TechAgility

With over 60,000 CPU’s in this beast it certainly packs some punch? And if you have a task that needs some serious computing like this then you can actually submit a request to get your jobs processed - submit proposals here - how cool is that?

At 500 Teraflops though this is quite a significant increase in global computing power and it makes you wonder just how much further this can increase? What if someone was able to create and prove a quantum computer? how much would that influence these sort of projects?

I does make me wonder whether or not there might be some breakthrough with how we manage the input side of things? Here we are with this enormous Computing power and yet we are still effectively stuck with a keyboard?

The World’s Largest Supercomputing Cloud

I had no idea the Hubble telescope could see only 12 billion years into the past.

Frankly, I’d never really thought about telescopes looking into the past until Dr. Michael Norman, a researcher from UCSD gave me a basic education in astronomy - and explained the Hubble looks at celestial bodies whose light is just now reaching us. But it can "only" see 12 billion years into the past - and that was a veil he’d like to pierce. (I asked him what he did for a living, he said, "I simulate the universe." Trump that job description.)

……..

I was asked to give a keynote to celebrate Ranger’s opening, and this was only one example of the flood of basic research and science that will now be performed on the world’s largest open computing platform. Open? The facility was funded by the National Science Foundation, and is committed to providing large scale supercomputing as a service to any researcher or scientist within the US (submit proposals here). Ranger is built entirely on Sun - to dip into geekspeak for a moment, here are the stats:

• In around 6,000 square feet datacenter space, consuming less than 3 Megawatts…
• More than 4000 quad core Sun/Opteron blades, 120+ Tb of DRAM, running CentOS
• Delivering more than 500 teraflops computing capacity
• Jobs scheduled by Sun’s Grid Engine
• Interconnected by two, 100 terabit non-blocking Magnum switches (horns optional)
• Data managed by the Lustre file system, on Thumpers
• More than 2 petabytes of storage
• Managed by our hierarchical data management SAM-FS product, archived to Sun tape platforms
• With overall systems managed and monitored by xVM OpsCenter (the world’s largest installation).

Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog

written by dcaddick

I was helping build a Road Case for demos at MS 2008 Launches and other uses and while building a couple of VDI’s as well as BladePC’s for the Thin Client’s to connect to we found that roughly half of the devices were not responding at all to a simple RDP connection.

One point here is that although this was just a small Road Case for demo’s we had decided to try and emulate a proper enterprise environment as possible in that the systems had been setup as Multi-Homed with dual NIC’s so that there is a Private VLAN for Altiris imaging jobs as well as a Public VLAN for the connections and normal work, this enables BladePC’s, VDI’s and Thin Clients to be re-imaged without causing disruption to normal LAN activity.

So with that caveat in mind, what went wrong and how did we fix it?

Earlier we had discovered that RGS (HP’s Remote Graphics Software) was not connecting either and this was traced to the fact that ALL of the systems we had set up to run RGS had managed to bind to the wrong NIC.

Action: Disable NIC2, restart RGS Sender service - test, OK

Open Networks, click on Advanced, make sure the correct NIC is at the top of the order

re-enable NIC2, still test’s OK

reboot, tested again, still OK.

As a consequence we have checked back up with the Product Development Team and the feedback is that there is now an enhancement request in so that during installation of the Sender component it will check for NIC’s and with more than 2 it’ll ask you which NIC to bind to. There will also be a configuration to ensure the right NIC is bound.

So that was the RGS sorted, so what was happening to the RDP connections?

We could ping them, we could connect via Telnet on 3389, the Remote Connection box was checked, and the user was part of the Remote Desktop Users group…..  very strange.

Checked the Event Log and found some curious reference to TermDD and an error 50?

At one stage I thought it might be MS kb555382

But it finally transpired that it was this "The RDP Protocol Component "DATA ENCRYPTION" Detected an Error…" error message

Unbelievably the cause is: A potential race condition between the Icaapi.dll and Rdpwsx.dll dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) may cause the private certificate key on the Terminal Services server not to be synchronized.

It simply means the invalid certificate is deleted and it is recreated on the fly on the next reboot

Resolution:

To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

1. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService\Parameters
2. Under this registry subkey, delete the following values:
   Certificate
   X509 Certificate
   X509 Certificate ID
3. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the server.  (Although this states Server - it can happen on XP SP2)

Interestingly enough there is also a mention of this very same KB article at VMware with reference to VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0 Release Notes

written by dcaddick

Well who would have thought it? is this Novell rising from the ashes? It will no doubt be an interesting year watching still further manoeuvrings in the Virtual space - although I wonder if the US does finally get in to a recession will this slow down the pace a bit?

Certainly VMware has a lot more competitors to contend with now than it did when the IPO was released last year and I see there share price is now back under USD$60 after the dizzy heights of $120 late last year….

Novell acquires PlateSpin

virtualization.info has just learned that PlateSpin, leader in the P2V migration market, has been acquired by Novell.

The canadian firm acquisition further boosts Novell visibility in the virtualization space.

Novell already has a major involvement in the market since the early days of Xen development in 2004, when the company was announcing the inclusion of the open source hypervisor in its SUSE Enterprise Linux.

After that first step another acceleration was provided by the interoperability agreement signed with Microsoft in 2006.

PlateSpin is a valuble acquisition target for Novell not just because of its flexible migration tool, PowerConvert, but also because of the other products in its offering: a capacity planning tool, PowerRecon, and most of all a new disaster recover solution called Forge.

These technologies will probably go integrated with the Novell management solution ZENworks, adjusted to handle virtual machines since end of 2006.

virtualization.info: Novell acquires PlateSpin

written by dcaddick

So running out of space to store all those "must have available 24/7" docs and files? If you already have a Hotmail or Live email address you have 5Gb at your disposal?

