mike4soa building/testing/scaling Open ESB

While migrating from MKSTools to Cygwin to VMWare-plus-Knoppix over the years, I’ve recently ended up with VirtualBox-plus-Ubuntu as my preferred way to run *nix-depenedent builds/tests on my Windows systems at home.

Reducing cost is one a factor.  A bigger factor is the ease of finding documentation, FAQs and HOW-TOs.  VirtualBox and Ubuntu just seem easier to use, too.  Another factor is power use.

With Solar PV cells soon to be offsetting a small percentage of the electricity I use at home for servers, consolidating multiple virtual servers on fewer physical systems with larger memory reduces power use by a large percentage.

The kill-a-watt shows that my home server systems consume around 2 Amps each, so instead of running four at once it would be better to consolidate the work on to one system, saving 75% or 6 Amps.  (I use Solaris Zones on my lab systems at work to also conserve power, space, and cooling requirements).

Category: virtualbox

virtualization plan

Working towards JBI Service Engine scalable testing

When checking out different branches from different projects using different tools, it is hard to predict which two or three builds need to run at any given time.   I’ve had to maintain nearly identical setups across multiple physical systems.

Plan: attach granular VirtualBox disks to a particular virtual machine as needed.

The benefits:

• save energy (powering up fewer physical machines when only running a couple of builds at once)

• “on demand” scaling (”move” work to additional physical machines by copying a relatively small disk image for each vm)

• less entropy (cloning disks ensures identical setups)

This makes it easier to distribute test clients and servers across my network and try different WS-Notification publish/subscribe use-cases and configurations.

Category: open-esb, virtualbox