VIRTUALIZE NOW! January 17, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software, virtualization , add a commentI am becoming ever more convinced that the truly agile enterprise will wholeheartedly embrace virtualization within its IT function. Perhaps this elicits a head-slapping “duh!” from some of you?
Some recent challenges at the day job caused me to consider how virtualization might have saved the day.
Whilst investigating various causes for the problem at hand, one possibility was upgrading the service pack of the application server. However, given the downtime that this would present and the possibility that it might make things worse contributed to our inability to make such a change. Fair enough, its a production environment. But as a developer, I get quickly frustrated by not being able to make changes to see if they have a positive effect. However, were we able to build up a new virtual server with the additional service packs and put it into production we would have minimal downtime (without needing a separate physical box to set up the software on) and should things become FUBAR, we could have easily replaced the previous VM.
Some of the features of VMware’s server products, such as VMotion are truly amazing! Imagine being able to migrate your VM from one physical server to another WHILST IT IS STILL RUNNING. Transparent, of course, to the end users. With the right hardware it is possible using VMware ESX Server. Anyway, this is starting to sound too much like a blatant sales pitch!
BTW, if you haven’t played around with the free VMware Player, do it now!!!! Check out the community-provided VM images; fancy playing around with a virtual install of Asterisk within your host Windows XP machine? VMware can do it.
Also, a great blog about virtualization trends is Alessandro Perilli’s virtualization.info.
Right, that’s all from me!
Airfoil + (n * Airport Express) + PDA = Poor Man’s Sonos? January 16, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : apple, gadgets , 1 comment so farRogue Amoeba recently updated Airfoil to version 2. One of the big additions in this release is the support for streaming music from any application (inc. iTunes) IN SYNC to multiple Airport Express’. Now this got me to thinking, “I wonder if a combination of Airfoil (running on a Mac natch, the Rogue Amoeba lads are exclusively OS X), multiple Airport Express’, and a PDA running the Salling Clicker remote control software could be cobbled together to make a poor man’s Sonos Digital Music System?”
Significantly, Airfoil won’t send separate audio streams out at the same time (I believe), but still,
it got me to thinking it would be very cool if it could!
Of course, all the newly minted Web 2.0 millionaires out there who can afford houses big enough to require multi-zone audio systems are probably just going to spring for the real thing, but it ain’t cheap at $1199USD for the introductory two player bundle.
BTW, check out Audio Hijack if you don’t already use it, it rocks.
S2S integration for GTalk coming soon? January 12, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : web, google, xmpp , 1 comment so farPedro Melo observes that the Server 2 Server port for XMPP (ie. Jabber) is now open on the google.com domain. Perhaps gmail.com is not far behind?
Jabber and XMPP are two of the technologies that I am most excited about; I think its fantastic that Google gave the XMPP community a huge boost by enabling client choice for Google Talk and hopefully soon we will be able to hook our own XMPP servers (I particularly recommend Jive Software’s open source Wildfire) into the global instant messaging fabric.
There’s all sort of fun and games to be had I think with integration between Google Talk, your own Jabber server and perhaps even Asterisk via Jive’s Asterisk-IM project.
BTW, check out Nerd Vittles for some excellent guides to setting up Asterisk via Asterisk@Home.