How can I backup/restore the data on Cumulocity?
Is there any backup feature or service on this platform?
This feature is specially needed when we use the Edge solution and something goes wrong with the edge server i.e. the Hard Disk defects.
Depending on where you are hosting the Cumulocity Edge VM you can export snapshots, e.g. on Hyper-V machines. This snapshot could then be archived/stored anywhere else.
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I work with a number of different specialized and configured OS environments but I generally only use one at a time. I have a processor-beefy laptop but storage is always an issue. It would also be good to have a running backup of each environment so I can work from other hardware.
What would be ideal would be if I could run some kind of VM library server that maintained canonical copies of each environment from which I could DL local execution copies to my local machine to work with and then stream changes back to the server image as I did my work.
In my research it seems like a number of the virtual machine providers used to have services like this (Citrix Player, VMWare Mirage) but that they have all been EOLd.
Is there a way to set something like this up today? I'd love a foss solution based on KVM but id be willing to take a free proprietary solution.
Apologies if this is the wrong platform for this question.
If I want to migrate 100 VM's onto Azure VM's what all things I need to consider and how can I migrate?
This is not a comprehensive answer but some things to consider are:
- Start with a thorough inventory of the VMs to migrate. Issues to watch out for include..
- Any unsupported OS versions, including 32-bit.
- large numbers of attached drives.
- Disk drives >1TB.
- Gen 2 VHDs.
- Application and network interdependencies which need to be maintained.
- Specific performance requirements (i.e. any VMs that would need Azure premium storage, SSD drives etc.).
In developing a migration strategy some important considerations are:
- How much downtime can you tolerate? To minimize downtime look at solutions like Azure Site Recovery which supports rapid switchover. If downtime is more flexible there are more offline migration tools and scripts available.
- Understand whether to move to the new Azure Resource Manager or the Service Management deployment model. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-overview/.
- Which machines to move first (pick the simplest, with fewest dependences).
- Consider cases where it may be easier to migrate the data or application to a new VM rather than migrate the VM itself).
A good forum to ask specific migration questions is: Microsoft Azure Site Recovery
Appending to sendmarsh's reply
The things you will have to consider are:
Version of virtual environment i.e VMWare or Hyper-V.
Os version, RAM Size, OS disk size, OS disk count, Number of disks, Capacity of each disk, format of hard disk, number of processor cores,number of NIC's, processor architecture, Network configurations such as IP address's, generation type if the environment is Hyper-V.
I could have missed a few more things... like checking if the VMWare tools are installed. Some of the configurations are not supported like having an iSCSI disk will not be supported. Microsoft supports not all naming conventions for the machines, so be careful in setting the name as that might affect things later.
A full length of pre-requisites list is over at:
[1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-best-practices/#azure-virtual-machine-requirements
Update: Using Powershell to automate the migration would make your life easier.
So I have a cloud virtual machine on google compute, does this mean by nature that it is highly available? If the VM is running on a single piece of hardware on GCE, if the piece of hardware breaks then the VM could go down. Is the VM running on some kind of RAID, but for servers? So if one of the machines goes down another machine will pick up and continue running the vm? Thanks.
The machine itself is not highly available. However, Google takes several steps to increase reliability:
Storage is replicated and independent of the physical machine the VM is running on (obviously not for local SSD). This means that even if the physical machine catches on fire, only the "runtime" state is lost but the attached disks are fine.
VMs can live-migrate. This is a setting you can control. If enabled, the VM will be migrated to a different physical machine on maintenance events. Live-migration can lead to brief performance degradation while memory etc. is synced to the other host but the machine is not shut down / restarted.
Even when the physical host suddenly dies, you can set your instance to restart automatically on a new machine. If you plan to use this mode, make sure your instance is able to cleanly boot to serving state without manual intervention.
If you need high availability, the best approach is to spread your instances among zones of the same region and using a network or HTTP(S) loadbalancer. These will automatically stop sending traffic to a machine in case it becomes unhealthy. Also see this short youtube video on Google's network architecture for more info.
