Hello Virtual World

Having recently worked on a private cloud implementation, I would like to point out the difference between external and internal/private clouds. They are really quite different things.

Some things are obvious. If you are building an internal cloud, you need to buy hardware and some cloud software solution. If you are looking at an external cloud, you don’t need to worry about any of that. All you are concerned about is getting the service (software as a service) you want from your cloud provider. This is what most people expect when they talk about “cloud”.

To make an internal cloud work, while you will no doubt be providing a service, the biggest challenge is integrating that service into existing infrastructure. For example, organisations have a naming standard, how do you integrate with that? Organisations have asset registers, charging models, directory services etc. It is highly likely that any internal cloud will need to interface with all those existing systems.

Getting cloud software installed and running is the easy bit. Integrating with the other systems is where the challenges are.

As discussed in the earlier post, just to prove that persistence and patience pay off.

Converter Output

I often think patience is the most important quality needed in ICT.

P2V-ing old laptops is something I have mentioned in the past and had some success with. I’m a fan.

At the moment I am trying to P2V a four year old HP mini-notebook running XP onto my ESXi 1.5 lab environment using VMware converter. I’m not having much success. VMware Converter fails at different points, mostly around 2% but in one case it got to 24% before blue-screening.

I started by using my QNAP as a datastore but have given up on that as I don’t think it, or maybe my network, can cope. I could have experimented with throttling the bandwidth but its time, time, time. I’ve made some space on the locally attached storage of my ESXi host but without any immediate improvement.

I am running the converter locally and connecting to the new VC appliance. That itself is pretty fat and may be using too much resource itself so I may cut that out too.

Other things I need to try are slimming down the services running on the old machine. You know how stuff tends to build up like limescale on top of your OS.

Will keep posting my progress.

How about that, an actual post about P2V!