A busy October and November

Looks like I did not manage to write a single entry for the 2nd half of October and the whole of November.

Here's a quick recap of the stuff I've been up to:

1. HP-Intel EDA Seminar 2008 - It was a fruitful trip up to Penang. We were greatful for HP's invitation and we are happy to share the High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities and leading marketshare position with our target audience. Did you know that 6 out of the TOP 10 supercomputers in 2008 are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server?
• Links to the presentation and photos (Day 1, Day 2)
2. VMware Virtualization Forum 2008 - Showed off Platespin products with our Platespin colleagues and business parter at Singapore's Suntec City Convention Centre.
3. Dell APJ Enterprise Summit 2008 - Attended the one at Kuala Lumpur and it was a very fruitful trip. I had a good interactive time presenting the entire Novell Virtualization/Automation solution suite. The only challenging bit was to do this 1 hour session 6 times over 2 days. It was worth it though as the audience understood Novell's value proposition and how we can GTM very well together.
4. IBM NEDC Summit 2008 - Attended both the Kuala Lumpur and Singapore event. Spoke to IBMers and their customers on the value of SUSE Linux Enterprise and our ability to have a common code base across the commodity System x to the industry proven and very resilient System z (mainframe).

I've been working on a few projects with customers and partners... and hope to share what I've learnt on this blog later this month... and I can't wait for openSUSE 11.1 and the next big leap forward of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

XEN/ZOS training for partners - Oct 2008

Finally have the opportunity to work with Jo De Baer on a 4.5 day XEN/ZOS training workshop for our Singapore and Malaysia business partners this week.

Wishing them all the best for the ZOS certification exam.


PS: ZOS is short for ZENworks Orchestrator

XEN Live Migration with iSCSI & OCFS2

Its been slow in coming but I've previously promised to blog about setting up iSCSI / OCFS2 as a means to share XEN domU images so as to facilitate Live Migration. Here we go...

Background:
Live migration in XEN is the moving of a running virtual machine (domU) from one physical machine to another. XEN will replicate the running domU's RAM across the wire between the source and target physical machine (both running XEN and having the right configurations, of course). It is up to us to ensure that the target machine has read/write access to the domU's virtual disks.

Hence, the most common way to do this is via NFS. For most, especially when setting up a demo system or in a class setting, this is sufficient. For larger scale deployments, customers usually have a SAN environment and that's that.

What about folks who are between the demo/class and larger-scale deployment scenarios? This is where this iSCSI / OCFS2 solution fits nicely. This is also commonly known as the poor man's SAN. There are quite a number of articles online that discuss this in detail (like pointing out the various SPOFs) so I'll not bother to blog about it here. Here's a good link for further reading though -> Build your own iSCSI SAN appliance, save money.

Solution:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 has both iSCSI and OCFS2 support. The following is based on SLES 10 SP2. iSCSI is a means to present a remote disk via TCP/IP to a local server just like its a local SCSI device. Hence, the little i stands for internet. OCFS2 is a proven cluster-aware filesystem and its the recommended filesystem when deploying Oracle RAC on Linux.

Here are the steps in general, you can find the details via online SLES documentation (or a one time 9Mb PDF download).

Link to documentation -> http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/index.html
Link to the specific section (12 & 14) -> http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/sles_admin/data/part_administration.html

Step 1: Setting aside a disk (or partition) to be shared via iSCSI

With reference to section 12.1, you will need to identity a disk or a disk partition to be used. Next, YaST -> Misc -> iSCSI Target to configure (if iSCSI is not installed, it will do so at this time).

Step 2: Configuring XEN servers as iSCSI clients to the shared disk

With reference to section 12.2, we configure the XEN servers to connect using YaST -> Network Services -> iSCSI Initiator so that the shared disk (or partition) will appear as local.

Step 3: Installing and Configuring OCFS2 on all servers

If you are not familiar with OCFS2, its recommended that you read section 14.0 through to 14.4.

From section 14.5, we install OCFS2 packages on all servers (storage and XEN servers). In section 14.6, we configure OCFS2 and format the disk (or partition) on the storage server.

In section 14.7, we configure OCFS2 to mount the shared storage on a common directory on the XEN servers (ie /mnt/xen/).

Step 5: Edit the domU configuration file

Copy the XEN domU configuration and virtual disk (eg disk0) into the mounted /mnt/xen/vm and /mnt/xen/images subdirectories respectively.

You will need to edit the domU VM configuration file to ensure that the disk parameter is not pointing to the new virtual disk (eg disk0) location in /mnt/xen/images/.

Don't forget to propagate these changes via xm delete and xm new commands.

Step 6: Live Migrate!

Live migrate the running domU from one physical XEN server to another via:

xm migrate [domU ID/Name] [target server hostname/IP] --live


Good luck.

Singapore Software Freedom Day 2008

Last Saturday (20 Sept) was Software Freedom Day 2008 worldwide. For Singapore, it was held at the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Information Systems. The website for this event is at http://www.softwarefreedomday.sg

I had the privilege to present a topic at the Technology/Consumer Track. My topic titled "Road to Freedom: Practical Steps to Linux and Open Source Productivity". As this is a consumer track, I wanted to educate the public on the latest openSUSE 11 and how it can become a productive end-user desktop... using Windows analogies to bridge the gap in understanding Linux and Open Source tools.

Had a good time there. Looking forward to an even better one next year as the organizers are already enthusiastically talking of a bigger and more public venue.