More Fun With Freeware

For those of you who read my last blog post, virtualization wasn???t the problem. You may recall my minor tiff with vendor support over a building maintenance system. The support tech was stonewalling problem resolution ???til we ran their SW on a dedicated physical server, or real server, in his parlance. After much testing, it turns out that VM???ing wasn???t the problem, and our VMware Server host box keeps chugging away. Speaking of successful, free virtualization hosting platforms: It seems the OpenVZ project team wants to make it even easier for newbies to demo their stuff. Read on after the link for more... The OpenVZ folks have released a bootable LiveCD image based on the Knoppix distro so testers can fire up the freeware environment to play around without commitment. If only everything in life were so worry free...

From Friday???s press release:

As I???ve mentioned before, we???re running OpenVZ on Debian with good results. (We have decided not to run PostgreSQL on our production OpenVZ box. Our hardware wasn???t up to the I/O performance we were hoping for. Radius and Apache are still clipping along fine in three VMs.) All in all, much happiness. We should be playing with the OpenVZ Live CD this month to see if the test to production deployment tools are any smoother than the manual installation we ran on Debian.

Oh, and for those really curious readers out there, our production app issues last week were vendor-driver-driven, resolved with a simple patch. The remote device-connection issues occurred with a dedicated physical server as well as with our VM???d platform for the third-party app. We would have been back up and running properly days earlier if vendor tech support had shown a little flexibility in root problem resolution and let us troubleshoot using our Win2K3 VM running on (the free) VMware Server. So it goes.