[18/04/2012 7:00:28 AM] Grey the Huge: Idaho is north of Utah. [18/04/2012 7:00:33 AM] Grey the Huge: fool. [18/04/2012 7:00:37 AM] churba: WHY HAS NOBODY TOLD ME THIS
Made my way to an Art of Shaving and snagged my first decent shaving set, with a brush, lather, pre- and post-shave moisturizers. I'm going to start shaving well and often, or cut my face off trying.
Churbs drinks a lot. I drink a lot. Others among us drink a lot, and together we form a bit of a troupe. We all tend to act like mad bastards with alcohol in our system. Churba burns couches; I take showers fully clothed, pretend to know everyone I see on the street (and attempt to convince them of as much), and steal whole bottles of tequila from unsuspecting party guests.
That's all there is to it, really, but I suspect a "FRCFools' Gathering" would be absolute madness. They'd likely exile us from any city we held it in; we'd have to retreat to the wilderness.
Churbs drinks a lot. I drink a lot. Others among us drink a lot, and together we form a bit of a troupe. We all tend to act like mad bastards with alcohol in our system. Churba burns couches; I take showers fully clothed, pretend to know everyone I see on the street (and attempt to convince them of as much), and steal whole bottles of tequila from unsuspecting party guests.
That's all there is to it, really, but I suspect a "FRCFools' Gathering" would be absolute madness. They'd likely exile us from any city we held it in; we'd have to retreat to the wilderness.
HEY! Not just couches. But yeah, we're loveable maniacs when we're on the piss.
Every day I use it, I feel more than more that VirtualBox is utter crap for anything serious. It's a toy virtualization environment with a reasonably slick GUI, but nothing more. Yesterday I lost several hours of work due to it hanging, forcing a dirty shutdown of a VM that ended up corrupting one of its file systems beyond the ability of fsck to repair it.
I'm sticking with VMWare for virtualization purposes, at least on anything I use personally, for the time being, although I hear KVM is also pretty good.
The main reasons why we're using VBox here at work is that it's free, it's not from a competitor (VMWare is owned by EMC, who is our main competitor... and besides, VMWare Server is only free for "personal use"), our product runs reasonably well under it, and it has a decent GUI. I'm hoping that we can at least switch to KVM or something else in the near future, though.
I use nothing but VirtualBox. I've never had it do anything bad. The only annoying part is that it constantly gets updates, and then I have to upgrade the guest additions in every VM.
Then again, all I do in Virtual Box is run Ubuntu VMs that I use for web development. I don't to anything weird or fancy.
I should really config a virtual machine to run instances of legit Adobe demo programs. That way, I can artificially keep the machine's time stationary and always have a copy of the current Master Suite going...
I'm doing fancier stuff in VirtualBox than you are, probably. For one thing, I use snapshots like crazy. I also have an internal private network within VBox between multiple VMs to simulate a cluster of machines. I'm also typically pushing tens to hundreds of gigabytes of I/O to my virtual machines as well (part of the reason why I use snapshots so much -- I don't want to have to repush all that data if I want to rerun a test).
I'm doing fancier stuff in VirtualBox than you are, probably. For one thing, I use snapshots like crazy. I also have an internal private network within VBox between multiple VMs to simulate a cluster of machines. I'm also typically pushing tens to hundreds of gigabytes of I/O to my virtual machines as well (part of the reason why I use snapshots so much -- I don't want to have to repush all that data if I want to rerun a test).
While the features are technically there for that, I think you are probably pushing VBox harder than anyone has ever pushed it. Really, I think for your kind of work you are better off with real machines or using AWS, despite the fact that they cost moneys.
You can't do snapshots with real machines. Actually, we do have real machines here as well, but I'm using VMs here specifically due to snapshot purposes as I'm testing the behavior of our app when we upgrade it as well as the underlying version of Linux it runs under (we sell a hardware appliance, so when a customer upgrades our product, it upgrades both the underlying OS and the software we run on top of the OS). I'm only interested in the app-specific parts of our upgrade process and not the whole Linux upgrade process, so I use a snapshot to avoid having to re-run the Linux upgrade every time I change the app-specific portion of the upgrade.
Also, AWS probably wouldn't scale well for us if only because of the limited pipe we have to the outside world to push out all those gigs (or even terabytes if we're doing load testing -- but we have physical hardware for that at least).
