I grew up in the western panhandle of Nebraska, and I would agree that development is sorely needed. Sure, some folks like the small town feel, but when half the town is a ghost town due to families and business leaving they could stand to have some growth to bring it back to baseline.
There were three main booms the panhandle went through. First was the railroad/homestead boom in the middle 1800's. Next was the oil boom when deposits were found (and now nearly completely dry). Finally there was the missile boom during the cold war era when several ICBM silo's were constructed (they still are there and active, but just without the huge influx of construction jobs).
No new boom is in sight. Side note... Elk Creek is in the eastern side of the state. So I don't think this will help out on the panhandle's lack of industrial diversity. This mine if it does open will only strengthen the hold Lincoln/Omaha has on the Nebraska economy.
Today it's just farming and the few industrials and corporates the locals have been able to coax in because nobody else wants them in their back yard (such as toxic waste incineration plants). Kimball has the Clean Harbors plant, and Sidney was fortunate to bring in Cabella's corporate. If those left, those community's populations would fall greatly, and possibly impact further the area's other sectors like the main community college (Western Nebraska Community College) in Scottsbluff and Sidney simply because there wouldn't be enough to sustain it.
I offered public wifi in my apartment complex on a limited pipe.
First, I setup a linux firewall with three nics - one for outside, one for my inside stuff+personal wireless, one for the public.
On the public wireless side, everything except port 80 was blocked. I included 443 in the blocks because I wanted to limit where people went, so I could mitigate potential trouble like pedo browsers. On port 80, I sent all traffic to a transparent squid proxy. The proxy then checked which URLs were being requested and if they were in my allowed list. If not allowed, I rewrote the URL and sent people to kittenwars.com (I'm sure you could find an equally evil site to send if that isn't your preference). I did add in an html frame on the left side (right side was kittenwars) when people tried going to a site that explained here are all the sites you can go to, and the dangers of using someone else's unencrypted access point.
Allowed URLs were fairly small, but from the usage the access point was still popular. wikipedia, Microsoft patches, PBS, weather.com, local government sites. I'm sure you could find more, but I wanted a very limited set that probably won't attract trouble.
Then finally I limited people from soaking up my pipe using linux traffic shaping on the transparent proxy.
I did purposely open up a wireless point for some time, but restricted where it could go. Places such as wikipedia, weather.com, youtube, PBS, Microsoft patch sites, and some of the local government websites.
Outside of those websites, I used a transparent proxy with a url rewriter to redirect users to kittenwars.com with a side html frame informing users to be careful, not to expect any privacy on an unencrypted connection when using wireless points that aren't their own and to properly secure their laptops.
With so many files, I don't treat my system as a filesystem, and more like a Google-type search.
I imported all my media into Drupal as page nodes and hotlinked to the backend files. Where possible, I had has much metadata as possible included about each file. Time/date, subject, type of media, keywords, where, descriptions if they were entered, and searchable text.
Navigating is then done by media type, searching, and browsing through various keywords.
Drupal then presents the media in the browser. If you wanted to get fancy you can reuse the metadata to present lists using the views module.
For direct access via the application (like the audio player), that is when I go to the backend, but generally at that point I know what I want after going through the website.
When it migrates between hosts, it doesn't move the virtual disks, just the memory and the cpu contents. Suppose you have two physical hosts with a virtual machine running on one host. The two hosts both see the virtual disks at the same time on some sort of shared storage - be it a fiber attached SAN, NFS share from a NAS device, or or iSCSI over the network. When you tell it to migrate from one host to another, the memory is copied from one host to another over the network.
As it is copying, the virtual machine is still running. Changes that are made in the virtual machine's memory are kept track of and sent back over the wire. When the memory is fully copied, it snapshots the cpu and temporarily pauses the virtual machine. During that pause, it sends the cpu state over the network then the other physical host unpauses the virtual machine and sends out a mac broadcast so the network switches realize where the virtual machine is. That cpu snapshot period is about 1-2 seconds.
If the network can't keep up with the memory copy and delta change copies, it will never be flopped over to the other physical host.
What I would like to see in future versions of ESX is for it to also be able to migrate the virtual disks. That would need more network traffic though, but would be really good for DR. In the meantime though I am content with pausing virtual machines, then copying that paused state over the WAN link for DR. Other possible solutions if you can't pause machines would be to look at SAN replication over the WAN, such as with Xiotech's georep. Then on the other end of the SAN replication have the systems ready to go to bring the virtual machines online.
