don’t trust it any more. At some point I’ll get around to running the S.M.A.R.T . tools and manufacturer utilites on it to see if they come up with anything. I don’t really want to waste a 120GB disk, but neither do I want to be using a near dead disk.