Now I just need to rid myself of this crappy Internode ISP and switch to TPG so that I can ramp things up to a proper ADSL2+ connection and all should be sweet?

February 21

Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive!

We know it’s been mighty quiet on the SkyDrive blog, but we’ve been hard at work on a new version that we’re proud to announce today!

You’ve made two things clear since our first release: You want more space; and you want SkyDrive where you are. Today we’re giving you both. You now have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favourite documents, pictures, and other files.

SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

This release also includes bug fixes and improvements to make the site even faster and more reliable. We’re proud of this release — so proud, in fact, that we’re officially removing the Beta tag!

Check out the new version and let us know what you think. We hope you enjoy it!

Windows Live SkyDrive Team Blog: Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive!

written by dcaddick

So from what Alessandro is saying it currently only works with Linux, I wasn’t aware of that limitation but that’s OK from an Appliance perspective, but you kind of wonder how hard it might be to replicate that on the Windows side of things?

Certainly this sounds like it can really help VMware distinguish itself from some of the other competitors - but only for the moment as I’m beginning to think that we might see something like an “Arms Race” as all the Virtualization players rush to out do each other in the bells and whistles stakes?

FASTSCALE COMPOSER SUITE

With FastScale® innovation, bloated operating systems and complex software are no longer an IT constraint. Software environments can be streamlined and built automatically, on demand and then provisioned in seconds — all without the need to build and manage golden images. FastScale does the work for you. FastScale Composer™ Suite delivers a new generation of software virtualization and provisioning including:

• Bare metal provisioning in seconds
• 99% smaller software environments — automatically
• Automatic patch & configuration management
• Easily configurable policies and settings
• Intuitive & flexible administration

Perhaps it also shows that we are very much in the early days of Virtualization when a firm can develop this from concept to acquisition in just over 18 months?

VMware acquired an application virtualization firm?

virtualization.info has learned from different sources that VMware just acquired an application virtualization vendor.

There is no confirmation at the moment so what follows is pure speculation.

Among the many listed in the Virtualization Industry Radar, one company seems the best candidate for this acquisition: FastScale.

FastScale doesn’t provide application virtualization and streaming solutions like Softricity (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), Thinstall, Endeavors Technologies and others, but introduces a new approach: through its Composer, FastScale is able to track down which libraries and OS components an application requires, and assemble them in an autonomous package, freeing the software from the operating system dependency.

Only available for Linux systems at the moment, VMware is adopting the startup’s technology since a long time, much earlier than the official launch date in August 2007.

On top of that FastScale Advisory Board includes a VMware veteran, Al Pappas, former CIO, and VMware seems to prefer acquisition of former employees (Akimbi, Determina).

While VMware is not an application virtualization company, FastScale acquisition would fit its strategy, much focus on virtual appliances.

While the idea of a modular data center, through virtual appliances, is interesting and would bring in some notable benefits, it woudl also lead to some major issues. Most of them are related to security and manageability issues.

FastScale capability to deliver incredibly low-footprint virtual machines, tailored around a self-sufficient guest application, would solve part of the security problems, while the just launched Update Manager (integrated into VirtualCenter 2.5) would solve part of the management ones.

This post will be updated as soon as new informations are available (you may want to subscribe virtualization.info Newsletter of RSS feed to receive updates).

virtualization.info: VMware acquired an application virtualization firm?

written by dcaddick

A very neat article that outlines part of the process that makes it quite difficult to track and identify the Spammers etc..

Fast Flux DNS and the Online Black Economy
As much as I hate hackers, there is a certain amount of heart-felt respect I have for them. Despite their intentions, their technical ability is at times simply astonishing. It seems nowadays that more and more hackers are becoming astute business people in one of the toughest environments imaginable; and their achieving this through creating worldwide botnets, with the nerve centre hidden using a technique known as ‘fast-flux DNS.’

However firstly, the business acumen of these people seems to be something of growing significance. They have created pricing structures to sell off credit card details to bank account information to anyone who might be interested. Furthermore they cover their tracks through money laundering tens of thousands of dollars through bank accounts of vulnerable targets such as businesses in serious debt. The thing that is of interest though is the fact that their business network is loosely coupled, with relationships being built up and torn down in a very short space of time, making them very difficult to track.

So with the online black economy growing, how do the kingpins structure their empires? One of the most prevalent worms in 2007 has been Storm. Rearing it’s ugly head on January 17, it’s compromised countless systems from personal PCs, to business, government, education, and even military computers. The success of the worm has partially been due to a diverse hacker developer base who find new ways to create releases that side-step improvements to a system’s security. Essentially the technical and business model operates in the following way:

Traditionally the botnets have been designed to receive commands from the Botnet Herder through IRC networks. From the defender’s point of view, this single point of weakness has been relatively simple to disable, hence bringing down the threat quite easily.

However the growing trend now is to use what’s called Fast-Flux DNS (this is broken down further into Single-flux and Double-flux). The idea behind fast-flux is to register a domain name, which resolves to a host that changes as quickly as every three minutes. This is achieved through a combination of Round Robin DNS, with a very short TTL. From a defender’s point of view it’s a nightmare, as you could be chasing down a certain IP, the DNS switches, and you’re no longer dealing with a valid host.

Logically, you’d then assume that the single point of weakness would move to the domain registar, and you could simply take down the domain. Unfortunately registrars are somewhat reserved in pulling down the name, as pulling down a valid site would spell catastrophe for them in terms of support calls from the owner of the domain, and the serious threat of severe legal action.

more at source… Geekswithblogs.net

written by dcaddick