Ubuntu Cloud Days, Day-2 Summary

Yesterday was the second and final day of cloud days. It was such a blast! Very interesting stuff, and very cool community to be part of! In case you missed it, you can still read up the logs, and you can reach me and others for questions and comments on #ubuntu-cloud .. Let's quickly zip through yesterday's sessions

16.00 UTC smoser gave a very good introduction to the different ways with which you can rebundle UEC or EC2 images for Ubuntu, how you can customize them and the different pros and cons. Scott also answered lots of questions
17.00 UTC tetet started by presenting some interesting new features and tricks that can be used with UEC namely persistency, which means kexec'ing the kernel to load from an EBS volume resulting in persistent UEC instances. Thorsten zipped through the session quickly, but as a pro instructor, he was very well prepared with links to graphics, links and documentation
18.00 UTC Daviey wowed the crowd with a puppet introductory session, he showed how to configure apache with puppet and what it takes and deploy a basic system to get running fast. It was a great session
19.00 UTC edulix took over to present an awesome session about using hadoop and its map/reduce programming model to crunch on large (we're talking terabytes) of data on lots of machines. Very interesting and useful session
20.00 UTC obino had the final say on cloud days. The session was about UEC/Eucalyptus. He presented a detailed architecture of the system, what each node does, how things work. He also explained how to get started contributing to the eucalyptus community. 

It was a great event. Big Thank-Yous to everyone who presented in UCD. Till next time o/

Day-2 Ubuntu Cloud Days

Yesterday was great! It was Ubuntu Cloud Days, the event was packed with very interesting sessions, hundreds of attendees, lots of questions got answered, tons of ideas and comments were made. I personally had lots of fun, and was literally stuck to my keyboard the full time of the event


Let's zip through what happened yesterday (If you missed it, Click the time to read the logs!)
16.00 UTC kim0 (me) took-over, gave a quick introduction about cloud computing, differences between public and private clouds and what the cloud fuss is all about
17.00 UTC semiosis started a great session about building scalable distributed storage on the EC2 Cloud using Glusterfs for improving redundancy, and performance
18.00 UTC SpamapS gave a cool presentation and hands-on demo of a new Ubuntu ground breaking "service" management framework called Ensemble. While in early development phase, it's already working well and is changing how we look at server management
19.00 UTC hallyn took over presenting a technically deep discussion and hands-on demo about LXC Linux containers technology. This is a light weight Linux virtualization (or container) technology
20.00 UTC soren took over to talk about OpenStack, one of the cloud stacks that Ubuntu ships with 11.04 that's been getting lots of cloud people excited lately. Soren explained how the whole thing got started, explained the architecture, answered lots of questions and discussed what we should be seeing in the future

Here's a sneak peak of today's sessions

Thu 24th Mar
16.00 UTC rebundling/re-using Ubuntu’s UEC images — smoser
17.00 UTC UEC persistency — tetet
18.00 UTC Puppet Configuration Management — Daviey
19.00 UTC Using hadoop, divide and conquer — edulix
20.00 UTC UEC/Eucalyptus Private Cloud — obino

Let's get crunching on even more cool sessions today! If you’re new to IRC, you can simply use this web page to join. For more information, check out the wiki page, also feel free to ping “kim0″ on IRC!

Today is Ubuntu Cloud Days

Today is .. dum roll ... Ubuntu Cloud Days! The event starts at 4pm UTC on irc #ubuntu-classroom. Updates to the schedule include an OpenStack session, a Eucalyptus session and a puppet session! Those attending the Ensemble session are in for a treat :) During Cloud Days, you’ll learn lots of exciting stuff, you’ll interact with tons of smart people, and you’ll just have fun! Spread the word, join in and bring your friends!

Here’s the sessions schedule

Wed 23rd Mar
16.00 UTC Cloud Computing 101, Ask your questions — kim0
17.00 UTC Scaling shared-storage web apps in the cloud with Ubuntu & GlusterFS — semiosis
18.00 UTC What is Ensemble? – Presentation and Demo — SpamapS
19.00 UTC Using Linux Containers in Natty — hallyn
20.00 UTC Open-Stack Introduction — soren

Thu 24th Mar
16.00 UTC rebundling/re-using Ubuntu’s UEC images — smoser
17.00 UTC UEC persistency — tetet
18.00 UTC Puppet Configuration Management — Daviey
19.00 UTC Using hadoop, divide and conquer — edulix
20.00 UTC UEC/Eucalyptus Private Cloud — obino

All session happen in IRC (Freenode) in #ubuntu-classroom. If you’re new to IRC, you can simply use this web page to join. For more information, check out the wiki page, also feel free to ping “kim0″ on IRC

Additional links:

• Ubuntu Cloud Facebook page
• Ubuntu Cloud Twitter page
• Ubuntu Cloud Identi.ca page

Ubuntu Cloud Days approaching

Just a reminder, Ubuntu Cloud Days is approaching, it's only two days away! Yes it's this Wed/Thu. I just posted the full details on the Ubuntu Cloud Portal. Check it out, and leave me a comment if you have any questions

Cloud Python hackers wanted

A while back I had blogged (yes the one with the big uncle Sam pic) asking for people interested in working on a python tool to help migrate ebs AMIs across ec2 regions. Since then the project has progressed a bit:

