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OSS P2V 4 free via G4U November 13, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, virtualization, windows , add a comment

That title is bit of a mouthful… let me explain myself.

One of the big ideas in the world of virtualization is P2V or Physical-to-Virtual. One of the barriers to taking advantage of virtualization technology in your data-centre is the time spent setting up your new virtual machines, running under VMware Server or Xen or what-have-you, to mimic the physical machines they are replacing on one bigger, beefier (and hopefully more energy efficient) server. P2V technology aims to make it easy to migrate a complete physical server, with the OS and applications intact, to a virtual machine. The major players in the virtualization and backup space all have P2V solutions generally priced for the enterprise end of town.

Since Apple’s move to Intel architecture we have seen a few virtualization solutions for Mac OS X pop up; first from Parallels and most recently from VMware. This has made it easier for people to switch from Windows to Mac OS X knowing that they have a way to keep working with applications that do not have an OS X equivalent. At the same time though, I expect that many may resist simply because of the time needed to switch all applications from a Windows laptop to an Apple MacBook. So I got to wondering, what if there was a cheap way to go P2V from a laptop running XP to a Parallels Desktop XP virtual machine? Read on to find out how.

DIY YouTube August 28, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web, virtualization , add a comment
  1. Download one copy of Broadcast Machine.
  2. Install Broadcast Machine on an Amazon EC2 virtual machine.
  3. Upload your hilarious family videos to an Amazon S3 account, easily accessed via your EC2 virtual machine.
  4. Encourage your family, friends and co-workers to digg your site like crazy, whilst they too upload their hilarious family videos.
  5. Scale to taste via EC2’s SOAP web service API.
  6. Watch as Broadcast Machine and Amazon S3’s BitTorrent support help to reduce your bandwidth bills.
  7. Profit!

Commodity virtualization with Amazon EC2 August 25, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : virtualization , add a comment

The blogosphere is going batty talking about Amazon EC2; their ‘limited beta’ service for provisioning virtual Linux machine hosting via a web service API. The core idea isn’t anything new, I had a virtual Linux box with Bytemark Hosting back when they had one of the few virtual hosting offerings available. EC2’s web service API is just too cool however; think about the possibility of building a web application that can respond to increasing load, perhaps due to a Slashdotting/Diggdotting, through requesting to EC2 that more application/web server VM instances be brought online to satisfy the increased load.

A few other random thoughts: