Sunday, February 21, 2010

Taking the plunge

In my pursuit of experimenting with as many virtualization options as possible, I'm upgrading my box to Ubuntu 10.4 (yeah, it's only Alpha at the moment) so that I can try out the Eucalyptus and Xen offerings. If I disappear for awhile, it's probably a safe bet that I've done something horribly wrong to my rig. More later.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Xen

Now have Xen installed/tweaked to the point where I like it. I will probably end up using Xen full time because:
  • my hardware isn't young enough to support native virtualization
  • OS virtualization doesn't support mixed environments
  • full virtualization tends to bog down on my older equipment (VirtualBox, VMware)
  • ESXi is overkill for my hard ware (need a second box for it to be useable)
  • KVM is a bit too light

That leaves Xen. I picked up "The Book of Xen" at the recent ShmooCon and have played with the CentOS version enough that I want to try the Debian version and play with DTC-Xen. If it allows access to some of my not-normally-supported-in-VM hardware (and it looks like it will), I'll probably make the switch permanent.

Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Note to self: when building Xen VMs, choose the manual IP configuration and add that IP to the exceptions list on the firewall (the part that I forgot). Took two hours to figure that out.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Update

Went to Shmoo, survived the snow storm (we need a snowpacolypse t-shirt), said hello to publishers, bought a few disks and a couple books, and argued with one speaker. Realized that a number of friends are afraid of snow (y'all are chicken!). Generally had a good time. Busted my hump all this week to make up for taking last Friday off.

Trying to figure out how to (safely) mention S.E.L.F. to wife. Gained some spouse points by putting together an intracate "some assembly required" desk for her. Torn between mentioning next conference or need for 2-meter transceiver.

Hope she's not reading this.