[SAC] Virtual Machines for Services

Frank Warmerdam warmerdam at pobox.com
Tue Nov 20 13:06:50 EST 2007


Folks,

We chatted a bit in IRC about virtual machine technologies and I just
wanted to get a bit of that into the mailing list archive and out to all
SAC interested folks.

For buildbot in particular, it is desirable to run some virtual machines
for some slave configurations.   But we could easily imagine some other
OSGeo services being run within VMs to make them easier to backup, migrate,
and so forth.

So then the question arises what technologies to use.  I understand vmware
is already fairly readily available at telascience and some of us already
have experience with it.  But it "sticks in my craw" (Arnulf will want to
lookup that up I think) to depend on non-open source technology for this
if open source alternatives are also quite viable and I hear good things
about Xen for instance.  Using vmware also puts us in an ackward position
in doing stuff outside of telascience without buying additional licenses.

I understand that Xen requires kernel modifications, and doesn't work well
with some older systems.  Who is familiar with those limitations?  For
instance, I'd like to be able to run VMs on "osgeo2" but I think it is
running a somewhat antique RHEL, is that right?  Will it support Xen?
Can we even run the vmware player on it?

Anyways, before we invest to much time and energy setting up VMs for
buildslaves (for instance), I'd love to see us have a discussion as
a group and decide on a VM technology we are interested in committing
to.

Related to this, a question for John is whether he has a beefy machine
with quite a bit of RAM and diskspace that we could run a few OSGeo
VMs on.  Initially for buildbot slaves, but potentially other services in
time as well.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org



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