VMware Predicts Death To Operating Systems

InformationWeek’s reporter Antone Gonsalves and Computerworld’s Robert Mullins commented on Mendel Rosenblum’s closing keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference. He is chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware.

In a nutshell, he says that today’s operating systems are too bloated and too complex to maintain. I think we can all agree to that. So the future could hold stripped down OS’es like a stripped down Linux kernel and only the software really needed to run one specific app.

This would then be deployed on one or more machines, that expose their hardware trough a hypervisor (virtualization layer). In this manner, the app thinks it is running on one machine, while in reality a whole array of machines is serving the app.

 On this “cluster cloud” a lot of apps could run, each in their own stripped os. This simplifies things a lot and benefits security tremendously.

I’ve been using virualized servers for about a year now and I must say that they rock! If I want a new server, I prepare the whole machine on my laptop and than just FTP it to my server cluster. I “mount” the new virtual server and presto. It just runs!

I find almost no performance impact on the performance, indeed performance is better because I use more than one machine.

If one machine fails, no one ever notices. I just replace it with new hardware and inform the cluster of a new member. That’s it!

ASP.NET on Linux pt2: It works!!!

Holy tamole!!!

I take a lot of my words from my earlier post and comments back! I got it running!

So what did I do wrong the first time?

This time I installed an Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop, the previous time I had installed the server version. (in retrospect I think it will work on a server edition too).

I followed Timani’s first post to the letter. Everything was fine and dandy and the xsp2 webserver was happily serving on port 8080. Only one small issue: his post says:

For the ASP.NET 2.0 environment
$ cd /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
$ xsp2
$ sudo cp /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index.aspx /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index2.aspx

But this should be

For the ASP.NET 2.0 environment
$ cd /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
$ sudo cp /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index.aspx /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index2.aspx
$ xsp2

Notice the cp statement comes before running the webserver.

Now came the time to get apache serving the aps.net apps

I headed over to Timani’s second post and again followed it rigidly.

Everything went fine until I got to sudo a2enmod mod_mono. This said the module was already enabled. Step 2 was also not needed. The module was loaded already.

After everything was done I pointed my browser to: http://localhost/AspOnApache/

Nothing nada zip I was very dissapointed, again… A nice 503 greeted me, again… I thought this cannot be, what is the matter here.

So then, I looked very carefully at the configuration file /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. I noticed that from copy/pasting from Timani’s post some quotes (“) where replaced by a dot (.). Don’t ask, I dont know why.

After retouching the conf, I reloaded apache again and reloaded http://localhost/AspOnApache/ in my browser. WELL WELL!!! It shouted a parser error at me! At least apache wasn’t hicking up anymore.

In the aspx file, the same foul play as with the conf happened, so I gave the aspx some love and reloaded http://localhost/AspOnApache/ once more.

IT WORKS!!!

Last notes: thanks to Timani and Viraptor for gently kicking me in the rear end! Persistance does pay off!

What next? I’ll see if I can serve some small asp.net 2.0 app i created some time ago. I’ll post the results.

UPDATE: *** I’ve struggled some more these last few days,  trying to get two apps of mine to run on the box. To no avail, I’m giving it up for now, due to too much work ***

ASP.NET applications served on Linux

I was talking to a friend of mine who said that he was running an ASP.NET 2.0 app on a Linux machine. That would be too good to be true wouldn’t it? Well he indeed showed me and thus I had to believe him. He was running the app on a Redhat linux box with Apache2 and Mono.

I was intrigued and toyed with it myself for several days but could not get it to work. Since then, I allways wanted to try again. If he could do it, I certainly can! I hate to admit failiure…

So, I’m going to have a shot at it again, this time following this post: Timani’s Blog » Blog Archive » Installing mono, apache, mod_mono and deploying applications in Ubuntu

I will let you know what I find out!

Have any of you guys done it before?