*Opscode Chef extends to Windows for more enterprise devops
*Black Duck continues growth, gains new funding
*Cloudant expands NoSQL database focus, customers
*New open source Web server and vendor Nginx arrives
*The downside of Microsoft’s Android dollars

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This is especially nice in combination with configuration tools like puppet as it is usually much easier to add a file to the system than to modify an existing file.

I ran into a small gotcha with this though: the default my.cnf binds mysqld to the localhost TCP interface so that it listens IP 127.0.0.1 only. To make the mysql server reachable from other hosts the bind=127.0.0.1 setting needs to be overwritten.
How to change the binding to a different IP should be obvious, but how to disable an existing binding completely if you want your mysqld to listen on all available interfaces?

The most obvious would be to simply say

bind=

, this does not have any effect though. What needs to be done instead is

bind=0.0.0.0

to make mysqld listen on all interfaces again.

This is obviously a solution for IPv4 only, for allowing incoming connections from all v4 and v6 interfaces allowing bind= without any argument to reset any existing bindings would probably be more clever?

*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’

iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)

I've ran into Alex at some UKUUG conferences before and he's got a solid background on MySQL Cluster and other HA alternatives so I was looking forward to reading the book.

Alex starts of with a couple of indepth chapters on MySQL Cluster, he does mention that it's not a fit for all problems, but I'd hoped he did it a bit more prominently ... an upfront chapter outlining the different approaches and when which approach is a match could have been better. The avid reader now might be 80 pages into MySQL cluster before he realizes it's not going to be a match for his problem.

I really loved the part where Alex correcly mentions that you should probably be using Puppet or so to manage the config files of your environment, rather than scp them around your different boxes ..

Alex then goes on to describe setting up MySQL replication and Multi Master replicataion with the different approaches one can take here, he gives some nice tips on using LVM to reduce the downtime of your MySQL when having to transfer the dataset of an already existing MySQL setup, good stuff.

He then goes on to describe MySQL with shared storage ... if you only mount your redundant sandisk once on your MySQL nodes my preference would probably be a Pacemaker stack rather than a RedHat Cluster based setup, but his setup seems to work too. Alex quickly touches on using GFS to have your data disk mounted simultaneously on both nodes (keep in mind with only 1 active MySQLd) and then goes on to describe a full DRBD based MySQL HA setup

The last chapter titled Performance tuning gives some very nice tips on both tuning your regular storae, as your
GFS setup but also the tuning parameters for MySQL Cluster

I was also really happy to see the Appendixes on the basic installation where he advocates the use of Cobbler , Kickstart and LVM ..

One of the better books I read the past couple of years .. certainly the best book from Packt so far , I hope there is more quality stuff coming from that direction !

Technorati Tags: cobbler drbd ha heartbeat linux-ha mysql pacemaker puppet

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What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

We had a book raffle where we handed out O'Reilly's .. we had a great free pizza party (got the idea from the saturday pizza event at LCA 2005) , and we had some free beer. Sounds like a good combination for a geeky weekend.

Apart from the regular talks there were plenty of Open Spaces where interesting topics were discussed ... we had spaces on Open Source vs Open Core , strong voices were heard when we discussed what we should do with the Open Core companies that claim to value Open Source , some people think we should actually list the fauxpensource ones somewhere and make sure the world knows about them

We had an awesome configuration management discussion session discussing Chef vs Puppet vs CFengine . And much much more ...

Some people owe me plenty of Sushi as I had to do my MySQL HA talk before their Managing MySQL talk , but other than that .. things just went fine..

Technorati Tags: cfengine chef conference devops ha load loadays mysql mysql ha puppet

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The UKUUG usually hosts the more interesting conferences around ... , it's not just the schedule that attrackts me , yes there's the strong focus towards Larger Scale Unix (and mostly Linux) deployments and how to manage them, but there's also the opportunity to chat in real life with the Devops from across the chunnel.

Spending time with R.I.Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Simon Wilkinson , Alex Davies , Simon Riggs , Josette, and many others is always fun .

As I was in town early I went to the preconference beer meetup and met with a lot of people and chatted about config management, virtualization and lots of other stuff ... after the pub the plan was to go for curries nearby .. and while walking to the , ahem Bus stop, I managed to recognise Ben Martin from meeting him back ages ago in Hamburg for LinuxKongress , always fun ..

Apart from having to jump on a bus and our group being split at the curry place , rather than being able to tell the latecomers where to walk to and being seeted upstairs with the whole group , the curries were interesting and fun.

As I had been pushing Simon Wardley on Twitter to submit a talk for the conference it was really great to finally see him present .. His talk was the perfect soft introduction to the conference ...

Simon's talk was followed by a talk on Security for the virtual datacenters, after I questionned the speaker if anyone actualy uses TPM outside an academic lab the talk suddenly changed into a commercial presentation for a Quack, nuff said.

The Ever energetic Matt S Trout talked about 21st century perl before Simon "Life is to short for SELinux" Wilkinson talked about his experiences in getting the openAFS crowd on Git.

