Tomorrow’s Virtualization hopes

 Sometimes, one is just not enough. When you’ve got one server with rocketing performance, you could very well make the maximum utilization of it. Obviously, I’m talking about Virtualization. We’ve had quite a lot of products out there in the market. Many of them proprietary and a few, free. I have read once, “A nice product which is free is better than a great product which costs.” But today, my choice is one awesome product which is free, and is absolutely fabulous. I’m going to talk about my own favorite Virtualization Solution- KVM.

KVM, Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a complete and perfect virtualization solution for Linux. With KVM, you can have multiple machines running anything they want, may it be Linux or Windows. To make things brighter, from 2.6.20, the mainline linux will have a kernel component of KVM. That means faster and more stable workloads.

One thing which grabbed our attention was, during the migration the KVM gave almost negligible down-time and completed the migration perfectly well. And guess what, the KVM reminded me of those days in college when we learned about the ACID properties of database. Upon success of migration, the whole set-up will continue to run on the new host. Upon failure, everything remains as it ever were. That is, it will continue to work on the source host, again without down-time.

Now, we’ve got plenty of Management tools available for working our way around up in here. One such tool is Virtual Machine Manager. This one is also known as virt-manager. It acts as desktop user interface for managing virtual machines. It is sweet, and acts as a complete tool kit for managing our resource. Virt-manager contains many tools like

• Virt Install- a cli interface for provisioning the various OS’s


• Virt Clone- a cli tool for cloning existing inactive guests


• Virt Image- a tool for installing guest operating systems based on a pre-defined master image.


• Virtual Machine Viewer- s a lightweight interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS.

KVM can very well be proclaimed as the immediate future of Virtualization, and rightfully so. With the kind of tools available for managing it, I feel the “immediate future” is going to extend for quite some time.

vyga rolls out Remote Infrastructure Management Service

Vyga, the largest outsourced web hosting support & service provider, has rolled out their “Remote Infrastructure Management Services”.

The Remote Infrastructure Management service model(RIMsm) offers customers an “one stop shop” for all their IT infrastructure management and customer care needs. RIMsm features round the clock e-mail, helpdesk, chat & phone support services, along with IT infrastructure provisioning/management, proactive and reactive server monitoring; and lots more…

The highlight of RIMsm, apart from it being a complete solution, is the level of customization a customer gets within this service model. RIMsm enables you to map its service deliverables against a standard set of acceptable service levels. Customer sets these service levels and the RIM team is built around such custom requirements specified by each customer. In short, RIMsm delivers results that a customer needs, at a service level he specifies!

RIMsm model suits small, medium and large enterprises, in need of IT infrastructure management, product support or customer care services. Some of the highlights of RIMsm are:


=> 24×7 e-mail, helpdesk, chat & phone support
=> Infrastructure provisioning and management
=> Customized service levels
=> Proactive and reactive server monitoring
=> Dedicated manager and QA to oversee operations

Panel less migrations

As we all know, server migration is the process of moving websites hosted on legacy systems to more robust and feature-rich systems. In most cases both the source and destination servers are installed with some control panels and many of these control panels provide tools in order to do this migration automatically. But there are times when we come across situations where both the source and destination servers are not installed with any control panels. Hmm, getting worried? No fear. I’ll guide you through this process and it will be as easy as breeze (well, literally!). 

There is no calculator in my Accessories folder!

Click Start>Settings>Control panel
in control panel click "add remove software"
on the right side click add remove windows components, new window will
open
click accessories and utilities, new window will open
click accessories > select calculator if not selected
click ok on all window

that should do it

alternatively if u think u deleted the link in the accessories try this
click start >run> enter "calc"
click ok
it should open calculator

enjoy :)
sandy

Restoring a Hard Drive Image using Norton Ghost

In the previous tutorial, we created an exact image of a hard drive on a separate external drive. For the sake of this tutorial, lets say Windows 7 or Vista got really confused about something and the fastest way to fix it is to restore the image of the Operating System when it was healthy. This is a review of the Norton Ghost hard drive restore process.

Open up Norton Ghost 15.0 to get to this screen. I want to recover my computer so I clicked on Recover My Computer.

This is good. The program found where the image is stored. I clicked Recover Now.

This next screen tells me exactly what Norton Ghost is going to do. It looks good to me so I clicked OK.

Then comes the following warning and I say sure you can overwrite my destination drive. It is wounded anyway.

It starts to show a progress indicator, then warns me that it needs to reboot the computer. I figured that would happen seeing as I am working in the drive it needs to restore. I said yes, please continue.

Then I got a surprise. It seems that Norton Ghost cannot control itself on a reboot. I need to use the recovery CD that I have not yet created.

In the Acronis True Image tutorial, the program made me a CD with a couple clicks. I could not find this feature in Norton Ghost 15.0 It made me read the directions and search the Symantec website to find an answer to this dilemma. I downloaded the Ghost program which was about 67 Megabytes but now it seems that I need to download a separate 200 Megabyte ISO file to complete this operation. I didn’t have to do that with Acronis.

I’ll go find that email with the link to the download. Then download the 200 Megabyte ISO file. Then burn the file to a bootable CD. What if my hard drive crashed and the email that I needed for the download was lost with the all the other information? I am quite sure that the restore will go smoothly when I get everything I need for the recovery process ready.

Now that I have downloaded the 200 megabyte file, I can create a Norton Ghost Recovery CD. I went to the file menu and clicked on Create Recovery Disk.

Then the following screen appears welcoming me to the Symantec Recovery Disk Wizard.

I clicked next a couple times to get the Recovery disk to start burning.

Then Norton Ghost told me that the recover disk was created successfully. The Ghost program recommended that I test the CD to make sure it will boot when I need it to. This is a recommended step.

I definitely want to test the recovery CD so I smacked Finish and I was told that a reboot was required. So naturally, I smacked Yes.

The computer booted to the Norton Ghost Recover My Computer Wizard and found my Lacie external hard drive where the Ghost image file is stored with no problems.

I chose the backup file created earlier and proceeded to run the Norton Ghost restore. The restore went uneventful and rebooted the computer to the prior state. The Norton Ghost program completed the task that I set out to perform, albeit with several more steps than I would have liked to perform. After the review of the Norton Ghost imaging process, the program gets a Petabyte on a scale of bytes to Brontobytes.