gary’s web sofa

 VMware recently announced the first beta of their free low-end VMware Server 2. It is a beta, and as such the sensible part of my brain tells me to stay away and let someone else take the pain. Unfortunately the gadget & gimmick loving part of my brain made me install it on my mail/web/everything else server that had a perfectly functioning v1.0.4 setup. Bad idea!

Version 1 has this very nice web UI for monitoring, starting/stopping, and tweaking stuff, and a separate Windows/Linux application for creating new VMs and accessing the console of each one. Version 2 has dispensed with the application and instead relies on a beefed up web interface, with a browser plugin to display the consoles. Unfortunately being beta, the web UI is ugly and unfinished, and there’s so much un-optimised debug code the VMs run at less than half the speed they did on the old version. I run Debian Linux web, email and SyncML servers, a Windows XP desktop, and the odd test Linux VM, all on a single 2.4GHz Celeron Dell server that I got for free. Obviously the beta had to go…..

Rolling back the server and toolset installs was a bit long winded, but it was straightforward enough. What wasn’t straightforward was un-scrambling the network config. Each VM has at least two interfaces, usually bound to the host system’s wireless interface (I keep the server in my garage, where I can’t hear it, so there’s no Ethernet out there) and a “host only” LAN for NFS, backups etc. The reinstall remapped everything arseways.

VMware Server 2.0 Beta – VMware

I re-read this article James Gaskin wrote for Network World today. He’s advocating the Pirate Backup System. The work “pirate” has has nothing to do with software, music or movies that you’ve got a five finger discount on. It’s the ARR (matey!) system. ARR stands for Automatic, Redundant and Restorable.

Backups should be automatic. If a human has to do something to ensure your backups happen, then once and a while that human will do it wrong, so your backups are not 100% reliable.

Backups should be redundant. There’s no point doing a backup to a local disk, because it’s possible that the event that causes you to lose your data will cause you to lose your backup. he uses the example of Francis Ford Coppola, who had his laptop stolen earlier this year. Much of the data was irreplaceable, including a script for the movie he was about to start work on. He had a backup alright, but it was a USB hard disk. the thief stole the disk at the same time. A similar scenario I came across before was the company who instructed their sales reps to backup their laptops to CD-Rs. Unfortunately the reps had a habit of storing the backup discs in the laptop case….

Backups should be restorable. It’s an obvious one, but often overlooked. People diligently follow their backup procedure, but fail to ensure it actually works. With tapes this means frequent test restores, but tapes by their nature have a finite lifespan. The verification puts more wear on the tape and can damage the data while it’s being verified. Basically, even after you verify the tape you’re never certain that the act of verification didn’t damage the backup, so you need to verify it again, and again, and again…….

To be honest, it makes me feel a bit warmer in side that the solution my company offers ticks all the boxes….. Our online backup platform is a pure software solution, so there’s nothing to interact with. It just works in the background, and is monitored by the service provider, so it ticks the automatic box. Data is immediately transferred off-site over the Internet, so a theft or natural disaster isn’t going to take out your server and ours at the same time, so that’s redundancy taken care of. Hard disks can take a lot more read and write cycles than tape, RAID and high end storage technologies prevent data loss, and built in continuous integrity checking mean that backup data is difficult to corrupt and is spotted and corrected immediately if it happens, so data on our service is always restorable.

The Pirate Backup System – Network World