Workstation 5.5 supports SMP (up to 2) in the virtual machines (on Linux anyhow that I'm running. Same with Server. ESX allows up to 4 in the virtual machine.
Been using Workstation 5.5 and Server. At the moment, not much difference. Though I haven't tried the multimedia features in server as much though. I think I remember some experimental 3d support going into workstation on their forums that wouldn't be possible on the server product.
One key feature that I would still pay for workstation for is the multiple snapshots. I don't think this was available before Workstation 5 where you could only have one snapshot per virtual machine. Server still only has the single snapshot ability.
VMWare has the lead in the enterprise arena for Virtual Infrastructure. Comparing Microsoft's Virtual Server to ESX Starter, the features are pretty much one for one. Past those features though is where the enterprise is interested, and are willing to pay for those features. But like you said, hopefully management just doesn't look at the dollar figure, but at the big picture with what works best for their business practices.
Currently VMware has these edges in the virtual machine features: *SMP support (looks though like Microsoft may offer this in the next beta after the current beta) *Clustering of the hosts, not just the virtual machines *Backup consolidation - imagine being able to backup 40+ windows boxes with only one backup client at the file level (not just the virtual machine images), even if the windows virtual machines are powered off. This saves on having to load backup agents on each virtual, and saves a load of cpu horsepower. *64 bit support *Multiple virtual machine clustering with a shared disk *Live migration between physical hosts - imagine moving a SQL virtual server, as it is being used, to another physical box. Doing a hardware upgrade on the prior physical box, then migrating back. Users don't notice a thing. *Direct SAN support *Multipathing for network traffic or to the shared storage
There are probably other ones that I didn't mention, but those are the ones that count for me. VMware knows Microsoft isn't going to sit idle and will probably be adding more on top of that. Same goes for Microsoft, but they have a lot of catching up to do.
I tried using a microphone using VMware Workstation in Linux with a Windows XP box virtualized. It worked.... but it didn't sound good at all. It jitter, sounded like the sound card wasn't being recorded from at a constant rate. Sound out from the Windows virtual machine worked great though.
-- Bah, this will teach me to use the preview button next time. ^_^
VMWare Server runs in Linux for free. It isn't open source though like Xen.
cd/usr/src/linux make cloneconfig make prepare
(the above steps are necessary on Suse so the vmware kernel module compilation steps work)
cd somedirectorywhereidownloadstuff rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.0-28343.i386.rpm vmware-config.pl
(now in text setup script - accept license agreement)
(hit enter for default mime type icon directory) (in all places I hit enter, the default was already what was wanted)
(hit enter for default desktop menu entries)
(hit enter for default app icon directory)
(hit enter for it to build the kernel modules)
(hit enter since it found the right place for my kernel include directory)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup networking for virtual machines)
(hit enter for yes I want to use NAT networking too)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private subnet)
(hit enter for no I don't want to setup more NAT networking ranges)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup host-only networking)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private network)
(hit enter for no I don't want to configure another host private network)
(hit enter for default network management port of 902 was to be used)
(changed option to no for I don't want vmware server to setup permissions for me - I like to do that myself)
(typed in default directory of/vmware where I want to put stuff, but default it wants to put it in/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines)
(changed option to yes for I want to type in serial number now)
(typed in serial number I got for free from vmware from their website)
After that, I installed the vmware server console on my workstation. You could install the console on the server though. rpm -ivh VMware-server-console-1.0.0-27828.i386.rpm
Then ran the console on my workstation. The console doesn't have to match the os of the server. Like you could use the windows console to control a linux vmware server, or the other way around. Very slick interface. The VMware Virtual Center console is even better for the enterprise, and also offers a web console over https to control machines. vmware-server-console
At the login screen I set it to my server ip address for destination, root for login, and the root password on the server. At that point, everything is ready to setup virtual machines. You could upload iso's to the server to boot off of in the virtual machines, or you could boot off a cd in your workstation over the network.
