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Virtual Hosting Features

I’ve just been setting up new virtual servers at Linode [1] and Slicehost [2]. I have previously written a review of both those services [3], based on that review (and some other discussions) one of my clients now has a policy of setting up pairs of virtual servers for various projects, one server at Linode […]

New Servers – a non-virtual Cloud

NewServers.com [1] provides an interesting service. They have a cloud computing system that is roughly comparable to Amazon EC2, but for which all servers are physical machines (blade servers with real disks). This means that you get the option of changing between servers and starting more servers at will, but they are all physical systems […]

Dom0 Memory Allocation and X

I’ve previously written about memory squeeze problems in a Xen Dom0 when large amounts of memory were assigned to DomUs [1]. In summary the Dom0 would have problems if started with default options and the majority of the RAM was later assigned to DomUs, but if the memory of the Dom0 was limited by the […]

Red Hat, Microsoft, and Virtualisation Support

Red Hat has just announced a deal with MS for support of RHEL virtual machines on Windows Server and Windows virtual machines on RHEL [1]. It seems that this deal won’t deliver anything before “calendar H2 2009” so nothing will immediately happen – but the amount of testing to get these things working correctly is […]

Xen and Lenny

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 AKA “Lenny” has just been released [1].

One of the features that is particularly noteworthy is that Xen has been updated and now works fully and correctly on the 2.6.26 kernel (see the Debian Wiki page about Xen for details [2]). This may not sound exciting, but I know that a lot […]

Physical vs Virtual Servers

In a comment on my post about Slicehost, Linode, and scaling up servers [1] it was suggested that there is no real difference between a physical server and a set of slices of a virtual server that takes up all the resources of the machine.

The commentator notes that it’s easier to manage a virtual […]

LUV Talk about Cloud Computing

Last week I gave a talk for the Linux Users of Victoria about Cloud Computing and Amazon EC2 [1]. I was a little nervous as I was still frantically typing the notes a matter of minutes before my talk was due to start (which isn’t ideal). But it went well. There were many good questions […]

EC2 and IP Addresses

One of the exciting things about having a cloud computing service is how to talk to the rest of the world. It’s all very well to have a varying number of machines in various locations, but you need constant DNS names at least (and sometimes constant IP addresses) to do most useful things.

I have […]

Basics of EC2

I have previously written about my work packaging the tools to manage Amazon EC2 [1].

First you need to login and create a certificate (you can upload your own certificate – but this is probably only beneficial if you have two EC2 accounts and want to use the same certificate for both). Download the X509 […]

Types of Cloud Computing

The term Cloud Computing seems to be poorly defined at the moment, as an example the Wikipedia page about it is rather incoherent [1].

The one area in which all definitions of the term agree is that a service is provided by a varying number of servers of which the details are unknown to the […]