Tag: Linux

My initial experience with Antsle, a virtual machine appliance

I love virtual machines and containers because they make it easy to isolate the applications and dependencies I’m using for a particular project. Tools like Docker, Virtualbox, and vagrant are indispensable for most of my projects and I’m still using those, but in this post I’ll describe a product called Antsle which has given me additional flexibility and has freed up some local resources.

My daily developer workstation is a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD. From a memory and CPU perspective, it can handle running a handful of virtual machines simultaneously without a problem. But disk space is starting to be an issue.

I use vagrant and Ansible to make virtual machine provisioning repeatable–I can delete any VM at any time without remorse because I can always recreate it easily. But I get tired of continually cleaning up machines and pruning back base boxes just to reclaim space.

I decided to do something about it. My options were:

  • When Apple releases a MacBook Pro that can take 32 GB of RAM, buy that with at least 1 TB SSD, then continue with my current toolset.
  • Buy a Mac Pro or some other desktop to use exclusively for virtual machines.
  • Buy or build an actual server and set it up with virtualization. Something like this, for example.
  • Use AWS for my development virtual machines.

Then I came across a little company based out of San Diego called Antsle. Antsle builds virtualization appliances. What makes their product attractive to me versus buying a workstation or server or building my own is that:

  • The machines have no fan or other moving parts–they are completely silent. The case acts as a heat sink.
  • The machines are energy-efficient. The docs say mine will run at 45 watts.
  • They are built on Linux with standard virtualization technology (LXC and KVM) plus some additional optimizations from Antsle.
  • They are ready-to-go out-of-the-box, saving me the time and effort of building my own solution.

I really like using AWS, and I think for production workloads, no one, not even your own internal IT data center, can do it cheaper or more securely. Plus the breadth of their service offering is nuts. But for my modest developer needs, I’m pretty sure I’ll break even within a year, and that’s not counting the productivity gain of not having to wait for instances to spin up or having to fool with the complexity of the AWS console.

So, after that analysis, I was ready to buy. The biggest struggle was to decide which model to buy and whether or not to do any upgrades. I went for an Ultra, which has an 8-core 2.4 GHz Intel processor, 32 GB of ECC RAM and two Samsung EVO 850 1 TB SSD drives. The drives are mirrored so that’s 1 TB of space. I could have expanded the RAM to 64 GB and increased the storage up to 16 TB, but it was hard to justify the added expense based on my needs.

My Antsle arrived last week and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. I’ve got a set of “base” images created so that I can easily instantiate new machines based on typical components and configuration. For example, I have an image for every recent Alfresco release. When I need to work on one for a client project or to help someone in the forums, I can just clone one of my base images and start it up. I can let it run as long as I want without worrying about cost, and then kill it or keep it around as needed.

Here is a summary of my experience, thus far:

  • No setup necessary. I plugged it in, started it up, and was starting up machines in minutes.
  • Creating machines from templates, cloning machines, taking snapshots, and startup/shutdown happens very quickly.
  • Templates and instantiated machines take up less space than I would have thought, which is great. So far, I’m glad I stuck with the base storage option.
  • I haven’t pegged the CPU yet, but I have seen it spike briefly to as high as 50%, and that was when I was only running a single VM. I continue to see brief spikes here and there, but as I won’t have too many machines under load at any given time so I’m not that worried about it yet.
  • Documentation seems thorough and helpful. The company has been really responsive and helpful so far as well. They responded to a minor billing issue quickly and resolved it without a fuss.
  • I noticed when you clone a machine that has a bridged network adapter, the MAC address doesn’t change. You have to drop and re-add the NIC if you want a new MAC address, otherwise DHCP will assign it the same IP address as the original machine. This isn’t a big deal once you know the behavior.
  • I had to change the vm.max_mem_map setting to make Elasticsearch happy, which is a typical setup task for Elastic. It took me a minute to realize that needs to be done on the Antsle host and applies to all guests–it cannot be done on the individual VM, at least for LXC.
  • There does not appear to be a way to tag or comment on virtual machines. Additionally, the name you assign to each image is fixed-length and fairly short. So I’m somewhat concerned that, as my library grows, I’ll start to lose track of what’s installed on which machine. AntMan, the management console, seems to be evolving fairly rapidly so maybe this will change in a future release.

I’ve also created a few videos if you want to see it in action.

This video is the unboxing.

This video shows an Ubuntu and a CentOS image being created and then configured for bridged networking.

This video shows how image templates work and gives you a little bit of a feel for the performance using a real-world app (in this case, Alfresco running on CentOS) while other machines are running simultaneously (one Mail/LDAP machine and a four-node Elastic cluster).

 

 

Why I’ve Switched from Ubuntu to Mac

It pains me to say it, but I’ve left Ubuntu as my primary OS and switched to Mac. I used Ubuntu as my primary operating system on my Dell laptop for over two years. I loved it. I felt very productive in the OS, especially relative to Windows. Many people have commented on how excited I must be (“Dude, you’re getting a Mac!”) but for me it kind of feels like it did when we moved out of the house our kids were born in–I know we moved for the right reasons, but the old place was special to me.

