Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On 03/05/2010 03:52 PM, Tom Buskey wrote: In this case, because the ZFS license isn't compatible with the GPL in the Linux kernel. And there's no patent grant for re-implementations (you have to use the CDDL code to get patent grants). Without patent problems, I'm confident it would have been re-implemented a couple years ago with GPL code - ZFS was only about 6K LOC. I have some hope Oracle will license OpenSolaris under the same license as all of their other open source projects (GPL). If not, btrfs seems like a good thing to switch to c. 2013. -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner BFC Computing, LLC http://bfccomputing.com/ Telephone: +1.603.448.4440 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall mad...@li.org wrote: Any other ideas on the topic of Why Linux for Cloud Computing? Virtualization? Any blatant negatives for Linux as a platform? Too many choices. Once you've chosen linux over other options, you've still got a ton of decisions to make. You mention choosing between security models as though this is a good thing. Maybe it's not [1]. Choosing a different platform might mean you have to make fewer decisions. (This isn't specific to cloud computing.) [1] For example, see http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/more-choices-fewer-sales.htm -Brian ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On 03/05/2010 02:03 PM, Brian St. Pierre wrote: Virtualization? Yes, and to drive home that point, this is what's being chosen empirically by the extant service providers. Amazon's EC2 is Xen on RHEL. I seem to recall that Rackspace also went this route. And if you don't like Xen on RHEL/CentOS you can switch to KVM on RHEL. Or (heaven forbid) VMWare Server on RHEL or VMWare ESX which was partially based on RHEL. Even Xen started life with a big code import from Linux. And if you go the Xen route and decide you really don't like Linux you can run Xen on OpenSolaris. Open Source is good - you can choose Linux first and still have good escape routes. Any blatant negatives for Linux as a platform? ZFS is only on *Solaris and FreeBSD (albeit an old one). Linux doesn't yet have a stable, consistent COW filesystem. Certainly a combination of the two is a great win. If you assume ZFS for storage virtualization, Linux has the advantage of being able to (p)NFS mount the data, so you can do file-level snapshotting and data de-duplication. You could also run Windows-based clouds with a ZFS backend, but you'd have to use an iSCSI backend which loses the nice snapshotting capabilities and drives everything back to the block device level of granularity because Windows doesn't play nicely with everybody else. -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner BFC Computing, LLC http://bfccomputing.com/ Telephone: +1.603.448.4440 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Bill McGonigle b...@bfccomputing.comwrote: On 03/05/2010 02:03 PM, Brian St. Pierre wrote: Virtualization? Yes, and to drive home that point, this is what's being chosen empirically by the extant service providers. Amazon's EC2 is Xen on RHEL. I seem to recall that Rackspace also went this route. And if you don't like Xen on RHEL/CentOS you can switch to KVM on RHEL. Or (heaven forbid) VMWare Server on RHEL or VMWare ESX which was partially based on RHEL. Even Xen started life with a big code import from Linux. And if you go the Xen route and decide you really don't like Linux you can run Xen on OpenSolaris. Open Source is good - you can choose Linux first and still have good escape routes. Hey, I was going to say that. VirtualBox is another interesting one. They demoed moving a running guest VM (running Solaris I think) from a MacOSX host to a Windows 7 host while running. Virtualization means you don't have to reinstall from OEM disks when your upgrade the server hardware. Just down the VM, copy the images to the new server, and start it again. To the VM running on the host, the network, storage controller, display, etc don't change. I think Linux is the best host for VirtualBox right now. Solaris is probably the least supported. Networking Linux can do vlans, VPN, firewalls in the base install. Its very flexible in what you allow to be exposed. Any blatant negatives for Linux as a platform? ZFS is only on *Solaris and FreeBSD (albeit an old one). Linux doesn't yet have a stable, consistent COW filesystem. Certainly a combination of the two is a great win. There is FUSE, but I wouldn't use it if I had any choice at all. If you assume ZFS for storage virtualization, Linux has the advantage of being able to (p)NFS mount the data, so you can do file-level snapshotting and data de-duplication. You could also run Windows-based clouds with a ZFS backend, but you'd have to use an iSCSI backend which loses the nice snapshotting capabilities and drives everything back to the block device level of granularity because Windows doesn't play nicely with everybody else. Samba works well here. ZFS also has a CIFS server built in that does all the ACLs that Windows needs. iSCSI for any database where you can't use a file server. ZFS does deduplication in the pools. Which means it applies to iSCSI too. Only on OpenSolaris development b131 and higher or the Sun Storage appliances. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