Bummer Thierry Carrez didn't show us the real juice of UEC and just the installations of a Cloud Controller and a Node Controller , but he managed to do so in approx 30 minutes as promised .

A talk titled Coherent and Integrated Configuration of Virtual Infrastructures always cathces my eye.. however when that talk turns out to be a Coherent and Integrated configuration only within the Univerity of Edinborough (aka lcfg2) talk I`m dissapointed, specially since it pretty much didn't introduce any new concepts from the ones I introduced back in my Durham UKUUG presentation

Luckily Andrew Stribblehill gave a very interesting talk on MySQL scalability, in which I promised him some answers to his questions for the next day :)

The Conference dinner was without a doubt the best UKUUG dinner so far , no typical english "food", no weird location (Old Trafford, an abandoned warship) , but just a big chinese place and plenty of food !

I started thurday morning in the wrong track, I assumed to be in the Virtualization track, but I ended up in the Sun thinclient and Abusing Linux to serve weird desktops under the Green computing umbrella track, not my favourites ..

When Patrick and Julian started their Hudson hit my Puppet with a Cucumber talk (which featured some aweseom #devops content) I was a afraid that we'd had to look for a replacment PostgreSQL talk as Simon hadn't arrived yet .. Luckily he arrived in time for his presentation and he explained us about the new replication features that are slowly making it into PostgreSQL, one way ... log shipping ... not really up to par with other alternatives yet :(

So with no further ado .. here's the presentation I gave

PS. If at a Ukuug event and not sure about a person's name ... try Simon.. pretty good chance you're correct :)

Technorati Tags: conference devops ha linux-ha manchester mysql puppet simon ukuug

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Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases  and a real community behind them.  At first glance my final list read like a cast of manga characters with names like Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly, OpenNebula, RabbitMQ and Zenoss. However they all seem to benefit from a strong development ethic, a growing community of users and the ability to address challenges associated with cloud computing.

• Chef – Chef  is a relative newcomer with their project being only one year old but they are aggressively developing their project as can be seen by the frequency of their code check-ins. is an integration framework for configuration management for all types of IT infrastructure but especially popular among cloud deployments. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure. Chef is professionally supported and sponsored by Opscode.
• collectd – collectd is a daemon which collects system performance statistics store the values in a variety of ways, one implementation is to store them in RRD files. What makes collectd particularly useful is it’s plugin architecture which allow the daemon to collect information from a variety of services and servers like Apache, memcache and Linux Vserver. collectd on its own is really interesting but what I really see is an opportunity for collectd to feed other systems management tools.
• Eucalyptus - Eculyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Eucalyptus Systems provides consulting, training and support services.
• OpenNebula – This is perhaps the most interesting and most relevant project of the list for cloud computing, billing itself as the open source tool kit for cloud computing.  OpenNebula is a tool that can be used  to build any type of Cloud deployment  and manage virtual infrastructure in a data-center or cluster or to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, for highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports public clouds by providing cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.
• OpenQRM – I have been a fan of OpenQRM for a long-time or at least well before the hoopla around Cloud Computing and have had the opportunity to work with technology when it was still part of a now defunct venture-backed company, Qlusters, and then spun out as a stand-alone open source project. While OpenQRM is not what I would consider a tool for public clouds I think it’s geared towards people delivering private virtual clusters or cloud capabilities.  openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT infrastructure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins. What’s really interesting about OpenQRM is that it can suck up physical installations, create an image, write that image to a SAN and then run the virtual instances on demand.  I think the opportunity for OpenQRM is to be able to suck those images up and then spit them out to cloud computing resources like EC2, RightScale or Rackspace Cloud.
• Puppet – The Ruby on Rails project is a great configuration management tool, very similar to Cfengine (which pre-dates Puppet) and Chef (which was started after Puppet). Puppet is a model-driven open source framework designed to automate the building and configuration of servers. Puppet lets you perform normal administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) on any number of systems, using essentially the same code, even if those systems are running completely different operating systems.
• RabbitMQ – RabbitMQ is an enterprise messaging system released under the Mozilla public license that adhere’s to the AMQP standard (AMQP is a standard that allows middleware products to send messages to one another). What really strikes me about RabbitMQ is the activity in their community especially their mailing lists and IRC channels. This was astounding to me as I feel like I am pretty up-to-date on active open source projects but before John’s post I was in the dark about RabbitMQ. Of the ones listed so far it’s really one that I feel like there’s really something substantial there. Commercial support is available from RabbitMQ LTD.
• Zenoss -  Zenoss made John’s list because of it’s Amazon Web Services monitoring capabilities and its ability to monitor all sorts of other cloud and virtual infrastructure. I am also excited about Zenoss making the list because the Zenoss Community is working to extend Zenoss Core to monitor all infrastructure you already have. I am very excited about the future of Zenoss as the community continues to expand its virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.
  [Disclosure: This caught my eye since I am the community guy for Zenoss.]

