The Muse: project planning

Showing posts with label project planning. Show all posts

My first E-Book: Kick Start a software start-up

Ok after all the configuration and working of the VM server with 4 virtual machines, I found it too much info to blog (lazy me..) with all the steps and configuration (I have some 3 posts still as draft yet to be published). There were some random thoughts on how this process and infrastructure can be used by others (start-ups or low budgets) for thier benefit.

Since most of the blog postings are enlightenments that occured to time once in a while, I've decided to consolidate all this information and jott them down like a step-by-step guide on how can we use the VM infrastructure for small shops or small projects in large shops. The table of contents for this book will look something like this.

Table of Contents

Preface
Who should read this book
What are the technologies we'll cover
Introduction
Analyzing & Building the server
Software selection.
RAID & LVM
Setup & Configure your first VM
VPN Applicance
Creating more Appliances I: Webserver, Database
Creating more Applicanes II: Version Control, Continious Integration Servers
Timed VNC sessions (iTalc or vncthumbnailviewer)
Appendix A: Configure your Linksys router with DDNS

If you have anything else you would like to consider let me know if practically possible I'll try to include it into the book. I hope to get the book out in 2-3 months (provided I can give it one hour a day). People volunteering for proof-reading are most welcome.

Virtualization: The Practical Implementation - I

I'm helping my friend Nitin at his firm Star4ce Technologies put up a virtualization server as their in-house development environment. To begin with we went ahead and ordered some hardware from newegg.

Here is a brief on the hardware we've picked;

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor
ASUS P5K-E LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
(5) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
(2) CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) SDRAM Dual Channel
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe SATA
Antec 850W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
ZOTAC GeForce 7300GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16
Logitech USB + PS/2 Cordless Standard Desktop EX110 Mouse Included

Now the bill fits to around $1,500.00 as of the day this article was written. Hopefully by next week we shall receive the components and we shall go ahead and assemble the system.

A few after thoughts about the hardware choices

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300
45nm consumes less power compared to predecessors and can be over clocked to 3.2GHz.

ASUS P5K-E
It's not a high end server, but can be used for a low end server. We did see a few other motherboards but opted for this, as they had SLI and were more geared towards being gaming PC's.

Why no Server Motherboards
This is an interesting find we dug into, we decided to hit the server motherboards for the system, as they supported 32GB of RAM quite easily as compared to the 8GB max of the above mentioned. The price was not that different approx $150.00 higher (with dual processors -physical) but it had FB-RAM which took the toll on the price of the system. 4GB on FB-RAM goes to approx $250.00 to $550.00 for 8GB. Yes now that's a whopping high number we are talking about.

So we are back to reality with a lower end system (recall the first article) it was aimed towards start-ups and low budget development teams.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS
32MB cache, and I trust Seagate. 5 pieces: 1- OS and 4- RAID 01

CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800
Nice & reliable.

ZOTAC GeForce 7300GT 256MB
There was no onboard video, this was the lowest and best

So we wait and watch for the parts to arrive. I'll be posting in intermittently the progress, issues & accomplishments along the way.

UPDATE: The shipping was quick, the parts should be arriving today afternoon.

Agile environment using virtualization

(This document is aimed more towards Java & VMWare, but the same can be replicated for any other language & environment)

Abstract

You have a team of developers working on different modules for a project-product which are inter-dependant. Each developer diligently writes unit & integration tests supporting their code. You want to set-up an agile test environment to run the unit tests & staging server for integration test, but purchasing hardware for multiple machines is a constraint.

The following article provides a guide on how virtualization tools like VMware can be used to set-up staging or QA environment (Agile), with approximate minimum hardware & time investment.

Hardware Sizing

The hardware sizing performed here is not an exact calculation, but an educated guess at the approximate system requirement to run the application.

Application	RAM	CPU
Revision Control (SVN or CVS)	512MB - 1GB	Single
Continuous Integration (Cruise Control or Bamboo)	1GB - 2GB	Single
Database (MySQL*)	2GB - 4GB	Single-Dual
Webserver (Wiki, Bugzilla, JIRA)	1GB	Single

*MySQL on VMware has some serious performance issues for production environments, if your application is very database intensive with thousands to millions of I/O per second, you might want to avoid virtualization all together. For testing purpose (application sanity, NOT performance) VM is decent.

Considering the above list of applications, and the assumption, each physical core can support 2 virtual cores.

Hardware configuration

Quad-core processor CPU
8GB of RAM
5 HDDs (1 OS + 4 HDD with RAID**)
Other basic required components

**Setting up RAID and the type of configuration suiting your needs is a seperate chapter all together, We consider mirrored and stripped there are loads of articles available on the internet on this topic.

The approximate cost of the above system is roughly $2,500.00 - $3,500.00 (as the date of this article)

Set-up

You can either install Windows or Linux (we are on an Ubuntu system) as the HostOS. Since you have 8GB of RAM on the physical machine, 32 bit OS's are not capable of using above 3-4GB. Use 64-bit distributions.

Download VMWare server from [http://www.vmware.com/products/server] select the distribution type depending on your OS. The guest and the host OS can be completely different, they need not be same there is no relation between them.
eg: You can install Windows as host and Linux as guest or vice-versa.

You can either create the virtual machines all by yourself using the VMware step-by-step wizard, or download 'appliances' created by others from the VMware site [http://www.vmware.com/appliances], this saves you the initial installation effort.

When you create a new VM, you are also asked the default networking connection type. NAT and Bridged are the most common options one selects from. Use NAT if you want the VM to talk within its own subnet only, or Bridged if you want other machines on the same subnet as the host access them.
eg: Your host machine is on 192.168.10.50

Tip: If you installing the guest yourself, you can create one master guest, with all the common applications configured (eg: OpenSSH server would be great to have on all the guests for remote management or java), you'll have to change the host name after that.

Power up each of the VM's and install the required applications for which they've been set and use them like any other machine on the network.

Your source files are versioned on the Revision Control Server
Your tests are run nightly on the Cruise Control Server
Your team documents the whole project and process on the Wiki, and file bugs in Bugzilla
Your MySQL server is used for running the DB & the supporting DBs for other apps (bugzilla, wiki)

These VM's need to be maintained like any other normal physical machine on the network.

Pitfalls

Putting all your eggs in one basket, if the main VMware server fails, all the "machines" (VM's) fail.
Since the server is dependant on the native OS it sits on, the capabilities of the VMServer is restricted by the OS
Solution: Use commercial ESX Server or other alternatives

Alternatives

You can use the Xen too for virtualization. I've heard pretty good things about it too, with a few short comings & advantages over VMServer (that's a separate topic all together).

There is an article dedicated to Virtual Machines on Wikipedia, you can refer that depending on your needs and fix upon a solution that suits your needs better

Glossary

Virtualization - The virtual machine simulates enough hardware to allow an unmodified "guest" OS (one designed for the same CPU) to be run in isolation

Continuous Integration - Continuous integration describes a set of software engineering practice's that speed up the delivery of software by decreasing integration times

Revision Control - Revision control (also known as version control (system) (VCS), source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information

Host OS - The operating system installed on the physical machine running VMware Server.

Guest OS - The operating system installed on the virtual machine.

Bibliography