Moving forward with the iFolder fork!

I have made contact with a group of open source enthusiasts that live Texas and in Europe.  The project now called NoFolder, started as a blog and forum to help individuals setup iFolder on various Linux distributions most notably SUSE.  The goal of the project now is to get the current version working on RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 so it isn’t just a project that has packages for one Linux distro.

This is really exciting.  I just built all the required mono packages for both RHEL and CentOS.  The next step is to get iFolder RPM’s built for RHEL.  It looks like I would be able to just rewrite the SPEC file so I can build the packages in RHEL, nothing else should need to be rewritten thankfully.

If anyone wants to help please get in contact with me!

RHEV 3.0 – The best alternative to VMware

I’ve been in training for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 and I can say with confidence that it is the best alternative to vmware for server virtualization.  Anyone that is looking for alternatives to VMware or you are using Citrix XenServer and looking to migrate to VMware, give RHEV a serious look.  It has nearly every feature that VMware Enterprise has.  It has multi-pathing built-in thanks to the Linux kernel no need to buy third party software.

RHEV also has some wonderful capabilities around VDI.  It is much better then VMware View and it is on its way to catching up with Citrix XenDesktop.  In some cases it might even be better then Citrix.  RHEV supports Windows XP/7 and RHEL 6 for desktops.  The protocol that it uses is called spice (www.spicespace.org).  It can handle up to four monitors it runs either using the spice-client through a web browser or on a thin-client currently.  It has a rich road map that I’m looking forward to seeing in future releases of RHEV 3.

Another feature RHEV has that really got me going was the user portal.  It can be compared to VMware’s Lab Manager, however it can also be used by ender users to access desktops or be used by developers to build development and test environments.  You can restrict how many VM’s get spun up per user and restrict their access to server resources so they only have so much CPU, memory, disk and network resources so they don’t end up hogging too many.

RHEV is a great product I can’t wait to get out in the field to help sell this to customers next month when it is released.  It is in public beta, I suggest you go to http://www.redhat.com and download the beta and give it a try.  If you are a Linux system administrator it just makes since to migrate your Linux workloads to RHEV since it is an environment you are very fimilar with already.

Linux Management Software

I have been on the look out for the best server management software for Linux specifically. I think I finally found it.

Red Hat has put out an open source project called Spacewalk, and it is the best Red Hat project out there by far. It brings together cobbler, augeas and other projects into a great package.

I’m still doing a lot of the initial configuration but I’m very impressed. I mostly needed it for monitoring and configuration management rather then package management and server deployments but I’m sure I will be using those features soon enough. It is worth the time to install and try. According the site it also supports Solaris and that debian support is coming.

I will be posting my experience with this project as I keep using it. My only problem with this project is that the postgres support is still very much in an alpha to beta state. I can tell you right now as soon as the postgres support improves I will be moving off Oracle.