I also think there are a couple of other projects that weren’t on John’s list but have both an open source and cloud computing component:

• Bitnami – BitNami.org simplifies the process of deploying web applications virtually and in the cloud. Each BitNami Stack contains an application that is fully integrated with all of the software it requires to run. BitNami Stacks are available free of charge as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud templates. Examples of BitNami-packaged applications include Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Redmine, Subversion and many more. Bitnami is sponsored by the cross-platform installer vendors, Bitrock.
• Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) -  ECP is worth watching is as much for its firebrand leader Reuven Cohen and his expertise as it for the merits of the project . ECP is a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses. ECP can help you design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud and in the process significantly reduce administrative and systems workload. Our browser-based dashboard enables IT personnel to simply and efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing, and analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity in an easy to use utility. We’ve designed the ECP platform to work alongside your current virtual data center, providing additional value and cost savings.
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud – Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) is included with Ubuntu Server Edition and integrates a number of open source projects (including Eucalyptus). Given the rabid Ubuntu fan base I think the UEC will immediately benefit. This gives users a turnkey package to deploy a private cloud. I also liked the he code name for Ubuntu 9.10 the latest release was Karmic Koala and as we all know Koala’s eat Eucalyptus (a clever little joke from the Canonical folks who develop Ubuntu).

I am sure there are other notable open source cloud computing solutions and tools that I haven’t mentioned and hope to add to this list going forward.

Related Articles

• Open Source Meets Cloud Computing (Information Week Government Blog)
• Lowering the barrier to open source (NASA Nebula Blog)
• Forecast for 2010: The Rise of Hybrid Clouds (GigaOm)
• Application packaging for cloud computing: A proposal (c|net’s Wisdom of Clouds blog)
• Cross-Platform Clouds Coming to Storage (MSP Mentor)

Technorati Tags: Chef, cloud computing, collectd, Enomaly, Open Source, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, Puppet, RabbitMQ, Ruby on Rails, Sys Admin, systems managment, Ubuntu, Zenoss

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware acquired open source java vendor SpringSource that not only developed the popular Spring framework but had also acquired open source systems management vendor Hyperic (May 2009) and commercial Apache support vendor, Covalent (January 2009).

According to CNET’s Matt Asay, Yahoo!’s  Zimbra business unit is still growing and has an impressive customer base:

Lost in the news of Zimbra’s release of version 6.0 of its collaboration suite is the importance of one very big number: 50 million. That’s how many paid mailboxes Zimbra claims now, a number that puts it within spitting distance of IBM Lotus Notes (approximately 145 million paid mailboxes) and Microsoft Exchange (approximately 175 million paid mailboxes). Whatever the truth to rumors that Zimbra is up for sale, Zimbra is an appreciating asset for Yahoo, not a depreciating one.

I also noticed a couple of months ago that VMware started to re-brand getting rid of their old blue logo and moving to a grey logo sans the “virtualization boxes”. According to this post by VMware CMO Rick Jackson:

Now, as we look at our current offerings based on vSphere, and our vision of delivering the infrastructure for unrestrained cloud computing, the image we are portraying to the market has evolved.  In fact, our message embodies the notion of freeing IT from the constraints of physical resources.

Makes you wonder in the long-term where VMware might draw the line...

Build, Manage and Provide the Silver Lining for Clouds?

Does this signal the beginning of a broader VMware open source acquisition strategy? Maybe they will complete their java application stack with a database.  Barring Larry Ellison offering to sell MySQL to VMware maybe there are some other opportunities. VMware might benefit from picking up EnterpriseDB or maybe become the patron saint for MySQL fork, MariaDB sponsored by MySQL creator Monty Widenius. Beyond the database there are a number of interesting buying opportunities out there for VMware should they have their pocketbook open. For one there is rPath which can build and update Linux virtual machines and provide automated provisioning of systems taking VMware’s management and deployment capabilities one step further.

Another option would be to get deeper in management by picking up one of the open source configuration management vendors like Reductive Labs that produces Puppet or newly funded cloud configuration rival Opscode and their open source project, Chef. They could even go old school and take a look at CFengine which is similar to Chef and Puppet but supports not only Unix-like systems but Windows too. Alternatively, they could acquire commercial open source vendor, Cloudera that provides support for Hadoop, an open source implementation of  MapReduce which is ideally suited for cloud deployment.

I guess that’s enough speculation for today. However, it will be curious to see if the deal goes through and if VMware pays a premium over Yahoo!’s acquisition price of $350 million back in 2007. It could as The VarGuy notes it could trigger a reset for how open source companies are valued.

Related Articles

• VMware Buying Zimbra – My Initial Thoughts (cloudave.com)
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare (mashable.com)
• Yahoo! to offload Zimbra on…VMware? (theregister.co.uk)
• Zimbra notches 100 percent growth (news.cnet.com)
• Rumor: VMware Buying Zimbra Open Source Email? (thevarguy.com)

Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Cloudera, Covalent, Hyperic, MapReduce, MariaDB, Open Source, Opscode, Puppet, Reductive Labs, Spring Source, VMware, Zimbra

*EC pauses Oracle-Sun over MySQL
* Open source licenses debated
* Red Hat growth opportunities and Summit roundup
* Reductive Labs seeking cloud role for Puppet software
* VMware-SpringSource analyzed

iTunes or direct download (26:04, 5.9 MB)