Conrey.org

A friend pointed me at a new bittorrent lab project, Sync. While it took me a few minutes to wrap my head around what was going on and how this is being used, I’d have to say I’m impressed.

The concept is simple, using a local client on your desktop or laptop Sync will synchronize the contents of the selected folder to other remote Sync clients sharing the same key. Synchronization is done securely via an encrypted (AES) bittorrent session. This ends up being effective for moving a lot of data across multiple devices and while I think it was initially designed for secure private dropbox style replication, I’ve been testing this as an alternative method of geo-replication between glusterfs clusters on Fedora.
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I just wrapped up my presentation at the Gluster Workshop at CERN where I discussed Open Source advantages in tackling converged infrastructure challenges. Here is my slidedeck. Just a quick heads up, there’s some animation that’s lost in the pdf export as well as color commentary during almost every slide.

During the presentation I demo’ed out the new QEMU/GlusterFS native integration leveraging libgfapi. For those of you wondering what that means, in short, there’s no need for FUSE anymore and QEMU leverages GlusterFS natively on the back end. Awesome.

So for my demo I needed two boxes running QEMU/KVM/GlusterFS. This would provide the compute and storage hypervisor layers. As I only have a single laptop to tour Europe with, I obviously needed a nested KVM environment.
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This started as a response to a twitter conversation with @DuncanYB and @joshobrien77  re: converged infrastructure. Duncan recently posted a great blog post about Converged compute and storage. Go read that first. I’ll wait here.

Welcome back! Ok, to start I agree with Duncan’s comments that Nutanix is certainly in the leader group for what’s viewed today as “Converged Infrastructure”, in that it’s delivering a whole stack solution. The other company mentioned in Duncan’s blogpost is Simplivity. Both companies are doing awesome stuff, and have figured out ways to solve REALLY complex problems.

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Dell has recently kicked off #ProjectSputnik, a beta program to deliver a Linux based laptop to developers featuring a tweaked out version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for a Dell XPS laptop with all the drivers ready to go.

Most intriguing was the idea that additional tools for devs specifically cloud tools that enable you to create “microclouds” on your laptop, simulating an at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud would be provided. Now, I get this is some of the work around Ubuntu juju, but I haven’t had a chance to dig in. I was hooked.
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This one is a quick one. If you’re looking for a package and you can’t find it in the main CentOS repos, there’s a good chance it’s over in the RPMforge repository. However, adding additional repos like this can be problematic during upgrades as software version can conflict.

Even though you can’t always avoid the problem, you CERTAINLY can try to minimize the potential damage that you can do.

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In my ever lengthening wait for VMware’s project octopus to be released into public beta, I’ve been trying other dropbox like applications for feature functionality. One of the ones that I’ve been most impressed by is SparkleShare. With the announcement today that they’ve released their first windows client, I thought I’d post this quick tutorial on how to get sparkleshare up and running leveraging illumian as your data repository, and also test it out with the new windows client. There’s already a mac and linux client available and both work great.

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Initially I was going to post this article as part of an install and configure series that I’m writing, but quickly realized that it’s going to be a probably going to be a reference article for other stuff as well. Hopefully, as I continue to learn and pick things up, this article will expand as well.
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I’ve spent the last few years working at a service provider working on client facing VMware projects, rolling out out a VMware vCloud environment, and helping shape how VMware can be leveraged internally. One of great things for me professionally was a chance to get my hands deeper into VMware’s product catalog from about every angle imaginable.
It was awesome getting a look behind the curtains at how a really great datacenter and internet company works to constantly deliver solid solutions to their customers. With this year drawing to a close soon, I’m eagerly looking forward to new projects and new challenges to tackle.

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Ubuntu to me is still the best OS to use for virtual appliances. It may not be for the reasons that you’re thinking about so here’s my short list.

• it’s wildly successful

to me this means lots of updates and support for packages both from the vendor (canonical) as well as the community.

• support available from ONE install

What other distribution has one install for the community AND commercial support? Yea. I can’t think of one either. This allows users to choose how much support they want/need from one virtual appliance/installation.

• small minimal virtual machine footprint

The ovf will fit neatly on a 512M usb drive when complete.
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