VMWare Server runs in Linux for free. It isn't open source though like Xen.
cd/usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig
make prepare
(the above steps are necessary on Suse so the vmware kernel module compilation steps work)
cd somedirectorywhereidownloadstuff
rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.0-28343.i386.rpm
vmware-config.pl
(now in text setup script - accept license agreement)
(hit enter for default mime type icon directory) (in all places I hit enter, the default was already what was wanted)
(hit enter for default desktop menu entries)
(hit enter for default app icon directory)
(hit enter for it to build the kernel modules)
(hit enter since it found the right place for my kernel include directory)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup networking for virtual machines)
(hit enter for yes I want to use NAT networking too)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private subnet)
(hit enter for no I don't want to setup more NAT networking ranges)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup host-only networking)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private network)
(hit enter for no I don't want to configure another host private network)
(hit enter for default network management port of 902 was to be used)
(changed option to no for I don't want vmware server to setup permissions for me - I like to do that myself)
(typed in default directory of/vmware where I want to put stuff, but default it wants to put it in/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines)
(changed option to yes for I want to type in serial number now)
(typed in serial number I got for free from vmware from their website)
After that, I installed the vmware server console on my workstation. You could install the console on the server though.
rpm -ivh VMware-server-console-1.0.0-27828.i386.rpm
Then ran the console on my workstation. The console doesn't have to match the os of the server. Like you could use the windows console to control a linux vmware server, or the other way around. Very slick interface. The VMware Virtual Center console is even better for the enterprise, and also offers a web console over https to control machines.
vmware-server-console
At the login screen I set it to my server ip address for destination, root for login, and the root password on the server. At that point, everything is ready to setup virtual machines. You could upload iso's to the server to boot off of in the virtual machines, or you could boot off a cd in your workstation over the network.
Depends on the services you are running in the virtual machines. Web servers that dish out static websites - pfff. You can put gobs of those on one box. A SQL box with loads of scriping running on it will probably need more hardware. VMWare ESX might be able to help out in that area by setting up memory and CPU pools so one virtual machine doesn't step on the another. QoS for processors.
With all these free offerings from Microsoft and VMWare, testing with your specific applications would be best.
VMWare Server is basically the successor to GSX, only free now. It can run on Linux and Windows, and allows you to create new machines. Looks like VMWare's business strategy is to get people introduced to virtualization on the small scale (VM Server, Player) then sell the really nice features with ESX (like clustering, load balancing, backup consolidation) for the enterprise.
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I grew up in the western panhandle of Nebraska, and I would agree that development is sorely needed. Sure, some folks like the small town feel, but when half the town is a ghost town due to families and business leaving they could stand to have some growth to bring it back to baseline.
There were three main booms the panhandle went through. First was the railroad/homestead boom in the middle 1800's. Next was the oil boom when deposits were found (and now nearly completely dry). Finally there was the missile boom during the cold war era when several ICBM silo's were constructed (they still are there and active, but just without the huge influx of construction jobs).
No new boom is in sight. Side note... Elk Creek is in the eastern side of the state. So I don't think this will help out on the panhandle's lack of industrial diversity. This mine if it does open will only strengthen the hold Lincoln/Omaha has on the Nebraska economy.
Today it's just farming and the few industrials and corporates the locals have been able to coax in because nobody else wants them in their back yard (such as toxic waste incineration plants). Kimball has the Clean Harbors plant, and Sidney was fortunate to bring in Cabella's corporate. If those left, those community's populations would fall greatly, and possibly impact further the area's other sectors like the main community college (Western Nebraska Community College) in Scottsbluff and Sidney simply because there wouldn't be enough to sustain it.
I offered public wifi in my apartment complex on a limited pipe. First, I setup a linux firewall with three nics - one for outside, one for my inside stuff+personal wireless, one for the public. On the public wireless side, everything except port 80 was blocked. I included 443 in the blocks because I wanted to limit where people went, so I could mitigate potential trouble like pedo browsers. On port 80, I sent all traffic to a transparent squid proxy. The proxy then checked which URLs were being requested and if they were in my allowed list. If not allowed, I rewrote the URL and sent people to kittenwars.com (I'm sure you could find an equally evil site to send if that isn't your preference). I did add in an html frame on the left side (right side was kittenwars) when people tried going to a site that explained here are all the sites you can go to, and the dangers of using someone else's unencrypted access point. Allowed URLs were fairly small, but from the usage the access point was still popular. wikipedia, Microsoft patches, PBS, weather.com, local government sites. I'm sure you could find more, but I wanted a very limited set that probably won't attract trouble. Then finally I limited people from soaking up my pipe using linux traffic shaping on the transparent proxy.
I did purposely open up a wireless point for some time, but restricted where it could go. Places such as wikipedia, weather.com, youtube, PBS, Microsoft patch sites, and some of the local government websites.
