Given the popularity of system or server virtualization products and technologies including VMware, Xen, Sun xVM VirtualBox, etc. in addition to Sun's upcoming xVM Server product, partners, prospects and customers often ask whether Sun supports the deployment of our middleware on these environments. Historically, we've provided inconsistent answers to this question. Fortunately, Sun recently released an official support statement to help address this issue.
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Updated March 9, 2009
The Update Center 2 Toolkit project is demonstrating how the Image Packaging System, also known as the pkg(5) System, can deliver the following features for multi-platform layered applications:
Installing OpenSolaris 2008.05 as a guest OS using VMware Workstation 6
on an Ubuntu host. This is an update to my earlier post addressing
installation of the Developer Preview releases.
See the updated instructions.
The Update Center (UC) 2.0 Toolkit open source project that I am a part of is reusing OpenSolaris' Image Packaging System (IPS) for distribution of software and updates on a variety of OS platforms. In addition to reusing the underlying IPS CLI and server side repository infrastructure, the Update Center Toolkit team has been keen to reuse the IPS-oriented package management GUI tools being developed by OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris is using PyGTK, the Python binding to GTK+, and the Glade GUI design tool to help them rapidly develop the new package management GUI tools for OpenSolaris. Since IPS itself is written mostly in Python, using a Python-based toolkit for the GUI applications was a natural decision.
Based on Danek Duvall's suggestion (yeah, blame Danek!), we took a look at the wxPython GUI toolkit.
Once a pre-installed VMware image of OpenSolaris is made available for general download, some of the following instructions will become obsolete. Ideally, all you should need to do is download a VMware image and boot it within VMware Workstation, VMware Player or one of the VMware server products.
In the meantime the following instructions address booting up the OpenSolaris 2008.05 live CD and installing the OS into a virtual machine (VM). In this example we'll use VMware Workstation 6.0.2 build-59824 running on Ubuntu 7.10 with bridged networking.
A colleague of mine has also followed these instructions using VMware Workstation 6 on Windows XP.
After installing our new QNAP TS-109 NAS server, one of our next steps was to ensure that my wife's Mac G4 PowerBook would automatically mount the shares of interest whenever she logs into the laptop. My personal blog article "Mac OS Client Access to NAS Server" explains what we did to get the most out of our new NAS server from one of our Mac clients.
As part of implementing our new home data storage and backup solution, we recently installed a QNAP TS-109 NAS server. My personal blog article "TS-109 NAS Server Initial Experience" describes the initial steps in using this pretty neat and simple device.
A highly varied climate is just one of the many benefits (?) of living in the Midwest of the United States. Accordingly, our new home has a relatively complex HVAC system. In addition to a geothermal ground source heat pump (GSHP), the system includes an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) to constantly introduce conditioned outside air and whole-house humidification and dehumidification.
Since this is our first year experiencing the four seasons in the home, we consider ourselves in the "sea trials" or "shakedown cruise" portion of familiarizing ourselves with the performance of the HVAC system.
To help us understand whether the various parts of the system are working as expected, I've set up a series of 1-Wire based temperature and humidity sensors to monitor the performance of the system. My personal blog article "The Skinny: Home Systems Monitoring Components" explains the tools we used to set up the initial monitoring system.
I recently researched options for managing our electronic documents and media files at home. Given several pretty basic requirements, the extensive amount of research I had to do to arrive at a reasonable solution was quite surprising. How do non-technical people adequately and efficiently manage data at home? I assume most don't. My personal blog article "Home Network Data Storage and Backup" sets forth our requirements, looks at several options and describes the approach we've begun implementing in stages.