- Project page is now: https://launchpad.net/ec2-migrate-ebs-ami
- Project is now able to launch two utility instances in the two specified regions, and mount the source volume in the source instance
- What remains is attaching a destination volume, and sync'ing over contents. More details can be found on the blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/cloud-server-n-ec2-migrate-region

Development pace has now slowed down significantly, as such I am renewing the call. This is a great way to start getting involved with cloud development, and to join the Ubuntu Cloud and server communities! joining in is "easy", you don't even have to know lots of python to start hacking! The steps are very well defined, and I am happy to help with all steps along the way. If you are thinking about it, go ahead and get in touch with me right now (kim0 on irc, kim0 AT ubuntu.com) or join today's irc meeting (6pm-UTC #ubuntu-cloud https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudMeeting) and start discussing how you can get involved

Two weeks to Ubuntu Cloud Days

Two weeks from now, Ubuntu Cloud Days begin! The very first dedicated Ubuntu Cloud Days event from March 23^rd to March 24^th 2011!

Cloud computing is changing the face of IT and Ubuntu Server is arguably the most popular Cloud based Operating System with millions of instances launched a year! Are you interested to know more about using Ubuntu Server on the Cloud ? Find out from March 23^rd to March 24^th 2011

Ubuntu Cloud Days is a series of online sessions where you can learn more about:

• Answering your questions about Ubuntu and the Cloud
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Images, using Ubuntu with Amazon EC2 cloud
• Building your private cloud over Ubuntu Server platform
• New virtualization and container technologies in Ubuntu Server
• Crunching Big-Data on the cloud with hadoop
• Scaling your web-apps on the cloud with Ubuntu
• much more...

Read more about UCD at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudDays

If you are interested to deliver a session, please get in contact with me! While the timetable is now "full", there's no reason why we can't extend an extra session (or day!). Ping me (kim0 AT ubuntu.com) or (kim0 on IRC)

Mark your calendar, Join in and Bring your friends ;)

Additional links:

• Ubuntu Cloud Facebook page
• Ubuntu Cloud Twitter page
• Ubuntu Cloud Identi.ca page

FAST Win7 KVM VirtIO{Disk-Net} Install

Everyone who has to use Windows, please let's at least keep it contained inside a virtual machine! In this article I'll demo how to "Install Windows7 over Ubuntu 11.04 Natty, using KVM with System Disk over VirtIO". Quoting the libvirt wiki "Virtio is a Linux standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization"

Here's a little convenience script to download virtio Windows drivers and launch virt-install to Install Windows. Copy/Paste this script into an empty folder, chmod +x it, and run it.

#!/bin/sh
WINISO=/path/to/win7.iso    #Windows ISO
INSTALLDISK=win7virtio.img  #Disk location. Can be LVM LV
VFD=http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/virtio-win-1.1.16.vfd
DRVRISO=http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/virtio-win-1.1.16.iso

[ -e $(basename $VFD) ]     || wget $VFD
[ -e $(basename $DRVRISO) ] || wget $DRVRISO
[ -e $INSTALLDISK ]         || qemu-img create $INSTALLDISK 30G

sudo virt-install -c qemu:///system --virt-type kvm --name win7virtio --ram 1024 --disk path="$INSTALLDISK",bus=virtio \
--disk $(basename $VFD),device=floppy --os-variant win7 --cdrom $(basename $DRVRISO) --cdrom "$WINISO" --vcpus 2

et voila Windows installer kicks in, we're greeted with the usual



Next the welcome screen, and agree on the license agreement (if you want!)


In this next screenshot, we see how Windows Installer does not see any "disks". This is because Windows now does not have any drivers for the virtio disk that we attached!


Let's fix that, clicking "Load Driver" and clicking OK, Windows starts reading the VFD virtual floppy image we attached, and detects the driver


Clicking Next, Windows can now see the virtio disk

Then it's business like usual

After installation completes, be sure to check the device manager and confirm the disk (and network) are both using optimized virtio drivers


et voila, Windows in its full glory running over optimized virtio drivers. The only part that sucks is desktop VNC performance, something that I'll probably write about very soon :)

First Ever Ubuntu Cloud Days

I am very excited to announce the very first Ubuntu Cloud Days! UCD is an online event that is designed for everyone interested in cloud computing, as well as someone who is already using Ubuntu server and who's thinking about "that cloud thing" everyone is talking about. If the words "virtualization", "cloud", "server", "scalability" or "automation" intrigue and amuse you, then you should definitely attend! It's a chance to learn a lot, get your questions answered as well as share your experiences and have fun with the rest of the cloud community!

In fact I'll go one bit further, not only should you attend, you should even deliver a session! Ubuntu as usual is all about community, learning from others, and sharing your knowledge to others. It's quite easy to deliver a session! My first session, I was quite surprised how I didn't have to prepare huge content to "fill" an hour, just answering questions and discussing with people, easily gets you by and you get a warm fuzzy feeling that you just helped lots of people and shared your knowledge.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, mark your calendars! March 23rd and March 24th

Fore more information: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudDays/

To contribute a session, (or if you're thinking about it) talk to me (kim0) on irc #ubuntu-cloud or email [ kim0 =AT= ubuntu.com ]