A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
There is always room to test different HA technologies in a simulated VM environment. At ICCLab we have created such a DRBD test environment for PostgreSQL databases. This environment is now available on Github. The test environment installation uses Vagrant as tool to install VMs, Virtualbox as VM runtime environment and Puppet as VM configurator. […]
Vagrant is a ruby framework that automates a lot of the boring, painful setup a developer needs to do to work with services. In the case of the ICCLab those services are generally OpenStack services. We use vagrant to create consistent reproducible setups of our testbed on local development machines.
In his excellent article in Linux Technical Review #04 Jens-Christoph Brendel proposes a new way how to implement High Availability (HA) in current IT architectures. According to Bendel, modern IT architectures continually gain in complexity. This fact makes it difficult to guarantee availability on a certain level. Nevertheless High Availability is not merely a competitional advantage: for many companies keeping availability levels above 99,999 % per year is a matter of existence. Therefore a few systematic steps should help in planning and implementing high availability in your IT environment. This article shows a possible strategy on how to plan High Availability in the Mobile Cloud environment.
SmartOS is an open source type 1 hypervisor platform based on Illumos, a descendant of OpenSolaris, and developed by Joyent. SmartOS is a live operating system, meaning that can be booted via PXE, USB or an ISO image, and runs entirely from memory, leaving the full space on the local disk to be used for virtual machines. This type of architecture makes SmartOS very secure, easy to upgrade and recover. Given its performances and reliability, in the context of the Mobile Cloud Networking project, SmartOS has been chosen to support telco-grade workloads and provide carrier-grade performances.
On the 19th February the 2nd Swiss OpenStack User Group Meeting took place. One of the presentations was held on Ceilometer by Toni and Lucas from the ICCLab. They talked about the history, the current and future features, the architecture and the requirements of ceilometer and explained how to use and extend it. You can […]
Recently we setup a server for version-control that can be used for internal and external projects here at the ICCLab. However, the service will not be available for public but the following hints may help you if you want to setup a similar appliance. Actually is gitorious our second choice, originally we want to use gitlabhq for this but […]
Puppet is an infrastructure automation system for the efficient management of large scale infrastructures. Using a declarative approach puppet can manage infrastructure lifecycles from provisioning, configuration, update and compliance management. All of these management capabilities are managed logically in a centralised fashion, however the system itself can be implemented in a distributed manner. A key […]
[OpenShift](https://openshift.redhat.com/app/) is one of the Open Source Platform as a Service cloud computing frameworks that the ICCLabs works with. For developers, deploying their application to this runtime is a simple as using the all-familiar `git` command. Currently, OpenShift supports the following development runtimes: * node.js * Ruby (Rack, RoR) * Python (WSGI, Django) * Perl […]
“[Cloud Foundry](http://www.cloudfoundry.com) is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Initiated by VMware, with broad industry support, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud […]
[OpenStack](http://www.openstack.org) is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack is the infrastructure management framework that is currently powering [the ICCLab research infrastructure](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/research/foundation/projects/the-init-cloud-lab/). Schlagwörter: iaas, […]