We're testing a cloud version of our core product which is fundamentally a windows machine running a small vm instance of a heavily modified old OS (QNX6.5) as the core of a suite of our applications. Workspaces is perfect for our use case (allowing a lot of operators using a variety of clients in easily). However we're having real trouble creating this nested VM which is fundamental. There doesn't seem to be a way to activate hypervisor but it's still present which means that VMware won't run. Is there any solution to getting this up and running or is workspaces a non-starter? the required resources are very light. Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks
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I am going to create environments. For now i have gcp machine and i run jupyter in there. Everytime, i need start it, and with 3 people it is hard to work in same environment. I know, there is docker, jupyter hub, but did not find and suitable roadmap to create dev/prod environment.
My aim to create dev and production environment. Everything should be on GCP.
Any suggested path ?
Thanks
You can take a look at the best practices for enterprise organizations. In order to properly split resources it's often advised to use different projects. However, depending on the GCP product, you could also use versions, such as with App Engine (see this StackOverflow thread).
So I was looking at the Getting Started with Django http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com/ tutorial, and everything was done in a vm. The author set up a vm, and then created a virtualenv in the vm. Is this good practice to get started on a django project, or software projects in general? Why the need for a vm? What happens if I have more than one project - should I use two vms? Or just create additional virtualenvs in the original vm?
I'm still a student in school, and I'm working on my own personal side projects, so it'd be useful to get some input on how things are really done in the real world.
Thanks!
You do not need VMs. You can get through just fine using virtualenv with an environment for each project - especially just starting out in Django.
In the future, one of the times you may need a separate VM environment for your project is if it has a lot of unique infrastructure needs. It's much easier to setup a VM, setup the unique environment, and not have to alter it when you want to work on other projects.
Another common reason I see people using VMs is when they have a Windows machine but want to develop in Linux. It's easy to spin up a Linux VM and work there since Linux is more programmer friendly.
It's subjective. I leverage virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper for my development, which I do on Linux. There are instance where you might need to leverage two separate VMs...it just depends, although I haven't encountered this.
There's no unwritten rule that says you have to use a VM. Python (and many other languages/frameworks) simply work better on Linux, so many people will leverage VMs to run Linux on Windows or Mac to do their development in that environment.
Let's say that I setup my own cloud using the open source cloud foundry implementation provided on cloudfoundry.org. Will each app that I deploy be run as a separate user? Or is there any of VMWare's virtualization technology in use here? E.g. would each app run in a separate virtual machine or anything like that? How can I configure the memory, cpu, and disk resource limits for each app?
I asked this on the mailing list. Here's the response I got:
If your DEA is configured to run in secure mode, then each app runs as its own user and process isolation is used to protect them. We are moving toward a model of using linux cgroups http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups when on linux, using the warden cgroup wrappers that are already in our source tree.
VM based isolation for a single app is pretty heavy weight, but we have long term plans to provide this for apps that need/desire it. (As opposed to the warden/cgroup work which is a near term project)
Since this is related to the open source for cloud foundry, you can try asking your question on https://groups.google.com/a/cloudfoundry.org/group/vcap-dev
You should get a quick response there!
We have the need to perform tests on localized platforms that put some burden on our hardware resources because for just a few weeks we might need plenty of servers and clients (Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, Vista, XP, Red Hat, etc) in multiple languages.
We typically have relied on blades with Windows 2003 and VMWare, but sometimes these are overgrown by punctual needs and also have the issue that the acquisition and deployment process is quite slow if the environment needs to grow.
Is Amazon EC2/S3 usable in the following scenario?
Install VMWare (Desktop because we need the ability to have snapshots) on an Amazon AMI.
Load existing VMWare images from S3 and run them on EC2 instances (perhaps 3 or 4 server or client OSes on each EC2 instance.
We are more interested in the ability to very easily start or stop VMware snaphsots for relatively short tests. This is just for testing configurations, not a production environment to actually serve a user workload. The only real user is the tester. These configurations might be required for just a few weeks and then turned off for a few months until the next release requires them again.
Is EC2/S3 a viable alternative for this type of testing purpose?
Do you actually need VMWare, or are you testing software that runs in the VMWare VMs? You might actually need VMWare if you are testing e.g. VMWare deployment policy, or are running code that tests the VMWare APIs. Examples of the latter might be you are testing an application server stack and currently using VMWare to test on many platforms.
If you actually need VMWare, I do not believe that you can install VMWare in EC2. Someone will correct & enlighten me if this is not the case.
If you don't actually need VMWare, you have more options. If you can use one of the zillion public AMIs as a baseline, clone the appropriate AMIs and customize them to suit your needs (save the customized version as a private AMI for your team). Then, you can use as many of them as you like. Perhaps you already have a bunch of VMWare images that you need to use in your testing. In that case, you can migrate your VMWare image to an EC2 AMI as described in various places in Google, for example:
http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2008/9/1/creating-an-new-ec2-ami-from-within-vmware-or-from-vmdk-files
(Apologies to the SO censors for not pasting the entire article here. It's pretty long.) But that's a shortcut; you can always use the documented AMI creation process to convert any machine (VMWare or not) to an AMI. Perform that process for each VMWare VM you have, and you'll be all set. Just keep in mind that when you create an AMI, you have to upload it to S3, and that will take a lot of time for large VMs.
This is a bit of a shameless plug, but we have a new startup that may deal with exactly your problem. Amazon EC2 is excellent for on-demand computing, but is really targeted at just a single user launching production servers. We've extended EC2 to make it a Virtual Lab Management environment, with self-service, policies and VM sharing. You can check it out at http://LabSlice.com and see if it meets your needs.
Amazon provides a solution themselves now: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/12/amazon-vm-import-bring-your-vmware-images-to-the-cloud.html
We recently bought a new rack and set of servers for it, we want to be able to redeploy these boxes as build servers, QA regression test servers, lab re-correlation servers, simulation servers, etc.
We have played a bit with VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBox etc, creating a virtual build server, but we came across a lot of issues when we tried to copy it for others to use, having to reconfigure every new copy of the VM.
We are using Windows XP x86/x64 and Windows Vista x86/x64, so I had to rename the machine, join the domain etc for every new copy.
Ideally we just want to be able to add a new box, deploy a thin boot strap OS (Linux is fine here) to get the VM up an running, then use it.
One other thing we have limited to no budget, so free is best.
I would like to understand others experiences in doing the same thing.
FYI, I am not in systems IT, this we are group of software engineers trying to set this up.
Any links to good tutorials would be great.
The problem you're running into is the machine SID must be unique for each machine in a domain. Of course by copying an image you now break that unique constraint.
I'd suggest that you read the documentation for Sysprep in the reskit and Vista System Image Manager - your friends for XP/Win2k3 and Vista/Win2k8 respectively.
These tools enable to "reseal" your configured instance of the OS such that the next time it boots - it can prompt for information such as network configuration, machine names, admin user ID's, run scripts etc.
Also be aware that the licencing restrictions for Windows desktop clients are generally per image - not per server.
Using these tools with HyperV we created complete preconfigured instances of Win2k3 & Win2k8 that boot to finish installing Sharepoint - going further we used the diffing disks to overlay Visual Studio so our devs could use the production images for their work. It has radically changed our development process.
At this point our entire public website is run on HyperV with of 5 boxes running 15 images for a mix of soft and hard redundancy - they take several hundred million page views per week.
Another option for dealing with the SID probelm is NewSID. This is a simpler tool than sysprep, in that all it does is rename the machine and reassign the SID; if you don't need all the other features of sysprep this is a much easier tool to use.