Æleen:
One of the most fascinating features of virtual machines, we find, is live migration, allowing a running virtual machine to travel from one host to another without the user even needing to know about it. Normally, the new server would be right next to the old ones, so in terms of physical distance, the VM would not go far. But it could if it wanted to.

Kyrre:
Last year, a collaboration between Exponential Consulting and Oslo University College built a framework which enabled virtual machines to travel over the Atlantic ocean. We also included the college of Gjøvik,located about 200 km north of Oslo. Much closer and only forests separate us, but the virtual machine could live migrate in very few seconds. Why did we do it? Because we could and because we did not know what awaited us when we were done.

These crazy projects make me daydream. At the college I teach, do research, and manage over 200 systems. Only 11 of those are physical; the rest are virtual machines. The users of my virtual machines have the typical user problems: they set wrong permissions somewhere and cannot log in anymore or forget their passwords. That’s ok. But while I am watching a virtual machine jump across the Atlantic, I fantasize how users knock on my door and tell me about their virtual machines now being somewere in Hawaii, because that’s where CPU time was cheap right now. They talk about how they programmed the virtual machines to flock like birds to the country where there are the most current users to their service. Stories circulate how one colleague made his virtual machine over-anxious so that when it was the target of a port scan, it got scared and ran away. It has been lost ever since.

I know, this is far away, but the world will get there. The first step is to master the technology and learn how the flexibility of virtual machines can be utilized by us so that we can deploy our systems effectively. Next, management of virtual machines will become transparent and adaptable to everyone, even the users of them. Then, organizations will cooperate, and markets will be built enabling virtual machines to travel the world. When that happens, my tasks at the college will include one more item: sending out emails entitled “Have you seen this VM?”

Æleen:
I’ll hate it when my VMs get a better vacation than I do!

We have written this tutorial because we want inspire others and given them information about how they can use virtual machines in their organizations. Virtual machines can be used in many scenarios. In our course, we will show solutions to interesting problems. If you attend, you will learn about what virtualization can–and cannot–do and also get plenty of information to more than get started using Xen or VMware. We hope to see you there.

S1: Virtualization: What is it Good For?

Kyrre Begnum is currently completing his Ph.D. in Network and System Administration at Oslo University College in Norway. Part of his research focuses on managing virtual infrastructures, and he is the author of the Manage Large Networks (MLN) VM administrative tool

Æleen Frisch has been working as a system administrator for over 20 years. She currently looks after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential System Administration (now in its 3rd edition) and the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Engineer’s Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, coauthored with Mark Burgess. Æleen was the program committee chair for LISA ‘03 and is a frequent presenter at USENIX and SAGE events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.

Here’s what Rik has to say:

I will be wearing two hats at LISA this year: one as a tutorial instructor, and the other as ;login: editor. My editor’s hat, consisting of an unruly fringe of hair, will make it plain that I am on the prowl, looking for articles for 2009. I already have a good lineup of articles for the February 2009 issue of ;login:, but want to find authors who can cover the big ideas in sysadmin for the rest of the year.

Two things that come to mind immediately are VM and configuration management. The IT world has gone crazy for VMs, and that changes the nature of sysadmin. Rebooting one machine can mean the halting and restarting of a dozen VMs, for example. In a sense, the configuration of VMs is not that dissimilar to the configuration management of separate systems, rebooting aside. And VMs themselves are still a work in progress. Exactly how much swap do you devote to a VM, and should this swap reside in a virtual disk or a swap partition? I have yet to hear a good answer to this question.

And not that the configuration ‘wars’ are over. There are still at least five contenders in the ring for dominance in the configuration management arena. I imagine that there will be BOFS as well as fierce
hallway (and poolside) discussions about whose software works the best. As often is the case, there will not be a definitive winner here, not just on merit, but because people have a lot of time and brainpower tied up in a particular solution.

I’ll also be watching the various pre-LISA workshops. I’ve found that sitting in on workshops (and reading the summaries) provide fertile ground for future articles. While most workshops focus on current issues, I always learn something new that I should be paying attention to. I notice that ZFS gets its own workshop this year, a hint that either ZFS administration is still new and complex, or that this area is just too profitable to ignore. I wonder why this is a workshop and not a tutorial?

