Applications as Appliances

Continued from page: 2

Monday, January 01, 2007

Hosting a Virtual Appliance

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Till the time a common standard emerges for virtual appliances, which will allow any virtual machine to work on any virtualization platform, you'll have to know how to configure various virtualization environments to run virtual appliances. In this article, we'll tell you about hosting virtual appliances on VMware, MS Virtual Server and Xen. There are tons of virtual appliances available online and you can choose the one according to your needs. We've even given lots of them on this month's PCQXtreme DVD.

Prerequisites
You need the following to run virtual appliances:

1. The right hardware: As we're talking about x86 architecture based virtual appliances, you'll need an x86 server or servers, depending upon how many virtual appliances you plan to deploy. Every virtual appliance has a basic set of hardware requirements to run. These inlcude a certain amount of CPU power, RAM, and storage space. Being a virtualized environment, you'll be running multiple virtual appliances on a single server. So you have to sum up the hardware requirements of all the virtual appliances and ensure that your server has the resultant hardware specs. Plus of course, you have to keep some of the hardware resources free for the base OS as well. For storage, you need the requisite shared storage on the network, such as a NAS or a SAN.

On the VMware interface you can create a new machine, which will be further bundled into a virtual appliance

2. The right operating system: This really depends upon which virtualization software you plan to install. Currently, there are either Windows or Linux based virtual appliances. These in turn depend upon which virtualization platform is supported by the virtual appliance that you plan to run.

3. The virtualization software: Like we said earlier, there are lots of virtualization software that are available, ranging from those for the desktop to those that can install on servers and even those that can handle a complete data center. At the desktop, you have what's called VMware Workstation (this is recommended only for testing and demos and not production purposes) and Player, Microsoft's Virtual PC, and Xen. At the server level, you have VMware's Server, which is again a free product, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Xen 3.0. At the data center level, there's currently VMware Infrastructure 3, which we reviewed in October last year. VMware Player can also be used to run server class virtual appliances as well, although that's not really recommended because it's only a product meant for testing and doing demonstrations of
a virtual appliance. It can't be used for production class environment. Many of them are in this month's DVD.

Hosting on VMware
We already mentioned all the virtualization products that are available from VMware. If you'd just like to get a taste of virtual appliances and how they work, then first try it out on VMware Player. This is available for both Linux and Windows. You can download it from www.vmware.com/  download/player. We've also given it on this month's DVD. Install and run the player and simply open a virtual appliance in it. Virtual appliances for the Player are available either as VMX or VMC files. The player provides a 'Save state' option. In this, if you close the player at any time, it will save the virtual machine in its current state, and on restarting, it will start the virtual machine from where you left. You don't have to worry about shutting down the appliance properly. Once you're fully satisfied that your virtual appliance is running fine, you can switchover to a commercial offering like the VMware Infrastructure 3 or GSX Server.

Microsoft recently introduced virtual appliances for Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server 2005, etc that runs on Virtual Server 2005. These are time limited trials

Hosting a virtual appliance on MS Virtual Server 2005
Microsoft also entered the virtual appliance race. At the time of writing this article, Microsoft had virtual appliances for four of its products. These include a combo of Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Live Communications Server; SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, Windows Server 2003 R2, and Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006. These are all evaluation copies, which will expire after sometime, and can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/technet/try/vhd/default.mspx. There's also an Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC image. You can either run these images on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 which is freely downloadable from microsoft.com/virtualserver; or you can import them to VMware Server and run them from there. Let's see how to do each. We downloaded Microsoft Exchange 2007 virtual appliance. The appliance is divided into three zip files, two are 700 MB each, and one is 8 MB. One of these has an .exe extension. Run it and it will extract the entire VPC image from all the files. To run it on Virtual Server 2005, just follow these steps:

1. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Shared Virtual Machines\ and create a folder named “Exchange 2007” and copy the three extracted files here.
2. Go to Virtual Server 2005's web-based management console and click on Add Link given under the Virtual Machines section. This will open a new page for adding new virtual machines. Here click on “know Configuration files” and select the Exchange 2007 appliance VMC file (a configuration file of the virtual machine).
3. On the same page, come to the 'fully qualified path to file' text box and give the path of the virtual appliance's image. E.g. “C:\Documents and Settings\AllUsers\Documents\Shared Virtual Machines\MS Exchange2007 Appliance\WS03R2EE_EXCH_LCS.vhd“.

Configuring the Exchange Appliance. The appliance works the same way as the application. All settings are saved and retained even if you change the virtualization host

Finally click the add button. With this your Exchange Server 2007 with Live Communication Server is ready too run. Just click on the Master Status link on the Virtual Server's web page and you will find the new Exchange 2007 in the list. Select the server and turn it on. You can access it remotely by installing a client called Virtual Server 2005 client, which comes bundled with the Virtual Server itself.

Before you can access the Exchange Server, you need to change its network settings so that it becomes accessible on your network. To do this, you need to go to the network properties of the virtual machine and give it a suitable IP address and gateway. Now, just access the Exchange Server 2007 remotely. As it's running on Windows Server 2003 R2, you can access it from Start>Program Files>Microsoft Exchange 2007>Exchange Management Console. Outlook Web Access is ready for access (http://virtual Appliance_IP/owa) out of the box for the Admin
account.

The username and password for Admin access are given in the readme file, which would have been extracted when you extracted the downloaded zip files. OWA has an AJAX based interface. You can configure the server appliance just as you would configure the real thing.

VPC image on VMware
Suppose you decided that you want to run the Exchange Virtual Appliance on a VMware server instead of Virtual Server 2005. That's not a problem at all. You can simply stop the appliance and import it into VMware. This will not affect all your customizations and settings. To import, open the VMware Sever Management console and click on the File Import option. Here select the VHD file and click on the Open button. It will first import the virtual appliance image into VMware format. During this process, it may appear that the machine has hung, but don't worry. The import just takes a long time because the Exchange Server appliance is pretty big. Once imported, you just need to start it by clicking the Play button.

Wiki Appliance Server running on Xen 3.0. The latest FC6 has Xen built-in, you only need to select it during installation

Xen
This runs multiple instances of UNIX flavored OSes inside a Xen virtual kernel. Incidentally the latest Fedora Core 6 comes with a built-in, pre-configured XEN. You simply need to select XEN and its required components during the FC6 installation process. Once your machine is ready, just copy the virtual appliance tarball file to the Linux machine and extract files from it using the tar –zxvf . After unpacking the ZIP files, go to the same virtual appliance directory, where they were extracted. Now issue the following command:

# xm create -c “Virtual appliance name”

In this command, 'virtual appliance name' will be replaced by the Xen virtual image file (for example 'Va-postgresql' is the name of one such virtual appliance).

Then you'll get Xen console. The VA's IP address will be printed there. Using your Web browser, open Virtual Appliance Management console at https:// your_ip address: 8000/.

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