Jason L. Froebe - Tech tips and How Tos for Fellow Techies » virtualization

High overview of Cloud Computing with Ubuntu Eucalyptus Cloud (UEC) from Canonical

Jason L Froebe — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:52:15 +0000

I installed Ubuntu Eucalyptus cloud (#UEC) on a couple of servers at home. I was naively expecting it to be similar to VMware. Oh I was wrong.

UEC is the Eucalyptus ‘cloud’ software running on Ubuntu servers. The instances would run under the KVM or Xen hypervisors. Ubuntu’s defaulted to running KVM but isn’t restricted by it.

“Eucalyptus is a software available under GPL that helps in creating and managing a private or even a publicly accessible cloud. It provides an EC2 compatible cloud computing platform and S3 compatible cloud storage platform…” Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide

This is how a vm works in UEC:

You publish an image that you previously installed all the software you need (or you can download such an image). There can be as many instances of this image running as the hardware supports (spread across N number of backend Node Servers).

All instances are transient. As long as an image is running, it will have a physical presence.. but when it is shutdown, the instance is removed including any work performed in the instance.

“static” storage is available via a Storage Server. After you create an image but before you start it, you have the opportunity to attach storage to the instance.

Diagram courtesy of Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition

While the management tools for UEC, and therefore Amazon EC2/EM, are primitive compared to VMware, it should be able to scale much higher with far less focus on which ‘virtual machine’ goes where.

Using VMware vCenter Converter and getting a SQL_CANTOPEN or similar error

Jason L Froebe — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:24:48 +0000

Using VMware vCenter Converter and getting a SQL_CANTOPEN or similar error? Make sure your backup (Carbonite in my case) is disabled else it may try to backup the database for the converter and lock the files from being written to. Anyone know where VMware keeps this database?

How to convert a laptop running Microsoft Windows 7 to a VirtualBox virtual machine

Jason L Froebe — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:32:53 +0000

I was very much surprised just how easy it is to convert a Microsoft Windows 7 laptop into a virtual machine running within Sun’s VirtualBox. This is what I did:

Pull the hard drive from the laptop. On my Dell Latitude, it was simply unscrewing the two screws on the bottom of the laptop marked with the hard drive simble
Attach the drive to a SATA to USB connector and plug it in to your Linux box
If you don’t have VirtualBox installed, do so now using apt-get, rpm, or whatever you use to install software
Follow How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox but make sure you specify the entire drive (i.e. /dev/sdh) and not individual partitions else you will miss the hidden partitions that Vista and Windows 7 create

You should have a working Windows 7 Virtual Machine. You’ll notice that you probably have a huge vdi file. Let’s shrink that down:

Within Windows
- download and install sdelete from Microsoft
- download and install PowerDefragmenter
- Run PowerDefragmenter on your c: drive (as administrator)
- Run “sdelete -c c:” from a cmd window (as administrator)
- shutdown windows
On the host
- run “VBoxManage modifyvdi my_disk.vdi compact” replacing “my_disk.vdi” with the name of your vdi file you created earlier
- Note that if you get a “Shrink hard disk operation is not implemented” error, then you’ve hit bug #2833 and you will want to download the latest VirtualBox to fix it.

Installing Oracle 10g / 11g on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) Server JEOS in VMware Server 1.0x/2.0x

Jason L Froebe — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:36:26 +0000

I’ve been tasked with becoming an Oracle DBA, so I need to be able to create an VMware Server image containing 32 bit Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server JEOS and Oracle 10g. Much of the work was taken from Augusto Bott‘s Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Peter Cooper‘s How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion.

I was able to consolidate the methods to work rather well together. As soon as Ubuntu 8.10 Server JEOS (Intrepid) is released, I’ll verify the procedure on that operating system as well.

If you’re looking for instructions on how to install Oracle 11 XE on Ubuntu 8.04.1, look at Installing Oracle Database XE on Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu by Todd Trichler.

Create a VMware Image with the following settings

Choose 32bit Ubuntu for the OS type
1024 MBytes RAM
16GBytes disk space
Ubuntu 8.04.1 (or higher) Server JEOS edition http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/jeos
Upon the os installation, create a non “oracle” id to use to administer the os.

Install the required updates and packages

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-`uname -r` openssh-client openssh-server unzip libaio1 gawk ksh rpm libmotif3 alien lsb-rpm libtool libxtst-dev libxtst6 libstdc++5

Add swap

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/extraswap bs=1M count=1536
$ sudo mkswap /extraswap
$ sudo swapon /extraswap
$ sudo echo "/extraswap none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
# "/sbin/swapon -s" should show the added swap space
$ /sbin/swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/mapper/oracle10g-swap_1 partition 401400 92 -1
/extraswap file 1048568 0 -2

If VMware Server version is 2.0x or higher, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ tar zxvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
$ cd vmware-tools-distrib
$ ./vmware-install.pl

If VMware Server version is 1.0x, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev wget
$ wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf VMware*.gz ; sudo tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz ; cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
$ ./configure && make
$ cd modules/linux/
$ for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
$ cd ../../..
$ mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/ ; cd vmware-tools-distrib/
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
$ sudo reboot

Append to /etc/sysctl.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf << EOF
fs.file-max = 65535
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535
net.core.rmem_default = 1048576
net.core.rmem_max = 1048576
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144
EOF

Append to /etc/security/limits.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/security/limits.conf << EOF
oracle soft nproc 2047
oracle hard nproc 16383
oracle soft nofile 1023
oracle hard nofile 65535
EOF

Append to /etc/pam.d/login

$ sudo cat >> /etc/pam.d/login << EOF
session required /lib/security/pam_limits.so
session required pam_limits.so
EOF

Set up user / groups

$ sudo su – root
$ addgroup oinstall ; addgroup dba ; addgroup nobody ; usermod -g nobody nobody ; useradd -g oinstall -G dba -p password -d /home/oracle -s /bin/bash oracle
$ passwd oracle
Password changed.
$ mkdir /home/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /home/oracle ; ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk ; ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm ; ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename ; mkdir /etc/rc.d
$ for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 S ; do ln -s /etc/rc$i.d /etc/rc.d/rc$i.d ; done
$ mkdir -p /dbms/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /dbms/oracle ; sysctl -p
$ reboot

Retrieve Oracle 10g zip file

Copy the Oracle install zip file from disc or somewhere
Unzip it

Retrieve IP of the network card

$ ifconfig |grep "Bcast"

Install / Configure oracle manually verifying any requirements:

$ ssh -C -X oracle@(ipaddress)
…
$ cd /home//database
$ ./runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs

iSQL*Plus URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus

iSQL*Plus DBA URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus/dba

Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control URL:

http://(ipaddress):1158/em