This quick guide will walk you through setting up OpenVZ on CentOS. I followed these steps on CentOS release 5.5 x64 version. If you want more detail on install via different methods and/or have different flavor of CentOS and run into an issue, you can follow instructions provided by OpenVZ site. Once you are done with this guide, you will have CentOS container running for you to play with.

For my purposes, I started with very basic installation of CentOS 5.5. I have done this on existing installations of CentOS without any issues as well. Ok so let’s start with getting the OpenVZ repository added to our system. This means that we will be going down “yum” path instead of “rpm” path. This is the quickest and easiest way to get OpenVZ installed.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://download.openvz.org/openvz.repo
rpm --import …

Topics for this podcast:

*Our latest CAOS Special Report – Control and Community
*Red Hat releases RHEL 6
*Symbian and Oracle highlight community challenges
*The latest on government adoption of OSS from GOSCON
*Open core issue continues, now with Linux and evil twins

iTunes or direct download (31:02, 8.5MB)

Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the …

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

It is a common misconception that DRBD (or any block-level data replication) solution can magically make an application crash-safe that intrinsically isn’t. Baron highlights that misconception in a recent blog post.

I want to reiterate and stress that point here: if your application can’t reliably survive a node crash, it won’t successfully fail over on a replicated (or shared, for that matter) data device. But if it can, and DRBD is replicating synchronously, then DRBD won’t break it. In other words: try pulling the power plug on your machine while your app is running, and power back on. If your application recovers to a consistent state, you’re clear. If it doesn’t, don’t bother adding DRBD until you fix that.

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There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and …

I wrote this post for the Zenoss community blog today, on cloud lock-in today. Rather than cross-posting I’ll just give you the lead in and you can read it there if you like.

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold. Despite a widespread interest in cloud computing there may be some pitfalls …

Mark’s done an excellent job again, getting VM’s of MariaDB 5.1.47 (release notes, changelog) out there for download. He’s also improved the bandwidth available at the box hosting these images. Get it for Ubuntu 10.04 or OpenSolaris 0906.

Related posts:

1. …

A common problem I see people running into when using a cloud computing service is the trap of under-provisioning. There’s a chain effect that leads to this result: 1) people don’t understand how virtualization works, and therefore 2) they don’t realize how much of a computing resource they’re really buying, so 3) they assume they are entitled to more than they really are, and 4) they under-provision. A few other causes and effects come into play here, too. For example, the choice to use the cloud is sometimes founded on economic assumptions that frequently turn out to be wrong. The cloud service looks more economically attractive than it really is, due to under-provisioning.

Let’s get back to this idea that people under-provision. How do I know that’s happening? I’ll use anecdotal evidence to illustrate. Here’s a real quote from a recent engagement about database (MySQL) performance problems:

Do you think it’s …