Meeting 5

Meeting 5 Windows vs. Linux, Virtualization and Cloud Computing

For E-learning week: We may use qik.com --> applet to streamline the video on your handphone

1. Virtualization and the benefits

Using a software to simulate an environment exactly similar to a piece of hardware, above which we can have OS and apps. You can run multiple OS concurrently. You can chose how much resources to allocate to each of the virtual machine.

But v-tion is not new. It started in 1960s with IBM: "Hypervisor" (KVM (Kernel Virtualization Module), Xen), which enables you to do v-tion. In the future it will become a default feature of all hardware.

Advantage: you can have the right set of tools to solve whatever problem you have
For me, I think it will tremendously raise efficiency.
Disadvantage:
Guest50636:microsoft virtual pc need over 4gb of ram in order to run smooth

Live migration: if your original hardware breaks down, you can migrate your virtualized machine to another piece of hardware. Hence, the uptime is increased. The time needed to migrate is 150miliseconds.

Virtualization will make old systems disappear (Dell, HP). iPad is the future way of computing :D

Virtual machine manger
Five nines uptime: 365 days = 31536000 seconds, 99.999% of which is uptime. So how much downtime can we afford with this standard?
(I check Wiki and it's 5m16sec; it maybe wrong because someone in the class came up with 8.76 hours a year)
Telephone network runs on batteries, so that the landline doesn't go out when there is a power cut.
Question: can we improve to six nines, seven nines? How much downtime can we afford?

2. Cloud Computing - what is that all about?

The environment that enables you to run your virtual machine on any piece of hardware within the pool.

Advantage: Edventure is not run on virtualization, because they have to shut down for maintenance. Same for e-banking with DBS, UOB, POSB!!! had they used cloud computing

Acronyms: (discuss their definitions: blurred +_+)
SaaS: software as a service:Is the pdworks a SaaS? What about Google Doc?
IaaS : infrastructure as a service
PaaS: platform as a service: paypal (1 place to buy, 1 place to

Story of Amazon: they built a cloud infrastructure and then sell the excess capacity under the name of EC2 (elastic compute cloud). When system is overload, you can automatically use EC2 to ensure your uptime without having to build another set of infrastructure --> computation on demand. You have your stuffs automatically backed up because it does not cost them more.
Excerpt from website on pricing: Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour. --> reduce fixed cost as well as variable cost!
Other cloud providers: http://www.gogrid.com/, Google, http://www.alatum.com.sg/
You can mix and match to serve your needs, but migrating between different SPs may not be possible yet.

Interests for projects:
Open standards - open source space
Example 1: Singapore government's websites - you can't log in if you are not using IE or Netscape - Govt should not dictate how I access their service.

Check out External Resources.