Sometimes it’s just that easy. Our good friends at Parallels have developed a special Mass Deploy package, available on their site. When you control-click on it and select Browse Contents you will see a license.txt. You can paste your license into the license.txt file and then put your virtual machine into the root of the package. Once complete, you can push this package out at will. Additionally, you can edit the postflight shell script in the Resources directory, throwing your own commands at the tail end of the file, adding more virtual machines, customizing settings, etc. Good luck.
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S3 Command Line Part II
Earlier we looked at using s3cmd to interact with the Amazon S3 storage cloud. Now we’re going to delve into using Another S3 Bash Interface. To get started, first download the scripts and then copy the hmac and s3 commands into the ec2 folder created in previous walkthroughs. To use the s3 script, you need to store your Amazon secret key in a text file and set two environment variables. The INSTALL file included with the package has all the details. The only tricky part I ran into, and from the comments on Amazon, other people ran into, is how to create the secret key text file. Now go into your…
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Custom VMs using S3+EC2
I’m obviously enjoying using Amazon for a number of testing applications (in addition to of course buying books and light bulbs from them, and not one showed up broken). So far, I’ve done articles on getting started with Amazon ec2, using the command line with ec2, whitelisting an IP address, deploying ec2 en masse, and setting up a static IP for ec2. But the S3 articles have been sparse. So, now let’s look at using Amazon’s storage service (S3) from the command line. Funny enough, if you’re going to upload your own custom Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) you’ll need to leverage S3. When you go to bundle an image, you will have a…
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Deploy EC2 En Masse
Render farms, cluster nodes and other types of distributed computing often require using a lot of machines that don’t have a lot of stuff running on them and are only needed during certain times. Such is the life of a compute cluster, which is what EC2 is there for. Because cluster nodes are so homogenous by nature you can deploy them en masse. Picking up where I left off with deploying EC2 via the command line we’re going to look at spinning up let’s say 100 virtual machines with the large designation, from a pricing standpoint. As with the previous example, we’re going to use ami-767676 (although you’ll more than…
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Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud
Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…
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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…
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VMware ESX 3.5 Security Patch
A security patch was released a few days ago from VMware for ESX 3.5: VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-200904201-SG: Updates VMX RPM Issues fixed in this patch (and their relevant symptoms, if applicable) include: A critical vulnerability in the virtual machine display function might allow a guest operating system to run code on the host. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-1244 to this issue.
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Using Dates in Shell Scripts
At a terminal prompt, it is really straight forward to grab the date, simply use the date command, with no arguments and you will get something similar to the following, including the day, date, time (with seconds), time zone and year: Tue Apr 15 00:40:07 CDT 2009 In a script this can choose fairly challenging, especially in cases where you just need the date stamp without the time and time zone, etc. Here we’re going to grab the current system date from ESX, OS X or Linux (or whatever OSen really) and then use a variable, currentdate, to put that date, formatted into a pretty standard format, YYYYMMDD: currentdate=`date ”+%c%m%d”…
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Configuring the ESX Firewall
The ESX firewall can be managed from the command line. If you login over SSH you can then use the following command to view (query) all of the active firewall entries (for those BSD/OS X folks, this command is similar to the ipfw command): esxcfg-firewall –q So we’re going to step through opening ports 3389 and 25 UDP and TCP into and out of our VM. We’re going to continue using the esxcfg-firewall command, as it’s the primary interface into the ESX servers/clusters firewall engine. We’re also going to use the -o option to open the port and then follow that up with a comma delimited set of parameters for…
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VMware for Mobile Devices
I am one of those weird techies that just likes a phone that works. It seems like the more I do to my phone, the less it works. Therefore, I don’t do much to my phone at all any more. I guess VMware is trying to change that. You see, if I had a bunch of Virtual Machines on my phone then I would have infinitely more games to waste time playing while waiting in line at the bank (OK, so who goes to the bank any more – whatever), I would be able to test code and sites from multiple OS’s and I would be able to hack around…