Simon Willison’s Weblog

Development virtual machines on OS X using VMWare and Ubuntu. Bradley Wright provides detailed instructions for getting the JeOS (VM optimised) flavour of Ubuntu running with VMWare tools so you don’t need to run samba just to share your desktop.

# 24th March 2009, 2:31 pm / vmwarefusion, vmware, virtualisation, ubuntu, jeos, bradley-wright

Google App Engine. Write applications in Python using a WSGI compatible application framework, then host them on Google’s highly scalable infrastructure. The most exciting part is probably the Datastore API, which provides external developers with access to Bigtable for the first time.

# 8th April 2008, 7:25 am / googleappengine, python, bigtable, google, scaling, virtualisation, wsgi

ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware.

# 10th December 2007, 3:27 pm / amazon, ec2, virtualisation, erlang, rails, erlyweb, benchmarks, performance, yarivsadan

Proprietary Software Does Not Scale. I’ve been thinking this for a while: if you’re using software with a per-CPU license you can’t just roll it out as an image across a bunch of virtual machines when you need to.

# 18th November 2007, 12:30 am / proprietary, open-source, licensing, virtualisation

Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 released. JeOS = “Just enough Operating System”—a minimal Ubuntu image designed for creating “virtual applications” that are embedded in a VMWare (or similar) virtual machine.

# 18th November 2007, 12:22 am / virtualisation, ubuntu, linux, jeos, vmware

How Time Machine works. From John Siracusa’s Leopard review. The bad news is that Time Machine doesn’t deal well with huge files that have small changes made to them... such as Parallels VM images.

# 29th October 2007, 9:56 am / parallels, apple, osx, leopard, john-siracusa, timemachine, virtualisation, arstechnica

Virtual Machine Creator (via) Web based tool for creating blank VMware compatible virtual machine images; uses QEMU under the hood.

# 24th October 2007, 10:19 pm / vmware, qemu, virtualisation, virtualmachines

Ganeti (via) New from Google (developed in the Zurich office): virtual server management tool designed to “facilitate cluster management”, built on top of Xen.

# 30th August 2007, 9:51 pm / google, virtualisation, xen, ganeti