I do have a couple of physical machines at my desk that I use for testing that doesn't require snapshots, though, and I greatly prefer those to VMs.
Scott, I highly doubt your argument will change the entire infrastructure of whatever Lou is trying to do at work, and I'm sure his company has good reasons for doing it the way they do.
Yeah, I know about imaging... Still slower than using a VM's snapshot system though. For one thing, I believe you need to quiesce the machine (i.e. perform a clean shutdown) to image it, which isn't exactly the behavior I need/want in this case.
You can do snapshots with real machines. It's called imaging. You can do snapshots even more easily with Amazon Web Services.
We in IT are aware of imaging. It isn't really useful for the kinds of things we're doing. ;^)
Yep... and my company's product is made to be sold to you folks in IT (or at least used by you folks in IT), as opposed to Scott's, which is (I believe) an end-user facing website. The issues we need to face while testing are probably much closer to what folks in IT have to deal with than what Scott has to deal with. If nothing else, I have to deal with all the shitty enterprise backup software out there...
Using Amazon is probably worth what it would cost.
I don't know how it could be. Machines are machines.
Yes, machines are machines, but the problem is that you still need a WAN connection to Amazon. The cost of a fat enough pipe to give us the bandwidth we need plus Amazon's services itself would outweigh any benefit Amazon itself could give us. We're not doing simple HTTP PUTs/GETs here. We're shoving out gigabytes to terabytes of data using CIFS, NFS, or OST (a Symantec proprietary protocol for backup apps) per user. The cost of a WAN link that can handle that kind of load would be insane, especially for a start-upish company like mine.
AWS is a great product. I'm not denying that. However, it's not a cure-all for every problem out there.
They actually have a service where you get a direct connection to them. It's not super cheap, but still surprisingly affordable considering what it is.
Also, if you are just using it for testing, you probably don't need to upload all new test data every single test. You can just upload your gigabytes of test data just once into S3, and then use it like crazy.
Not trying to be an Amazon shill. I just honestly think it might make your job way easier.
Actually, I can't just "upload" my gigabytes of test data, at least not for every test I do. I actually need to run backup applications since they often do weird things when writing out their files that canned test data can't simulate.
I also don't see how it would make my job way easier. At best, it would make it just as easy (assuming we ditch VBox for something else). I do admit this is a neat feature from Amazon, however.
Actually, I can't just "upload" my gigabytes of test data, at least not for every test I do. I actually need to run backup applications since they often do weird things when writing out their files that canned test data can't simulate.
I also don't see how it would make my job way easier. At best, it would make it just as easy (assuming we ditch VBox for something else). I do admit this is a neat feature from Amazon, however.
You would have a Windows machine on Amazon EC2 that runs the backup applications. Then instead of spinning up virtual machines running your app, you spin up other EC2 machines based on an AMI you have created. You would use the EBS snapshot feature instead of the VBox snapshot feature.
Comments
[18/04/2012 7:00:33 AM] Grey the Huge: fool.
[18/04/2012 7:00:37 AM] churba: WHY HAS NOBODY TOLD ME THIS
That's all there is to it, really, but I suspect a "FRCFools' Gathering" would be absolute madness. They'd likely exile us from any city we held it in; we'd have to retreat to the wilderness.
I'm sticking with VMWare for virtualization purposes, at least on anything I use personally, for the time being, although I hear KVM is also pretty good.
Then again, all I do in Virtual Box is run Ubuntu VMs that I use for web development. I don't to anything weird or fancy.
Also, AWS probably wouldn't scale well for us if only because of the limited pipe we have to the outside world to push out all those gigs (or even terabytes if we're doing load testing -- but we have physical hardware for that at least).
I do have a couple of physical machines at my desk that I use for testing that doesn't require snapshots, though, and I greatly prefer those to VMs.
1990 - 1969 = 21
1990 closer to moon landing than it is to present day.
AWS is a great product. I'm not denying that. However, it's not a cure-all for every problem out there.
https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/#pricing
Also, if you are just using it for testing, you probably don't need to upload all new test data every single test. You can just upload your gigabytes of test data just once into S3, and then use it like crazy.
Not trying to be an Amazon shill. I just honestly think it might make your job way easier.
I also don't see how it would make my job way easier. At best, it would make it just as easy (assuming we ditch VBox for something else). I do admit this is a neat feature from Amazon, however.