Category Archives: Virtualization

EC2 AMI Creation Tips

While we were still working on Buildix 2, people started asking about an AMI for Buildix on Amazons EC2. This didn’t seem to be such a big ask, but now that I’ve finally gotten around to working on this I’ve found it can be a bit fiddly! While there is a lot of good documentation in the various sections of the EC2 site, I still had a quite a few head scratching moments trying to create my own Ubuntu 7.04 Server image to load Buildix into.

The Buildix image is now available for public use as ami-e4ca2f8d.
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Solaris Zones in the Real World

At one of the clients I’m assigned to at the moment, we’re moving our development environment to Solaris 10 on Sun x4100 servers. We have two physical machines, one for our CruiseControl environments, and one for all our testing. To make good use of the resources we have (Dual Core CPU’s, lots of RAM) I’ve been carving them into zones. I’ve tinkered with zones in Solaris 10 ever since the first beta build that featured them, but it was always for little things and never anything serious. Consequently I thought they were quick and painless. Note the use of the word “thought”. Don’t get me wrong, they are the (almost) perfect solution for what we need, it’s just that if you’re planning on doing anything serious with them, here’s a list of gotchas you need to take in to consideration.

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