Virtualization? Well, I did not mention virtualization before, since there are so many answers for virtualization for different operating systems, but there is an element of efficiency in virtualization and Too many choices. A good point, but I think it is overblown for uber cloud computing (Google, Amazon, Oracle, and other large service vendors) who either roll their own (because they are big enough, and they can) or partner with one of the big guys (Red Hat, Novell). More of an issue for private clouds, but I think that enterprise companies will still go with Enterprise vendors like Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, if only that their private cloud will match with their public cloud. Small companies and ISPs that offer cloud services may see more choice indecision, but they will have people who can analyze which is best or will hire consultants, and that is why they will be paid the big bucks. :-) I do not think the indecision factor will be as great for cloud computing as for the noobie trying to choose their first desktop distro. Good points though. md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for 'cloud computing': Request for Input
On Fri, March 5, 2010 3:12 pm, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote: It has been some time since I have looked at file systems, and particularly COW file systems, so pardon me if these questions are naive. Any traction to ext3cow or using the COW layering capability of the UDB block driver? Or LVM snapshots? I'd say non-btrfs COW solutions are being back-burnered. When Ted T'so (for example), primary guy behind ext-4, says it's a stopgap until btrfs, you get the idea that folks are hot for it. And with people like Valerie Aurora (a former ZFS developer) watching closely and offering advice, you hope that they get things right. And I can not remember if GFS (Global File System, or even the Google File System) was COW. Dunno. Finally, what about the up and coming Btrfs? See above. It's coming. I'd say that, by fall, you could start using it as your primary, non-server filesystem. Since folks are (understandably) very conservative about filesystems, it'll probably be another two years before it's a primary install option, but it's coming. It's got some truly neat features: - COW - Explicit/online defragmentation (volume or file) - Filesystem-aware RAID (you can even alter RAID on a per-file basis) - VERY flexible, filesystem-aware snapshotting - Online fsck - Checksums (yay!) - (File-level) de-duplication; block-level is being discussed, but apparently would require an on-disk format change, so that's probably a major rev away. (Ken's guess.) - Etc. See the Wikipedia page or the btrfs Wiki for more info. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs and http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org , respectively.) -Ken -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Bill McGonigle b...@bfccomputing.comwrote: On 03/05/2010 02:45 PM, Tom Buskey wrote: Samba works well here. ZFS also has a CIFS server built in that does all the ACLs that Windows needs. But you still have to boot Windows off of a C: block-device, right? (and run your many apps that only run on C:) If there's a CFS-C:\ like Linux NFS-root that would be really helpful. That way you could go into, e.g., C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\.zfs\ to fix your brokenness. :) A fileserver won't help with apps that want everything on C:. It will only work for D: I'm not sure Windows can boot off an iSCSI (or FC) target either. Solaris can. I don't know if Linux can. Then there are network boots. Linux and Solaris excel at this. Very useful in provisioning. I haven't been able to find this feature, but I also don't really know what to search for. I've always thought that propagating C:, D:, PRN:, etc was one of the poorer things that NT kept from DOS (and is predecessors). It's useful to slip a 2nd drive into a system and move /var to it when space is needed. Or move /usr/local to a fileserver when the workstations have small (400 MB) drives. (DON'T do this. rpm won't like you and you'll create other headaches) ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
Tom, Networking Linux can do vlans, VPN, firewalls in the base install. Its very flexible in what you allow to be exposed. AWESOME with the networking mention. The BSD guys often said in the early days that they had a better networking stack, but I am fairly sure that Linux has caught up. :-) More than that, Linux supported more networking types than any other OS I know. X.25, uucp...you name it. Linux even has a FOSS version of DECnet. /* Aside The project leader for the DECnet Linux project wrote to me after DEC had been purchased by Compaq and Compaq was merged with HP, and asked if I thought that DEC would mind the project using the name DECnet. I gave him the Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper answer: It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. and in this case it was literally true, as I did not know if there was anyone left to the DECnet group at HP. The DECnet Linux project gave DECnet Phase IV functionality to Linux, which allowed Linux to talk to VMS systems that only had DECnet, and to LAT boxes (this was a bunch of serial lines tied into a box and then hooked to the ETHERNET) which would handle terminals, printers and other serial devices. I thought that this project added to DECnet's life, and that DEC/Compaq/HP would have to be crazy to object. But sadly I now see (as of February 10th, 2010): http://www.csamuel.org/2010/02/19/decnet-now-orphaned-in-the-linux-kernel-for-2-6-33 So just like I said RIP to Grace Murray Hopper, I now say RIP to DECnet Linux. */ Warmest regards, maddog ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall mad...