Over the users I’ve written a good bit about pushing a workload off to a virtual machine sitting in a data center somewhere. The Google CloudPlatform has matured a lot and I haven’t really gotten around to writing about it. So… It’s worth going into their SDK and what it looks like from a shell using some quick examples. For starters, you’ll need an account with Google Cloud Platform, at cloud.google.com and you’ll want to go ahead and login to the interface, which is pretty self-explanatory (although at first you might have to hunt a little for some of the more finely grained features, like zoning virtual instances. The SDK…
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Put an ESX Virtual Machine Into Safe Mode
Sometimes you need to boot a system into Safe Mode. But with a virtual machine you don’t have enough time to put a Windows system into Safe Mode. To put a normal system into safe mode, you can just hit the F8 key when Windows is booting. But with a virtual machine the BIOS screen is by default set to go away in 0 settings. Therefore, you need to add a boot delay to mimic a physical host. To get a virtual machine in ESX to have such a boot delay, view all the virtual machines and then right click on the virtual machine you need to configure a delay…
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Looking at Amazon's Cloud
There is a lot of talk about “the cloud” in the IT trade magazines and in general at IT shops around the globe. I’ve used Amazon S3 in production for some web, offsite virtual tape libraries (just a mounted location on S3) and a few other storage uses. I’m not going to say I love it for every use I’ve seen it used for, but it can definitely get the job done when used properly. I’m also not going to say that I love the speeds of S3 compared to local storage, but that’s kindof a given now isn’t it… One of the more niche uses has been to integrate…