RHEL

Main HallRed Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit.

I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

Virtual Areas

• Conference Center - 15 presentations in three tracks with live video, audio and slides including chat submitted questions from the audience
• Exhibition Hall - 3 regions, US region had 14 vendors with staffed booths offering public and private chat
• Resource Center - 15 background items (PDF and Flash videos)
• Birds-of-a-Feather - 4 Topics
• Networking Cafe - Chat center with presenters and guests
• Help Desk - Section for help with the virtual experience usage

I sent this to the centos-virt mailing list today... and thought I'd share it here as well.

Greetings,

I'm a big OpenVZ fanboy. I've sent a few emails on this list that proves that... and I'm sure I've annoyed some people... but be that as it may... I would like to draw everyone on this list's attention to Proxmox VE. What is Proxmox VE?

I noticed a blog posting by Daniel Veillard on Fedora People about initial support for OpenVZ being added to libvirt. If you aren't familiar with libvirt, it is an underlying library/API that can be used by higher level tools to create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. libvirt is trying to be technology agnostic by supporting several virtualization technologies. They started off with Xen and QEMU but have since added KVM. libvirt is used by the GUI tool Virtual Machine Manager which first appeared in Fedora Core (now Fedora) but became part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Looking at some of the postings in the libvirt mailing list archive for this month, it is mentioned that adding OpenVZ support is a bit different than previous technologies because the OpenVZ tools are already GPLed, "simple and straight forward", and than OpenVZ additions to libvirt "ends up looking very close to the original". I don't know how far away complete support for OpenVZ is in libvirt nor when it will show up in Virtual Machine Manager but I definitely look forward to it... although I doubt it would completely replace vzctl and the other OpenVZ tools for me.

Package SetsIf one knows of the hype about Ubuntu, and it is almost unavoidable, one is led to believe that it is the most popular Linux distribution for desktop users. I have yet to see hard data that shows evidence of that claim so that will remain unresolved for now. One of the reasons touted for Ubuntu's popularity is that it comes on a single CD. Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based, also has fans because it too has a very light-weight install option (among other reasons) which will install the base system and allow one to install all the desired software post-install by downloading only what is needed. While Debian is huge, 27 CDs for the full distro or 3 DVDs (not counting the source CDs), virtually no one downloads all of the .iso images.

Since I'm a Red Hat fan (which includes Fedora Core and CentOS), I'm aware of the complaints people have about "having to download multiple CDs" before they can start installing. In fact, the recently released CentOS 5 is 6 CDs (i386, or 7 CDs for x86_64). To counter those complaints, I thought I'd try a single CD install of the recently released CentOS 5 "Debian style" and then add everything in post-install. Join me if you will...

OpenFiler iSCSII installed OpenFiler on an extra machine the other day. What's OpenFiler? According to the OpenFiler website:

Openfiler is a Storage Management Operating System. It is powered by the Linux 2.6 kernel and Open Source applications such as Apache, Samba, LVM2, ext3, Linux NFS and iSCSI Enterprise Target. Openfiler combines these ubiquitous technologies into a small, easy to manage solution fronted by a powerful web-based management interface. Openfiler allows you to build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and/or Storage Area Network (SAN) appliance, using industry-standard hardware, in less than 10 minutes of installation time.

I've never worked with iSCSI before... but now I want to. The reason I'm looking into it is because RHEL 5 and others can use iSCSI disks to install to... and hopefully it'll work well for XenVMs too. Care to follow me on this, the initial leg, of my journey?

Virtual Machine ManagerI got a bit farther with Xen this time. I did another CentOS 5 Beta install and made sure to add the Virtualization package set. It's not like I needed to do another install but I've been doing a few installs just to test out differences with the various package sets.

I originally tried out Xen about a year and a half ago on a Fedora Core 4 host on rather underpowered hardware and a lot has changed since then.

Install CD BootI discovered that CentOS announced a public release of CentOS 5 beta this morning. I quickly downloaded the 6 .iso images for the CDs and gave it a spin. The DVD iso is only available via .torrent and I can't do bittorrent at work.

Added to this release are package sets for:

• Virtualization
• Clustering
• and Cluster Storage (aka GFS)

Follow along with me as I do installs on both a physical machine and in VMware. Feel free to go directly to the screenshot gallery.

No, this isn't a repeat blog posting... as I continually download and install various distros. Since I'm very Red Hat centric, I'm all excited about the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release... that is coming out... maybe in March?!?
[Update: Looks like next week... March 14th.]

Fedora 7 Beta 2

Fedora 7 betaDownloaded and installed Fedora 7 Test 2. Notice that Core is no longer part of the name because Core and Extras are in the process of being merged. I downloaded the LiveCD and it worked great. I was very impressed by the artwork. I did an install from the LiveCD and it worked well... and seemed faster than the boot-install method. The only things broken that I noticed were some warning messages during shutdown after doing the install... about not being able to unmount something... but it was of no consequence... and a few of the desktop apps didn't work... like Abiword for example. Other than that, it recognized the onboard Intel video chipset of my wife's Gateway branded box and worked with accelerated video... rotating cube and all.

For the rest of the story, click on the read more link below...