Amazon EC2

[garethEds]

Anyone using Amazon EC2 Free Tier service for virtualisation and messing around?

 

Gareth

[dhicks]

Anyone using Amazon EC2 Free Tier service for virtualisation and messing around?

 

Not at the moment, I'm more interested in S3 and Glacier - I think I might turn one of my home servers into an S3-compatiable private cloud server of some kind (OwnCloud, OpenStack or Eucaliptus, I'm not sure which yet) so I can tinker without being charged for bandwidth and/or storage. What kind of thing are you aiming to try out?

[mats]

Anyone using Amazon EC2 Free Tier service for virtualisation and messing around?

 

Gareth

 

Yes but my free usage tier is about to expire. Great if you want a net accessible always on linux box without paying the electricity bill.

[dhicks]

Not at the moment, I'm more interested in S3 and Glacier

 

Right, after reading up some more: Amazon (and host-your-own solutions like Eucaliptus) offer block storage (Amazon's EBS) - it looks like they pretty much just use Linux's LVM to split up the available storage into 1TB chunks. To make that block storage available for my own applications (i.e. backing up virtual machine images) I'd need to run an EC2 instance to stick together however many 1TB chunks I needed and present the result as a network-accesible block of some kind - iSCSI over SSH is what comes to mind, although that would use up a fair bit of bandwidth (two thirds?) doing encryption. Does anyone know:

 

- How I go about calculating the monthly costs involved in provisioning, say, a 1TB block of storage, 300GB of data transfer and an EC2 instance to run it all? I get that 1TB of provisioned storage is $0.11 * 1024 = $112.64 a month, but I don't get how Amazon's "I/O operations" translates into "GB transfered", or how much processing an EC2 instance has to do to mediate all this.

 

- Are there backup products (Veam, PHD Backup?) that will backup storage volumes from a KVM / Xen / XenServer / VMWare / Hyper-V / etc storage repository directly to a given iSCSI volume? I know I can backup Xen / XenServer storage volumes easily enough simply by writing an application to read a given storage volume sector by sector and transmit any changes, can I do the same with VMWare / Hyper-V?

 

- Can I connect an iSCSI-over-SSH volume directly to a VMWare / Hyper-V server, or would I have to set up an intermediate server to connect to the remote iSCSI block device over SSH and re-publish it locally as a standard iSCSI block device for local services to access?

[mats]

dhicks - you want the AWS forums for that lot I suspect!

[dhicks]

dhicks - you want the AWS forums for that lot I suspect!

 

I think the easiest way to get exact answers to the I/O measurements and so on is to simply try with my own local instance of Eucaluptus. I was hoping people here would know about the backup-to-iSCSI and mounting-iSCSI-over-SSH questions, though - both are easy enough on my home (Xen on Debian) system, but I'm not sure how difficult that srt of thing is to do with products that other people use.

[dhicks]

I think the easiest way to get exact answers to the I/O measurements and so on is to simply try with my own local instance of Eucaluptus.

 

No, OpenStack - Eucalyptus (which I have now, at least, learnt how to spell) turns out to use CentOS as the basis for its all-in-one installer ISO, which in turn uses a Linux kernel (2.6.32) so old (December 2009!) it doesn't recognise the SATA port multiplier attached to the ASMmedia ASM1062 SATA card in my server (an Intel NUC, not being used for what the original developers intended it for). I'm now trying OpenStack on Fedora 18 - I've got Fedora installed, it recognises the hardware properly, I've configired the network, now I've just got to get OpenStack installed...

[psydii]

Yes been using it for a few months as a playground, and my own webdav share in the sky.

 

Pretty neat.

 

Probably going to use it to host and installation of classroombooking. Can't use it for much for work since Finance refuse to engageand get a business card (so no amazon at all).

[pete]

in my server (an Intel NUC, not being used for what the original developers intended it for)

 

Totally off-topic, but how are you finding that? I've been eyeing up one for a similar purpose.

[dhicks]

Totally off-topic, but how are you finding that? I've been eyeing up one for a similar purpose.

 

I bought a NUC to use as a server because I have very limited space at home to put it in, and I wanted something that could be passivly cooled and so be completly silent. It's working well enough, after a bit of messing around getting it configured. I have my NUC inside a Tranquil PC case, so I bought the NUC and then a case separatly, but I see they've just brought out what looks like a NUC motherboard in their own case:

 

ABEL Systems - N Series - Tranquil PC Limited Store

 

I have my NUC connected up to two sets of 5 SATA drives connected via SATA expanders - in the end I went for a ASMedia ASM1062 mini-PCIe card off eBay as that was the only one that would actually fit in the Tranquil PC case and let me attach SATA cables at right-angles, another card I tried worked fine but wouldn't fit in the case with cables attached.

 

For a home server, if I had a little more room I'd probably go for a motherboard capable of taking the lowest-TDP (17 watts?) of the new Intel Xeon processors (out in a month or so, I think) and a Streacom case - that would give a bit more space within the case itself to put disks and so on, I currently boot my NUC off a USB drive.

[dhicks]

I've got Fedora installed, it recognises the hardware properly, I've configired the network, now I've just got to get OpenStack installed...

 

Might just be worth noting, if anyone's come accross this page via Google or similar: the PackStack utility with the "-allinone" option is the quickest way to install OpenStack on a single Fedora 18 machine:

 

Quickstart - RDO

 

I found I had to set SELinux to "permissive" mode - "PackStack -allinone" doesn't seem to work in "enforcing" or "disabled" mode for assorted reasons. If, like I do, you have a stack of local disk storage attached to your all-in-one machine, set it up in LVM and create a Volume Group called "cinder-volumes" before you run PackStack, otherwise PackStack just creates you a 20MB test VG on your boot volume.