Conrey.org

I just finished giving a presentation to the National Association of State Technology Directors or NASTD about server virtualization and emerging technologies. Working actively in this field, I hadn’t been in front of a large audience speaking for some time, but I was excited to get the opportunity to put together a presentation and try avoid people falling asleep. From everything I heard, it was a roaring success, and I got some great feedback about my comments and thoughts about both Xen and VMware. I’m sure that most of this was new ground for some of these folks and I’m hoping that I have helped in some small part to get things rolling in their data centers for virtualization to succeed.
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Citrix has just released XenServer 4.1, and from the press announcement, it looks to be big. Release coverage:The Register, Tech Target, even the VMware Forums.

Couple of interesting things I’d like to talk about while I’m trying to download my XenServer Trial 4.1 iso. From the Citrix press release, here’s an interesting quote:
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Airline tickets booked. Hotel room reservations made. I even bought my ticket for the door. This is going to be crazy.

I’ve been an avid reader of RTFM Education for some time. Mike Laverick has a fantastic site and he’s pretty well known in the VMware arena. I was a bit dismayed however to read his take on the news that Canonical has settled on KVM for their virtualization platform. To most of us this is fantastic news.
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It’s done. I’ve migrated my services over to Internet Solver. Everything is working as it should be, my asterisk server is online and I’m happy with my Linksys PAP2T, and Polycom 330. I’m routing local and toll free calls out internet solver, and my long distance traffic is going out Vitelity. The internet is working great, and the speeds are fantastic. Now that everything is up and running, I’m ready to find something else to break tinker on. Undertaking an asterisk project is a lot of fun, and with my home phone number ported over, getting additional traffic will be interesting.

I’ve ordered a couple of new phone devices for my home Asterisk project. My wife really wants to keep all of the phones that we have up and running, so I’ve got a Linksys PAP2T NA Analog VoIP Adapter ready to install once we get the port complete. In the meantime however I’ve installed a new Polycom IP 330 SoundPoint IP Phone. As this phone has two extensions I’m going to be putting one of them in a ring group with the PAP2T, and the other will be an extension for Vitelity DIDs.
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There is alot of Asterisk information, and if you’re just getting started, it can be a bit overwhelming. Here are some of the best links that I found to get me started:
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My home asterisk server is up and running, and I’m and the only things left to do are some polishing on an IVR and getting some ringgroups established. I have a few DIDs that I use for testing and work, and I’ve been happy with the service and customer support I’ve gotten from Vitelity.net. Their service is fantastic. However, the drawback to this setup is the lack of local DIDs. I’ve been wanting to port over my home number and have it tied into my server, and until recently there wasn’t a company in town that provided that service.
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The program dd is a disk copying utility that you can use on the command line in order to make a disk image. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it’s copying, caring nothing about the file system type, or the files inside.

Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you’re copying from has to be able to spin up — in other words, it’s works much quicker and easier to make a copy if the disk is healthy. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd can salvage data.
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Being able to install a minimal system without X, install only the required prerequisites, and get a VMware server up and running is fantastic. I’ve got a test Debian server up and running Server 2.0 Beta in under 4 Gigs. I haven’t even tried paring it down at all, that’s just the netinstall with no packages selected.
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