Giuseppe Taibi's Techlog » virtualization

Testing Chrome OS

yus — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:05:51 +0000

I just downloaded Chrome OS as a VMware Virtual Machine and I am playing with it. My understanding so far is that it is nothing more than a browser with an OS attached. While I don’t expect this to become an overnight success, I do welcome the new addition as there are a number of advantages to this approach. My dream is actually to own a thin client but to access a full desktop that lives in the cloud that can scale up and down depending on my needs.

WMware Management Client Coming to iPhone

yus — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:24:49 +0000

[...] a future version of VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client, which is the software used to access VirtualCenter Server, would be made available for the Apple iPhone and other mobile devices

Source: ZDNet.co.uk

Sweet

The End of Scalability

yus — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:50:32 +0000

Google has launched App Engine, their new scalable computing platform for application developers. Dreams do come true for application developers who now have an incredible array of choices for hosting their apps. With so many choices for hosting web apps on massive clusters of servers, scalability is no longer a problem. The race is still open for ease of deployment, high-availability and manageability. Currently, the runtime environment supports only Python and Django, with more languages to come. The environment features:

dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
automatic scaling and load balancing
APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer

Interestingly, the storage model is not a relational database but rather an object database, as the native ZODB of Zope and Plone. This is the first time that such object database gets exposure to a massive number of developers. It will be interesting to follow the reactions to this choice from the blogosphere.

Google’s App Engine datastore uses a non-relational object model to store information, which allows you to create fast, scalable applications. Because this method of storing data differs from relational databases, such as MySQL, not all functionalities used with relational databases are available with the system. For instance, the Google App Engine datastore does not have the ability to ‘join’ tables that is available in a relational database.

We have full CRUD operation (create, retrieve, update and delete) support, and allow you to query against our datastore using GQL, our query language. You may also use our Query class, which allows you to use filters and ordering when retrieving the data, as well as perform ancestors queries for an entity.

Datastore filters allow you to restrict the data retrieved from the datastore by using common comparison operators: < <= = >= >

The ordering operations allow you to organize how the data is returned from the query. You can view the ordering operations for each type available with the datastore here.

Lastly, when retrieving the data from the datastore, you can specify both a limit and an offset to the results returned. The limit is maximum number of results returned by the query. The fetch offset specifies the number of results to skip when returning the data from the datastore.

See a GQL example at Creating, Getting and Deleting Data.

Get the full scoop at What is Google App Engine.

Say Hello To Desktop Virtualization

yus — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 05:12:08 +0000

www.panologic.com

Migrate your VMware image to Amazon EC2 (and back)

yus — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:01:12 +0000

This is poised to be a major breaktrough. Enomaly has released a Migration Module for its Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard that converts an exisitng VMware image to a format compatible with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2, and vice versa. I have already virtualized my Windows laptop to run under Parallels on my MacBook. The next step will be virtualizing all my personal servers and migrating them to EC2 and S3.

Source: Enomalism Amazon EC2 Migration Module