Over Subscribing or Over Capacity
Posted by James B. in Technology on February 15, 2010
There’s been a very interesting set of discussions lately regarding performance anomalies across Cloud infrastructure providers. The most recent involves Amazon Web Services and RackSpace Cloud. Let’s focus on the former because it’s the one that has a good deal of analysis and data attached to it.
Reuven Cohen’s post (Oversubscribing the Cloud) summarizing many of these concerns speaks to the meme wherein he points to Alan Williamson’s initial complaints (Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed?) followed by CloudKick’s very interesting experiments and data (Visual Evidence of Amazon EC2 network issues) and ultimately Rich Miller’s summary including a response from Amazon Web Services (Amazon: We Don’t Have Capacity Issues)
The thing that’s interesting to me in all of this is yet another example of people mixing metaphors, terminology and common operating methodologies as well as choosing to suspend disbelief and the reality distortion field associated with how service providers actually offer service versus marketing it. Read the rest of this entry »
Moved Hosts
I have completed moving the site to my new choice of host, (mt) MediaTemple. This site and a couple of other sites that I have are running in their (gs) Grid Server layer. Let me know if you see anything out of line on here that might be due to the move.
Automate SSH Logins with expect (without keys)
Posted by James B. in Technology on February 8, 2010
You need to automate a task across many machines. You know the user name and password, but for some reason, either by policy or otherwise, you are not allowed to use PKI, or Public Key Infrastructure.
Well, not to give up hope just yet, because there is a nice little tool that is extremely powerful, yet not widely utilized. it’s called ‘expect’.
Read the rest of this entry »
VMware Virtual Center and vCenter Redundancy
Posted by James B. in Technology on February 8, 2010
Introduction
VMware Virtual Center (now called vCenter) is a critical piece of VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Suite. If you use the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Suite, it is likely that you use Virtual Center / vCenter for ANYTHING related to management of your virtual infrastructure. Many of us have Virtual Center, SQL Server, and the VMware License server running all on a single server. We use VC to administer our guest VMs, check performance, configure high availability, load balancing, and so much more. But what if Virtual Center went down? What would happen to your Virtual Infrastructure and the entire critical guest VMs? Let us find out what would happen and then what you can do to keep VC as highly available as possible. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Issues Nexus One Software Update
Posted by James B. in Technology on February 4, 2010
Google announced on Tuesday it has issued an over-the-air free software update for users of its new Nexus One smartphone. The update will come via the telephone network instead of having to plug it into a computer and download the software.
In addition to adding several new features, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) said it thinks the update released today for the Nexus One will address 3G connectivity issues some users reported last month. “We will provide a general fix to help improve 3G connectivity on some Nexus One phones,” the company said in a blog post.
Three key features of the update include a new version of Google Maps, the addition of the Google Goggles application and pinch-to-zoom functionality, a feature found in the iPhone.
With Google Goggles, users can snap a picture of something and have the device perform a search based on the image, so the user doesn’t have to type anything in. For example, a tourist could take a shot of a well-known landmark and get back relevant Web sites with more information on it.
The latest Google Maps 3.4 synchronizes starred items or favorite places from your phone or computer for easy access. The app now also includes search suggestions from a user’s personal maps history if they’ve already been using Google Maps. Version 3.4 also includes “Night mode” navigation, automatically changing the screen color and brightness for easier viewing when driving at night.
The update is being rolled out now and Nexus One users will receive a message notifying them of its availability. Google said the update is being rolled out gradually to avoid congestion, so some users might not get the notification until the end of this week.
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