For high availability of your application data, there are highly available options like Datastore for database-like usage and Cloud Storage for file-oriented data. Keep in mind that Cloud SQL also runs on a single instance/physical machine which means that you have to setup slaves/replicas to get high availability. However, you can also do that with your favorite DB system on plain Compute Engine instances if you are willing to maintain them yourself.
I am working on a server ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
In fact i don't have an access to the server itself, but at a VM.
I am trying to monitor SMART disk information (like Temperature_Celsius and othet stuff like that) but only from the VM.
I think it is impossible because the VM havent any real access to the physical server, but I am not sure of it.
Thank you for read and i hope someone could answer me fast.
It will work provided that the VM "owns" the disk and the virtualisation engine permits arbitrary commands to be sent to the disk. In the mass-hosting case where multiple virtual machines are sharing a disk, that's a no-go, but it can be viable for custom configurations.
For example, you can use VMWare to pass-through a USB-SATA converter to the guest. Provided the guest supports sending SMART commands to USB Mass Storage devices — and anything you're likely to run in 2014 will have this support — you're good.
Azure and EC2 are optimized for running servers. Lots and lots of servers. Both platforms attempt to manage tons of things for you -- in Azure's case, it wants to manage even the target operating system.
However, I'd like to use such a service for a different reason: Testing.
I've got a ton of operating systems I need to support. My tests don't actually take that long, but running them on every platform is time consuming. I was going to just use a cloud service for this, thinking that these machines would be running for much less than an hour, and it wouldn't cost all that much.
The problem is that the major cloud services won't run client versions of Windows -- Windows Server only.
Is there a cloud service which would let me run every client and server version, and every service pack level, of Windows released starting with Windows 2000 SP4 to the present day?
Try CloudSigma, Defiantly can upload your own ISO's and run any x86 and 64bit OS you like on it. They have their in-house versions to get started but you can bring your own OS versions.
Based in Switzerland but they would have also the servers in the US, performance i've expected to quite good.
https://www.cloudsigma.com/
There is also a free trail on at the moment
https://cs.cloudsigma.com/accounts/signup/
The list of Open Virtualization Alliance members may have some candidates for you.
A search on the page for "operating system" suggests the following possibilities (in addition to the already-mentioned CloudSigma):
ElasticHosts
stepping stone GmbH (I'm less sure about this one)
Sublime IP
No, commercial cloud services like Azure and Amazon EC2 are themselves virtual, so you don't get a great deal of control over the operating system.
An option may be to consider renting a full physical server (colocated, or managed) and then use a battery of virtual machines to run the tests. Something like VMWare's snapshot feature sounds perfect: spin up a clean virtual machine, deploy the test code, then throw away changes to the disk once the tests have been completed.
Or, indeed, as #Stuart suggests - run the tests locally.
This definitely isn't something Azure offers - I think all of Azure's images are based near to Windows Server 2008 R2.
For EC2 you could set up images for Server 2003 through to 2008R2 - but nothing else. There are also some services out there to assist with this - e.g. VaasNet http://www.vaasnet.com/catalog
For testing the other Windows operating systems, I simply don't think there's a cloud service available to let you do this. I don't even think there are any cloud services where you can run "Virtual PC" type applications on top of the hosted operating system - as I think most of the virtualization APIs are disabled in the cloud environments (virtualization within virtualization not supported!)
Sorry to say this, but your best bet may be local test hardware running VirtualPC images.
It appears that the Xen Cloud Platform might do what you're after. This page ends with:
Guest Operating Systems: the XCP binary distribution is delivered with a wide range of Linux and Widnows guests. Check out the release notes for a complete list.
And their PDF document Xen Cloud Platform Virtual Machine Installation Guide (Release 0.1, Published October 2009) says that Windows 2000 Server has "No known issues."
(I don't have any affiliation with Xen)
In conjunction with the above, there is also a list of Xen VirtualPrivateServerProviders, several of which say they include Windows.
Buy time on an EC2 instance and use it to host VirtualBox VMs with VMs set up for each operating system you want to test for. Use a RDP client or VNC or some other means to control the guest OS. This forum post seems to point to that being possible. But yes it is not a cloud service itself and you would have todo some initial setup and configuration work yourself.