Open Source Geek

Was it me? I dont know, I was loyal, but they left me anyway – well thats how it feels

Long Time Fan
Ive been a long time (read 2000/2001) fan of VMware – they were the first and, you could argue, still are the best in their space. Im a Linux fan, have been for a while and one of the reasons that I liked VMware was because the software I bought from them (yes I paid for Workstation and upgrades) was available for my OS of choice. Whats more they took the time to make sure that the windows worked with GTK2 looks. This to me meant that they liked their Linux users, they gave a crap about us.

I was so disappointed when I moved my home server from VMware Server 1 to VMware server 2 as the Linux client had gone. At least its been replaced with a web interface, that seems like a good idea – then all operating systems can manage the server. The interface came in for some criticism but it did everything I needed it to for the most part and I could manage my home VM server while out and about.

Times change and VMWare came out with their free version of ESX – namely ESXi. Now while ESX also had a decent web interface, ESXi did not. Your only choice of a graphical interface now meant you had to run Windows. So I stayed with Server 2.0

Recently I became aware of “VMWare Go” which was a “new web interface of ESXi users”. Yay I thought, good times! Alas no, when I went to log in I was prompted with a message that said “Your broswer must be at least Firefox 3 or higher, or IE v7 or v8 to use this site”. Thats odd I thought as I am running 3.5.5. What I very quickly realised is that this wasn’t to do with browser, it was to do with OS. I tried the site from my dual boot laptop (the only place I have Windows left these days) and I was able to get in with Firefox 3.5.5 on Windows but running the wizard prompts you to download components like the .net framework and other such single platform technology. How utterly disappointing

End of the Road
What did we do VMware? Why did you abandon us? Well anyway, I guess its the end of the road then old friend. Be happy.

Im off to migrate my stuff to Xen or KVM. Im not sure which yet, Xen has Amazon using it and Citrix seem committed to open source. In fact Ian Pratt was on FLOSS Weekly earlier in the year, so they seem to have the right mindset. On the other hand the Redhat road map points to KVM.

Anyway, watch this space. Im going to take my time to decide which to chose – i am on the rebound after all

OSG

A few days ago I moved the server again. If you remember, after my last hosting provider was broken into by malicious hackers and I had no ETA for my server being available, I moved OSG into Amazons EC2 infrastructure.

The process was quite straight forwardand their clear pricing meant that I could be sure roughly how much it would cost. The only part I couldnt work out is the bandwith costs. Anyway I decided to leave OSG with Amazon for one month so that I could get an idea of the total cost of hosting a server instance with them.

Its been about a month now and the costs are in. The bandwith costs were tiny (probably due to the very small ammount of traffic that my site gets) and so my calcualtions were spot on.

Does it compare?

How does it compare ? Well thats not a straight forward comparison as my old server had 512megs of Ram and the smallest Amazon instance is 1.7gigs. So while the Amazon instance is more expensive, when you compare it to a server with the same amount of RAM its actually a very good price.

That said, I dont need all that extra RAM, so I have elected to move OSG back out of the Amazon cloud and back to a hosting provider.

Where did I go?

I have moved over to Linode – these guys seem to have good feedback on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and my experience with them has certainly been very good so far compared to my previous hosting provider.

I will no doubt do a mini write up on that in a week or two but please let me know if anything isnt working

OSG

Some of you may have noticed that this site was down for a little while. It seems my hosting company were victims of a massive incursion by malicious hackers and, at the time of writing, my original server still hasn’t been restored after 24 hours downtime.

While you have to feel sorry for them and all the extra work that they have been doing to rectify the issue now is a good time to go back over that age old question. Do you have a DR plan? Are you backing up, is your documentation up to date, have you tested a restore? Luckily I was in the process of documenting my setup when this happened and so my pain hasn’t been as great as I should imagine some others are experiencing

I think its also worth mentioning that, as I had no ETA of when my sites would be restored (or even if they could be restored by the provider) I moved everything into Amazons EC2 offering. This seems like an ideal platform for just such an occurrence, if you dont know how long your main site will be down you can very quickly get servers back on-line and then when and if your original platform is ready you can move back and you will only have had to pay for the hours/bandwidth that you have used.

If your on-line presence is important to you, and I cant think of many businesses that this doesn’t apply to, I would encourage you to look at adding something like Amazons Cloud offering to your DR strategy – and don’t forget to test, remember you only pay for the hours that you use and this is from as little as $0.10 an hour

OSG