@li.org wrote: Bill, ZFS is only on *Solaris and FreeBSD (albeit an old one). Linux doesn't yet have a stable, consistent COW filesystem. Certainly a combination of the two is a great win. It has been some time since I have looked at file systems, and particularly COW file systems, so pardon me if these questions are naive. COW makes snapshotting easy and can reduce the need for a fsck. NetApp's WAFL is a COW. With WAFL or ZFS, you can have snapshots every 15 minutes and keep multiple copies of the snapshot w/o using significant disk space. BSD (sun's UFS) and LVM allow only 1 snapshot at a time. For backup of a database: freeze the DB, snapshot, start the DB, backup the snapshot, delete the snapshot. Any traction to ext3cow or using the COW layering capability of the UDB block driver? Or LVM snapshots? And I can not remember if GFS (Global File System, or even the Google File System) was COW. I think GFS is a shared file system. Over iSCSI, Fibre Channel or Infiniband. It can be much faster then NFS and reduces the bottleneck. Finally, what about the up and coming Btrfs? From what I've read it looks like a nimby ZFS with improvements. As has been mentioned, Linux reinvents things instead of building on others sometimes. In this case, because the ZFS license isn't compatible with the GPL in the Linux kernel. And that's a valid reason. OpenSSH was created for similar reasons. btrfs changed the underlying code that should make it much easier to reduce a pool to fewer or smaller disks or increase a RAID5 by adding another disk like some RAID cards allow. Some of the ZFS discussions assume that people will just build another pool and only home user types would do this. It's kindof like seening 2 mice; one is a marsupial and one is a mammal. They're built very differently but function similarly. I'm hoping btrfs takes off and becomes part of Linux as a viable ZFS alternative. ReiserFS is a good example. The transition from 3 to 4 hurt its inclusion in the kernel. Does SuSE still use it as the default FS? Are people still using it? There are lots of projects on filesystems these days. SSDs, Embedded systems, Distributed nodes, HPC, reliability. It's a good thing. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall mad...@li.org wrote: So just like I said RIP to Grace Murray Hopper, I now say RIP to DECnet Linux. There is still some good stuff happening with VMS, for example if you are an hp software partner, you can get ssh access to a virtual machine running OpenVMS 8.4 EFT. See: http://bit.ly/bmNyDE Or start at http://www.hp.com/go/dspp and drill down a bit to the Partner Virtualization Program part. -marc -- Marc Nozell (m...@nozell.com) http://www.nozell.com/blog ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
Mark, There is still some good stuff happening with VMS, for example if you are an hp software partner, you can get ssh access to a virtual machine running OpenVMS 8.4 EFT. I did not mean to imply that there was not good stuff happening with VMSbut VMS is and was not DECnet. Even when I was there you could see the writing on the wall for DECnet as a protocol. TCP/IP was available for VMS, first through Wollongong (boy, I have not thought about them in years!) and then through DEC itself with TCP/IP Services for VMS (then TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS, now HP TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS). BUT people still had LAT boxes, and wanted to use them. And LAT boxes did not speak TCP/IP. So there were gateway products and such created, both by DEC and then by others. But the gateway products just were not the same as DECnet. DECnet Linux was just another fine example of FOSS extending the life of otherwise forgotten hardware. I went to the HP site and found the latest version of DECnet OpenVMS (Version 7.3). The date on the manual was May of 1993, one year before I met Linus. DECnet-Plus for OpenVMS (including X.25 support) latest version is 8.3, with a date of June 2006. RIP DECnet Linux! md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Linux for cloud computing: Request for Input
Also Process Software's MultiNET, which we were using circa '98-2000 at one site here in Vermont. On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall mad...@li.org wrote: Mark, There is still some good stuff happening with VMS, for example if you are an hp software partner, you can get ssh access to a virtual machine running OpenVMS 8.4 EFT. I did not mean to imply that there was not good stuff happening with VMSbut VMS is and was not DECnet. Even when I was there you could see the writing on the wall for DECnet as a protocol. TCP/IP was available for VMS, first through Wollongong (boy, I have not thought about them in years!) and then through DEC itself with TCP/IP Services for VMS (then TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS, now HP TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS). BUT people still had LAT boxes, and wanted to use them. And LAT boxes did not speak TCP/IP. So there were gateway products and such created, both by DEC and then by others. But the gateway products just were not the same as DECnet. DECnet Linux was just another fine example of FOSS extending the life of otherwise forgotten hardware. I went to the HP site and found the latest version of DECnet OpenVMS (Version 7.3). The date on the manual was May of 1993, one year before I met Linus. DECnet-Plus for OpenVMS (including X.25 support) latest version is 8.3, with a date of June 2006. RIP DECnet Linux! md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
