SharePoint Dan

Blazing fast.

There you have it folks, those are my first thoughts with regard to the Rackspace Cloud Windows Beta. Not only is the service fanatical in terms of the Rackers online ready to help out should you run into problems or happen to have a question pertaining to the different servers around the clock, the system is fast.

I thought I’d provision a few servers and within about three minutes they were up and operational. Further, for only having a minuscule amount of RAM dedicated, they still seem to be working pretty snappy.

Nonetheless, props to Rackspace for building out their cloud, this relationship just got interesting

Similar to several other applications, with the introduction of Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6) it’s all about optimization of processor cycles using the 64 bit architecture of the underlying Darwin platform.
With this upgrade it several software vendors are working expeditiously to release upgraded applications that better leverage memory and the platform.
For virtualization on the Mac, there are a few different solutions, my personal choice is VMWare Fusion which allows for the operation of virtual machines built with other VMware tools such as Workstation.
With the next iteration of the VMWare Fusion software, Windows 7 will be supported as a host operating system. More information?
http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/fusion3-preorder.html
On a side note, if you’re looking to use Windows Server 2008 x64 R2 and you’re still running VMware Fusion 2, Fusion will not be able to recognize your VM. Simply tell it that you’re running Windows Server 2008 x64 and your machine will boot up, ready for usage.

Amazon has released their Web Services Management console, eliminating the need for plugins and third party products that are one off solutions for managing Amazon Web Services resources.  Primarily, EC2 has been simplified for end users.  No longer are novice users forced to use something like the Elasticfox plugin for Mozilla Firefox for EC2.  The console is completely web based and has the same functionality as that of Elasticfox with a little more refinement.

The console is available at: https://console.aws.amazon.com

It’s user interface is simple and easy to get around.  Nice work Amazon!

So I won’t claim to be an MCSE or someone that develops custom driver code when for some reason a newly installed components unsigned driver apparently doesn’t work and without it I won’t be able to experience true gigabit Ethernet throughput… but I do know a thing or two about scripting and API hacking.

Tip #1 – Download ElasticFox plugin for Mozilla Firefox

Tip #2 – Read through the ElasticFox Getting Started Guide

Tip #3 – Amazon Web Services EC2 Getting Started Guide

Tip #4 – Re-read Amazon Web Services EC2 Getting Started Guide

So as for me, I hit a road block until I realized that the API tools actually needed to be run from the host client that I was working from to make calls to the EC2 Cloud to perform any actions on the actual VM sitting in the cloud.

Essentially, what that means is that the API tools available here, are installed on your local machine. The path statements are set on your local machine and then the API tools can be used for simple things such as creating EBS or any other functionality of ElasticFox, but from the command line.

You are now free to roam the clouds…

Now Playing: Rory Stewart – The Places in Between (Unabridged)

So what more could I ask for than to continue to experiment with the Windows virtual machines available from Amazon Web Services elastic computer cloud?

I could ask for more flexibility and ease of use… though I suppose it’s more just getting used to the way that Elasticfox works and how to connect machines together appropriately.

What is most amazing to me is the Elastic Block Storage capability – the ability to quickly spawn a hard drive for your virtual machine to consume as an additional physical device.  What’s better is the ability to take this hard drive, detach it and reattach it to the next machine – great for holding your ISOs that you’re using for your machines or if you need additional SQL database space, just spawn another disk.

Overall, I’m still working on getting things tweaked for my own personal development environment that I can turn on and off when away from my desk.  Initial impressions are fairly positive.

Now Playing: Rory Stewart – The Places in Between (Unabridged)

So I figured that I would get my hands dirty with the AWS’s EC2 Windows servers for my development environment for SharePoint.  Can I just say that I’m blown away by the bandwidth that is available to these servers?

Running a quick speed test from SpeakEasy.net I received a result back of 91458 kbps download speed and 67451 kbps upload speed.

Smokin’!

Why carry your VM with you and accidently have a hard drive failure when you can host it in the clouds?

Now Playing: Charlie Haden & Gonzalo Rubalcaba – Land of the Sun – Fuiste Tu (It Was You)

Have you ever looked for something to zero out all of the frivolous extra space that Windows is “holding” for later use?  Then look no further friends, introducing SysInternals friendly and free “SDelete”.

Get your copy now, quick and easy… helps to shrink down those EC2 Windows images prior to bundling too.

Now Playing: The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Time Out – Take Five

BLUF – Attempted to load VMWare ESX 3.5i on a Lenovo T61. Failed to find device to write to in either AHCI or SATA Compatibility modes when attempting to use VMWare ESX Thin Installer.

So you’re not familiar with “BLUF”? Bottom Line Up Front…

Nonetheless, decided to attempt to pop in a spare 100 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 SATA hard drive into my Lenovo T61 Core 2 Duo laptop and attempt installation of the newly free VMWare ESX 3.5i software. Burned a copy of VMWare ESX 3.5i onto a CD and went from there, watching the ThinStaller make its way through the hardware compatibility list only to stop when it didn’t find the appropriate SCSI interface to load VMWare onto.

So lesson of the day – make sure that youv’e got a SCSI interface to allow VMWare ESX to continue its installation on your laptop if you’re hoping to use it as such. Good luck on finding a laptop with said interface