My job is almost completely reliant upon my ability to perform work in lab of virtual machines. Almost every action plan I write is tested locally. When I need to troubleshoot an issue for a client one of the most common first steps I’ll perform is attempting to recreate the issue in a virtual environment so I can work on it there without the risk of impacting client data.

I believe that having a place to test and grow your skills is an absolute necessity for anyone working in the IT field today regardless of your specialization, even if you’re an IT generalist. But every now and then I hear about individuals who have issues with their virtual machines or with the virtual environment provided by their employer, so I figured this was a good time to share my method of creating a virtual lab. More specifically, one that allows you to do virtual work on a commodity laptop, one that won’t break down if you lose connectivity, one that …

For the majority of us who have grown accustomed to a Windows environment over the years, Linux can seem like another world. In essence, Linux is a free open-source operating system that has gained increasing popularity since its release in 1991. Linux is based on the whole Unix ecosystem of operating systems that grew out of Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s. Linux has been around for almost 25 years and grew immensely in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it became associated with the LAMP web development stack; Linux stands for the ‘L’ in the acronym of popular tools, along with Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.

The main difference that …

Ok, so I wanted to look into the new compression options of MEB 3.10.

And I would like to share my tests with you. Remember, they’re just this, tests, so please feel free to copy n paste and obtain your own results and conclusions, and should I say it, baselines, in order to compare future behaviour, on your own system.

An Oracle Linux 6.3 virtual machine with 3Gb RAM, 2 virtual threads, on a 1x quad core, windows laptop. Not pretty, but hey.

So, these tests are solely about backup. I’ll do restore when I get some *more* time.

First up, lets compare like with like, i.e. MEB version 3.9 & 3.10:

Let’s make this interesting, hence, want to use as much resources available as possible, read, write, process threads and number of buffers.

mysqlbackup --user=root --password=oracle --socket=/tmp/mysql5614.sock \
--backup-dir=/home/mysql/MEB/test --with-timestamp …

Ok, so I wanted to look into the new compression options of MEB 3.10.

And I would like to share my tests with you. Remember, they’re just this, tests, so please feel free to copy n paste and obtain your own results and conclusions, and should I say it, baselines, in order to compare future behaviour, on your own system.

An Oracle Linux 6.3 virtual machine with 3Gb RAM, 2 virtual threads, on a 1x quad core, windows laptop. Not pretty, but hey.

So, these tests are solely about backup. I’ll do restore when I get some *more* time.

First up, lets compare like with like, i.e. MEB version 3.9 & 3.10:

Let’s make this interesting, hence, want to use as much resources available as possible, read, write, process threads and number of buffers.

mysqlbackup --user=root --password=oracle --socket=/tmp/mysql5614.sock \
--backup-dir=/home/mysql/MEB/test --with-timestamp …

Over the past couple of years, several tools have come up to solve some of the long standing problems for developers, DBAs and operations teams. This list is no where near exhaustive and your mileage may vary.

These tools should let you get up and coding, saving your code to a central place.

I run (Mac/Windows), I need a Linux server to learn some of this cool stuff, right?

Not exactly. VirtualBox is a virtualization project for multiple platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris) that allows you to run a guest OS right from your laptop or desktop. There are repositories of images (alternative here) that you can use to get yourself going quickly, or you can provision your own.

I set up (cool open source package here) and now my team …

Ok, so after all the things that have been announced @MySQLConnect, I’ve got to play around with them. First stop: space (no.. not ‘the final frontier’).

I need more space on my f/s to get installing. I was a bit of a scrooge when I created my Oracle Linux virtual machine, so now I’m paying the price.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_ol63uek01-LogVol01
                      7.1G  5.7G  1.1G  85% /

As I’m using Virtual Box, I’ve added a new SATA Controller vmdk of 10G, SATA Port 1 and then start it up.

fdisk -l

Will be able to identify the new & unused partition:

[root@ol63uek01 ~]# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 Disk identifier: …

Ok, so after all the things that have been announced @MySQLConnect, I’ve got to play around with them. First stop: space (no.. not ‘the final frontier’).

I need more space on my f/s to get installing. I was a bit of a scrooge when I created my Oracle Linux virtual machine, so now I’m paying the price.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_ol63uek01-LogVol01
                      7.1G  5.7G  1.1G  85% /

As I’m using Virtual Box, I’ve added a new SATA Controller vmdk of 10G, SATA Port 1 and then start it up.

fdisk -l

Will be able to identify the new & unused partition:

[root@ol63uek01 ~]# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 Disk identifier: …

This Log Buffer Edition is encompassing various blogs across Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL arena. Enjoy the Log Buffer #284. Oracle: Dimitrios Stasinopoulos was trying to install new Guest Additions to VirtualBox4.1.14 to 4.1.18 and all of a sudden…. Denes Kubicek has a good blog post about APEX 4.2. Jonathan Lewis blogs about the bugs [...]

I have had most of my test environment, aka puppetmasters, test mysql setups etc running in KVM for the past couple of years .. (yes I`m still using a lot of Xen in production environments, but we've also been using KVM for a while already .. it's a good mix) , Virtual box has always been the lesser loved Virtualization platform , however while playing more and more with Vagrant Up I realized I needed to convirt some boxen (e.g my PuppetMaster) to Virtualbox, and google was really no good help(most people seem to go the other way , or want to use some proprietary tools )

So I remembered VBoxManage and apparently I hade blogged about it myselve already ..
I just hate it when I search for stuff and google points right back to me

So I converted my puppetmaster's disks

1. VBoxManage convertdd Emtpy-clone.img PuppetMasterroot.vdi
…

Oracle announced the release of VirtualBox 4.0.4 today. This maintenance release addresses many bugs experienced by hosts of all operating systems. You can find a full list of fixes and additions in the Changelog.

I use VirtualBox on both my Macs for my various testing needs. If you’ve got a favorite desktop virtualization program, leave a comment and tell us about it.

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