Monthly Archives: September 2010

oracle renames virtual box back to virtual box

last month the http://www.virtualbox.com and http://www.virtualbox.org websites seemed to be dead and you could only reach virtualbox via http://www.oracle.com/virtualization/oraclevm but it seems that this month http://www.virtualbox.org has reappeared and you can download virtualbox from http://dlc.sun.com/virtualbox/vboxdownload.html!

oracle oel and oracle db now on aws

Oracle OEL gnu/linux and Oracle db AMIs are now avaialable on the amazon aws ec2 cloud !

Amazon customers can not only build enterprise-grade solutions hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) using database and middleware software by Oracle, but they will also be able to launch entire enterprise software stacks from Oracle on EC2.

VMware Tools can't shrink ed/x/ubuntu 10.x ext4 partitions

Apparently it’s a known issue that VMware tools toolbox cant shrink ed/x/ubuntu ext4 partitions. Until this is fixed by VMware one workaround from http://www.insomnihack.com/?p=387 suggests creating a large file of zeros then deleting it then using vmware-vdiskmanager on the command line.

rhel red hat 1000Hz or 200Hz kernel

you can reduce the kernel clock rate in later versions of rhel 4 & 5 vmware vm guests from 1000Hz to 200Hz by adding divider=5 into the kernel start parameter line in your /boot/grub/menu.lst

for more info and other kernel start params such as clock= and clocksource= see

http://vmware.com/red-hat-rhel-vm-guest-rtc-clock-issues
http://vmware.com/timekeeping-in-virtual-machines
 http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/238
 http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/238
 http://www.vmware.com/Timekeeping-In-VirtualMachines.pdf
 http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/externalId=1006427

yet another reason to switch to CentOS

Due to changes in our subscription arrangements with Red Hat, Rackspace can no longer offer Cloud customers hourly billing for RHEL licenses. Rackspace Cloud Servers customers will be billed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on a monthly rather than hourly basis.

Rackspace will begin charging customers a $20 monthly licensing fee, starting in September.

amazon cloud trys to undercut ovh cloud

Amazon EC2 Cloud are now trying to undercut OVH Cloud pricing

Amazon EC2 Micro instances area new, low cost instance type designed for lower throughput applications and web sites. Amazon EC2 Micro instances provide 613 MB of memory and support 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Amazon EC2 EU Micro instance pricing for On-Demand instances starts at $0.025 per hour.

StratoGen Cloud Vsphere VMs from £115 / VM

StratoGen Cloud delivers cloud hosting using VMware vSphere 4.1 hypervisor. Hosted in a London data centre, their vSphere cluster is built on HP Blade servers, with storage provisioned on EqualLogic enterprise SAN units configured in RAID10.