Outside of those websites, I used a transparent proxy with a url rewriter to redirect users to kittenwars.com with a side html frame informing users to be careful, not to expect any privacy on an unencrypted connection when using wireless points that aren't their own and to properly secure their laptops.
With so many files, I don't treat my system as a filesystem, and more like a Google-type search. I imported all my media into Drupal as page nodes and hotlinked to the backend files. Where possible, I had has much metadata as possible included about each file. Time/date, subject, type of media, keywords, where, descriptions if they were entered, and searchable text. Navigating is then done by media type, searching, and browsing through various keywords. Drupal then presents the media in the browser. If you wanted to get fancy you can reuse the metadata to present lists using the views module. For direct access via the application (like the audio player), that is when I go to the backend, but generally at that point I know what I want after going through the website.
When it migrates between hosts, it doesn't move the virtual disks, just the memory and the cpu contents. Suppose you have two physical hosts with a virtual machine running on one host. The two hosts both see the virtual disks at the same time on some sort of shared storage - be it a fiber attached SAN, NFS share from a NAS device, or or iSCSI over the network. When you tell it to migrate from one host to another, the memory is copied from one host to another over the network.
As it is copying, the virtual machine is still running. Changes that are made in the virtual machine's memory are kept track of and sent back over the wire. When the memory is fully copied, it snapshots the cpu and temporarily pauses the virtual machine. During that pause, it sends the cpu state over the network then the other physical host unpauses the virtual machine and sends out a mac broadcast so the network switches realize where the virtual machine is. That cpu snapshot period is about 1-2 seconds.
If the network can't keep up with the memory copy and delta change copies, it will never be flopped over to the other physical host.
What I would like to see in future versions of ESX is for it to also be able to migrate the virtual disks. That would need more network traffic though, but would be really good for DR. In the meantime though I am content with pausing virtual machines, then copying that paused state over the WAN link for DR. Other possible solutions if you can't pause machines would be to look at SAN replication over the WAN, such as with Xiotech's georep. Then on the other end of the SAN replication have the systems ready to go to bring the virtual machines online.
Workstation 5.5 supports SMP (up to 2) in the virtual machines (on Linux anyhow that I'm running. Same with Server. ESX allows up to 4 in the virtual machine.
Been using Workstation 5.5 and Server. At the moment, not much difference. Though I haven't tried the multimedia features in server as much though. I think I remember some experimental 3d support going into workstation on their forums that wouldn't be possible on the server product.
One key feature that I would still pay for workstation for is the multiple snapshots. I don't think this was available before Workstation 5 where you could only have one snapshot per virtual machine. Server still only has the single snapshot ability.
VMWare has the lead in the enterprise arena for Virtual Infrastructure. Comparing Microsoft's Virtual Server to ESX Starter, the features are pretty much one for one. Past those features though is where the enterprise is interested, and are willing to pay for those features. But like you said, hopefully management just doesn't look at the dollar figure, but at the big picture with what works best for their business practices.
b rary/aace7325-ef73-46b3-929b-d1e6dbd0df691033.mspx
e s
Looking at Microsoft's features page:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Li
And VMWare's features page:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/#_tabfeatur
Currently VMware has these edges in the virtual machine features:
*SMP support (looks though like Microsoft may offer this in the next beta after the current beta)
*Clustering of the hosts, not just the virtual machines
*Backup consolidation - imagine being able to backup 40+ windows boxes with only one backup client at the file level (not just the virtual machine images), even if the windows virtual machines are powered off. This saves on having to load backup agents on each virtual, and saves a load of cpu horsepower.
*64 bit support
*Multiple virtual machine clustering with a shared disk
*Live migration between physical hosts - imagine moving a SQL virtual server, as it is being used, to another physical box. Doing a hardware upgrade on the prior physical box, then migrating back. Users don't notice a thing.
*Direct SAN support
*Multipathing for network traffic or to the shared storage
There are probably other ones that I didn't mention, but those are the ones that count for me. VMware knows Microsoft isn't going to sit idle and will probably be adding more on top of that. Same goes for Microsoft, but they have a lot of catching up to do.
I tried using a microphone using VMware Workstation in Linux with a Windows XP box virtualized. It worked.... but it didn't sound good at all. It jitter, sounded like the sound card wasn't being recorded from at a constant rate. Sound out from the Windows virtual machine worked great though.