 

So why the switch? With Ubuntu there were a few annoyances. The major ones included:

 

  • Palm Treo synchronization. Worked in Gutsy once then started working fine after upgrading to Hardy Heron so this one wasn’t ultimately a factor.
  • OpenOffice.org incompatibilities with Microsoft Office. At Optaros we’ve tuned most of our standard documents to work with both. Just to make sure I always sent a PDF version of documents and presentations along with the original.
  • Broken wireless with the upgrade to Hardy Heron. Worked great in Gutsy. Completely broke in Hardy. The problem is a bug in Network Manager related to the Intel wireless device in Dell laptops. I learned to live without wireless.
  • Unreliable display detection. This is correctable with edits to xorg.conf, but when my machine couldn’t detect the projector settings, it was usually 10 minutes before a pitch which is a bad time to be fooling with that file.
  • Inability to host a Webex. I worked around this one by dual booting, running a virtual machine image, or using an alternate machine. Co-workers running Gentoo don’t seem to have a problem with Webex so I’m not sure what was going on here.
  • Gnome instability. Every once-in-a-while, I’d hear my hard drive start swapping and then–boom–all of the “file menu” frames around all of my active windows, and all of my Java processes would simply go away. There was no way to recover without restarting X (ctrl+alt+backspace). Gnome is probably not an accurate description of where the problem was here.

Could I have fixed these issues? Given enough time, probably. But I’d rather spend my time elsewhere rather than fooling around with stuff that ought to “just work”.

 

I realized that what made my development so productive on Ubuntu was:

 

  • Being able to install software quickly and easily through apt-get
  • Working with the same command-line tools I enjoy working with on Linux and Unix servers
  • Building and running open source technology on its “target” platform
  • Having complete control over what is installed and running at any given time
  • Enjoying increased stability and performance (gnome issue aside) compared to Windows
  • Never having to worry about procuring a license
  • Finding helpful community and online resources for self-support

Ultimately it was my former colleague and friend, Tom Pierce, a fellow Linux lover and Mac user, who convinced me that with a Mac I could keep the productivity of Linux while gaining the benefit of a consumer-oriented machine–Mac users don’t have to settle for broken wireless or worry that an archaic projector will derail a client presentation. (To be fair, neither do Linux users with the time and inclination to work through the issues).

 

So I bit the bullet and switched. At least on my primary work machine. My wife and kids still run Ubuntu on their desktop, my son runs Debian on his laptop, and our DVR is a Windows Media Center PC that talks to an XBox 360. (My home IT environment is now every bit as heterogeneous as Optaros’). Tom says my MacBook Pro is essentially a gateway drug and that my house will be all-Apple in no time. I hope he’s wrong. I don’t want to be a fan boy. Variety is the spice of life. My Treo is looking a little long in the tooth, though. I’ll bet an iPhone would be a nice complement to this machine…

 

Everex should have gone with straight Ubuntu

I’ve been slowly tweaking the way my family uses their computer to make it easier to migrate everyone to Linux. First, I completely removed Internet Explorer and got everyone used to Firefox. Then, I moved my wife off of her thick email client and onto Gmail. Next, I replaced Office with OpenOffice. Each of those moves was relatively painless. Spreading them out over time helped.

The kids were even easier. When they were younger, they used a lot of PC-based CD-ROM games and educational software. Now ages 6 and 10, they are exclusively into web-based Flash games and virtual worlds. All browser, all the time, although they do seem to enjoy tweaking their wallpaper, changing themes, resetting their passwords, and, oddly, watching the CPU performance graphs. They can out control panel most adults.

Anyway, the spare computer finally became unbearably slow compared to the primary machine and my laptop. I decided I’d get a decent monitor (20″ Dell Ultrasharp 2009W) with a low-end workstation. I went with an Everex gPC2.

I’ve been running Ubuntu for two years, and the gPC’s gOS is based on Ubuntu so I figured it ought to be easy enough for me to support. But I had to do a bit more work than I thought I should based on that fact that this was aimed at the masses. I mean it used to be sold at Wal-Mart for crying out loud. I guess the ideal target end-user is a single user who connects to the net to do absolutely everything. At first blush, my family fits that description. But they also want to share files on the local network. And they want their own login. And they want a decent file manager. And they want to be able to “switch user” instead of logging out to let someone else log in. These are all done effortlessly on Windows and fairly painlessly on straight Ubuntu. On gOS, these seemingly rudimentary feats require additional installs. For those already familiar with Linux, these are fairly simple. But for families without a command-line lover in the house, it would get very frustrating, very fast.

I pushed through it because I’m the only one that has to deal with installation and config. If my family is happy, and if they can get their “work” done without coming to the “help desk”, I’m happy. And at first, my family was excited about the new box. It started up fast, the UI was pretty (my son loved the Mac-ish iBar), and the browser and OO.o worked like they’d expect. After a few days, though, the bleeding edge nature of some of the gOS components started to turn into annoyances:

  • Segment fault messages on every logout meant an extra close the error dialog.
  • Fairly often, Firefox complained that it was already running. (This usually happened when someone had just logged out and a new user was logging in and starting up Firefox.)
  • There was no easy way to mount and navigate Windows shares in the file manager. (I did see a workaround involving Thunar and Fuse but Fuse seemed to be acting a bit fishy–I wasn’t seeing consistent good behavior there).
  • Reported system freeze-ups. (I never saw any of these first-hand).

After less than a week I finally had enough. What was the gOS buying me? Nothing. Instead, it was costing me time. Today I slapped in the Ubuntu install CD and never looked back.

I still think the $199 I paid for the Everex box was worth it. And judging from the partial success of the gOS experiment, the family is definitely not going to miss Windows. I wonder if there is a group of happy gPC2 users still using gOS out there or if Everex would have done better forgoing some of the eye candy and distributing with a straight Ubuntu install.