Using Kernel-based Virtualization
KVM on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10
Recently I stumbled upon KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) which allows you to leverage the virtualization features built into modern processors.
This blog entry got me started. I am running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 on an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor so I installed qemu and kvm, loaded the kernel module and created a disk image for my virtual machine:
sudo apt-get install qemu kvm sudo modprobe kvm-amd qemu-img create node1.img -f qcow2 6G
Next I added myself to the kvm group to access /dev/kvm. As an alternative you can temporarily loosen the permissions (sudo chmod 666 /dev/kvm) but don't forget to fix that later on.
I grabbed the iso image of the server edition of Ubuntu 7.10 and was ready to boot the vm and start the installation:
kvm -m 750 -cdrom ubuntu-7.10-server-amd64.iso -boot d -std-vga node1.img
Wow! That was easy:
I installed Ubuntu just like on every other computer. Once the installation was done the automatic reboot failed as expected and I closed the qemu window and started it again (this time with only 500MB of RAM which is still plenty):
kvm -no-acpi -m 500 node1.img
I booted a fully running Ubuntu system - even networking automagically worked.
This looks like a great alternative to the bloated VMware server especially as it is extremly easy to just copy or move the virtual machines if you want to play with clustering for example.
Read more here and here (yes, you can also run Windows this way). Cool stuff!
Clustering Jira with Terracotta DSO
Sourcesense has added clustering to Jira using Terracotta DSO and released it under an Open Source license.
Clustering for Jira has been a long requested feature by Atlassian's customers. While Atlassian provides clustering for their enterprise wiki product Confluence they voted for different priorities for their issue tracker.
Jira comes with full source code for its enterprise customers and integrators and it seems to be quite well engineered if a third party could easily add such a low level feature by simply providing a plugin. Another interesting aspect is that Sourcesense chose Terracotta DSO over Oracle's Coherence which is used by Confluence and many other enterprise products in that category. Terracotta allows distributing the plugin under an Open Source licence which Coherence disallows.
The beta plugin is available from the Jira plugin pages.
I wonder what it would take to implement the clustering features of the enterprise edition of Openfire using Terracotta DSO instead of Coherence ;)
Updates for Openfire 3.4.1
New versions of Asterisk-IM, Open Archive and the User Status Plugin
A few days ago Openfire 3.4.1 has been released.
More than 30 new features and more than 30 bugs were fixed. Personal Eventing via Pubsub was added so you can now publish your geo-location, music you are listening to and let subscribers be alerted. From the admin console you can manage users roster. Moreover, it is now possible to retrieve photos from LDAP and use them as users avatars. The complete set of changes can be found here. Openfire 3.4.1 is available for download from ignite realtime.
The new version includes a few incompatible changes to the API so I have released new versions of the plugins that I maintain:
Open Archive and the plugins are released under the terms of the GPL.