-- Bah, this will teach me to use the preview button next time. ^_^
/usr/src/linux
/vmware where I want to put stuff, but default it wants to put it in /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines)
VMWare Server runs in Linux for free. It isn't open source though like Xen.
cd
make cloneconfig
make prepare
(the above steps are necessary on Suse so the vmware kernel module compilation steps work)
cd somedirectorywhereidownloadstuff
rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.0-28343.i386.rpm
vmware-config.pl
(now in text setup script - accept license agreement)
(hit enter for default mime type icon directory) (in all places I hit enter, the default was already what was wanted)
(hit enter for default desktop menu entries)
(hit enter for default app icon directory)
(hit enter for it to build the kernel modules)
(hit enter since it found the right place for my kernel include directory)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup networking for virtual machines)
(hit enter for yes I want to use NAT networking too)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private subnet)
(hit enter for no I don't want to setup more NAT networking ranges)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup host-only networking)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private network)
(hit enter for no I don't want to configure another host private network)
(hit enter for default network management port of 902 was to be used)
(changed option to no for I don't want vmware server to setup permissions for me - I like to do that myself)
(typed in default directory of
(changed option to yes for I want to type in serial number now)
(typed in serial number I got for free from vmware from their website)
After that, I installed the vmware server console on my workstation. You could install the console on the server though.
rpm -ivh VMware-server-console-1.0.0-27828.i386.rpm
Then ran the console on my workstation. The console doesn't have to match the os of the server. Like you could use the windows console to control a linux vmware server, or the other way around. Very slick interface. The VMware Virtual Center console is even better for the enterprise, and also offers a web console over https to control machines.
vmware-server-console
At the login screen I set it to my server ip address for destination, root for login, and the root password on the server. At that point, everything is ready to setup virtual machines. You could upload iso's to the server to boot off of in the virtual machines, or you could boot off a cd in your workstation over the network.
VMWare Server runs in Linux for free. It isn't open source though like Xen. cd /usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig
make prepare
(the above steps are necessary on Suse so the vmware kernel module compilation steps work)
cd somedirectorywhereidownloadstuff
rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.0-28343.i386.rpm
vmware-config.pl
(now in text setup script - accept license agreement)
(hit enter for default mime type icon directory) (in all places I hit enter, the default was already what was wanted)
(hit enter for default desktop menu entries)
(hit enter for default app icon directory)
(hit enter for it to build the kernel modules)
(hit enter since it found the right place for my kernel include directory)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup networking for virtual machines)
(hit enter for yes I want to use NAT networking too)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private subnet)
(hit enter for no I don't want to setup more NAT networking ranges)
(hit enter for yes I want to setup host-only networking)
(hit enter for yes I want to probe for an unused private network)
(hit enter for no I don't want to configure another host private network)
(hit enter for default network management port of 902 was to be used)
(changed option to no for I don't want vmware server to setup permissions for me - I like to do that myself)
(typed in default directory of /vmware where I want to put stuff, but default it wants to put it in /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines)
(changed option to yes for I want to type in serial number now)
(typed in serial number I got for free from vmware from their website)
After that, I installed the vmware server console on my workstation. You could install the console on the server though.
rpm -ivh VMware-server-console-1.0.0-27828.i386.rpm
Then ran the console on my workstation. The console doesn't have to match the os of the server. Like you could use the windows console to control a linux vmware server, or the other way around. Very slick interface. The VMware Virtual Center console is even better for the enterprise, and also offers a web console over https to control machines.
vmware-server-console
At the login screen I set it to my server ip address for destination, root for login, and the root password on the server. At that point, everything is ready to setup virtual machines. You could upload iso's to the server to boot off of in the virtual machines, or you could boot off a cd in your workstation over the network.
Depends on the services you are running in the virtual machines. Web servers that dish out static websites - pfff. You can put gobs of those on one box. A SQL box with loads of scriping running on it will probably need more hardware. VMWare ESX might be able to help out in that area by setting up memory and CPU pools so one virtual machine doesn't step on the another. QoS for processors. With all these free offerings from Microsoft and VMWare, testing with your specific applications would be best.
VMWare Server is basically the successor to GSX, only free now. It can run on Linux and Windows, and allows you to create new machines. Looks like VMWare's business strategy is to get people introduced to virtualization on the small scale (VM Server, Player) then sell the really nice features with ESX (like clustering, load balancing, backup consolidation) for the enterprise.