Natural Born Coder

Category: Virtualization

  • Installing and Running KVM on Ubuntu 14.04 Part 1

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    doozer
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    I’ve been running my own servers for many years now but recently I’ve started to get the feeling that I could be doing a better job of it. I’ve played with virutalization a little both on the desktop and on real servers (I run a small VMware set up for work) but I’ve never translated that…

  • Understanding TUN TAP Interfaces

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    doozer
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    As I mentioned in the previous article Understanding Bridges, Linux and most other operating systems have the ability to create virtual interfaces which are usually called TUN/TAP devices. This article will discuss those devices with particular focus on how they are used in OpenStack.

  • Understanding Bridges

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    doozer
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    In this article I’ll discuss network bridges and where they are commonly used (spoiler: they aren’t any more). Mainly though I want to discuss how bridges are used in an OpenStack set up as building a personal cloud is my final aim. Hardware network bridges aren’t as common as they once were as switches have…

  • Understanding VLANs

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    doozer
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    The aim of this article is to explain VLANs to someone who has a reasonable understand of how a computer network works. Recently I’ve been reading up on OpenStack as I’d like to put together a small personal cloud for a project I’m working on. So far so easy but the one aspect that I’ve been…

  • WobblyStack – Reading List

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    doozer
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    I had to read a lot before I could get to the point where I felt I could write a script that installed OpenStack for me. The links below are a selection of articles that I found useful. This is the complete list of things I read as I didn’t start compiling the list before…

  • A Quick Introduction to Open vSwitch

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    doozer
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    In a previous article I discussed bridges and showed how the Linux utilities bridge-utils and iproute2 could be used to create virtual bridges within a system. This is great for simple set up but when deploying a cloud environment a bit more functionality is required and that’s where Open vSwitch comes in.

  • Installing VirtualBox Additons on Ubuntu Server

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    doozer
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    I have a number of Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machines installed under VirtualBox running on Windows 8.1 and occasionally I find it useful to have the VirtualBox additions installed. Unfortunately for me the documented process doesn’t seem to work. Whenever I mount the ISO image using Devices –> Insert Guest Additions CD Image… I find that…

  • WobblyStack – A Single Node OpenStack Install

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    doozer
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    For a couple of years now I’ve run a small VMWare virtualization system for my business. Broadly speaking it’s gone well and been fairly uneventful. The only panic came when I transitioned from the free to the small business version of the software – I installed more memory than was allowed in the free version,…

  • VirtualBox Additions on the Cloudera Training Machine

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    doozer
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    I was playing with the Cloudera training virtual machine (as supplied by the Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce course over on Coursera) today and I installed it into VirtualBox as suggested by the instructor notes. I must have hit every pot-hole on the way through though so I thought I’d document them here for anyone else…

  • Only detected a i686

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    doozer
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    One of the servers I manage is currently running Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) but in a little over a month 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) will be making an appearance. Now there’s no good reason for me to be rushing out an upgrading but it’s got to be done at some point so I thought I’d get…

  • Applying Updates on ESXi 5

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    doozer
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    I was recently faced with the task of having to apply updates to an server running ESXi 5. Now, you would think that this would be a pretty simple job but it actually turned out to be more difficult that I would have though. The main problem was that I couldn’t find any concise instructions.…

  • Monitoring an LSI MegaRAID on ESXi 5

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    doozer
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    I’ve been installing a new ESXi 5 based VMWare server recently. The machine contains an LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID card and four decent sized disks. The host operating system installed fine and I thought everything was going well until I got almost to the point of completion when I went to check that error reporting…