During Tech sessions, I see lots of old friends as well as many new faces in both the papers track and the two tracks of IT sessions. I found myself thinking “oh boy” several times as I read through the lineup. This week will be fun, including the hallway track, where I can get some face time with people.

I will also be wearing my NSA hat. Of course, you can’t see my NSA hat, because it is classified (and invisible as well), but I am determined that I will help people who attend my tutorial re-enable enforcing mode in SELinux. I’ve worked with SELinux over the years as a user, and often as not been frustrated by it. If an application didn’t work, I just put SELinux into permissive mode, and then, likely as not, forgot about it after I solved whatever problem I was having. I decided it was high time I learned more about SELinux.

Red Hat, and other distros, continuing insistence on including SELinux features also piqued my interest. SELinux must be worthwhile or it would have been dropped a long time ago. And second, usability features
have appeared, such as setroubleshootd, sealert, modules, and booleans, that have made managing SELinux much simpler.

Honestly, I never got an NSA hat, even after over a dozen visits. The RCMP gave me a nifty hat, though, so perhaps I will wear that one.

As always, I look forward to going to San Diego, and hope to see you there.

Rik Farrow has been teaching UNIX security classes since 1987. He wrote the second book on UNIX security, as well as hundreds of security-related articles. His experience with Linux security goes back over ten years and has led him to believe that sandboxing applications with SELinux is not just a good idea, but necessary. Rik Farrow is also editor of ;login:.

Find out more about Rik’s class Working with SELinux (New)

Virtual machines, networking, and storage are the technologies that underpin the new generation of data centers and support cloud computing. This LISA workshop is a new opportunity to spend a day discussing the configuration and management of virtual infrastructures with experts in both research and practice. While it is intended primarily for those with experience in the area, the workshop is also open to anyone with experience with more traditional infrastructures who is interested in learning more about this topic. The number of places is limited and attendance is by invitation only; More details can be found here.

The LISA ‘08 Virtual Infrastructures Workshop, taking place November 11, 2008, will be led by Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh.

Find out more about this and other workshops at LISA ‘08 here.

Today we’re kicking off the first in a series of guest blogs written by LISA tutorial instructors.

First up:  Mark Burgess discusses the latest version of Cfengine and more.

And now: Here’s Mark…

So I find myself in Amsterdam, near the Vondel park in what is clearly
the tourist part of the city. There is a mosquito in my room. What on
Earth is it doing in the middel of the city? I bet it isn’t going to
share my bill for this arty hotel Vondel with all its, well art.  I am
here in the Netherlands to hold a training course on cfengine for a
well known Dutch organization. I started a company after all these
years of arm-twisting. It seemed like the right thing to do. And I am
using my evenings to catch up on the coding of cfengine 3.

Not long to go now.

I promised myself some time ago that I would finish a substantial
version of cfengine 3 before LISA, and I have promised the users that
it will be tested and ready for production by January 2009.  I
generally keep my promises, but more than that — I cannot fail to
deliver when cfengine 3 itself is all about keeping promises, promises
about system states, promises about behaviour and promises about
knowledge.

The past few months have been hectic for me but spiced with real
excitement.  I decided last year that academia and all of its
government regulated money has been moving in the wrong direction for
me.  I fall naturally into the role of a scientist, not a bureaucrat
but governments are turning research into a paper trail. It is a
conspiracy to transform thinking men and women into mediocre blue
collar workers, who are paid to deliver homework reports to people who
judge research by whether it follows an ISO 9000 quality assurance
plan. I’m sorry, that is just wrong. I need to get back to something
real. Let me out.

I believe in research. It’s just creativity — well, at least in my
naive mind. I believe in theory and abstraction with a passion that
few people really share. I also believe in turning these powerful
thinking-tools into powerful practical tools, but increasingly people
of higher wisdom seem to say no to powerful thinking and yes to cheap
fixes. Governments are turning academics into bureaucrats and I was not
made for that mold.

Enough papers, I said. Enough conferences, trying to persuade
sceptical researchers about how to solve the key problems. If I have
to write a quota of papers every year, when will I ever find the time
to actually do something? Why not just solve the problems and show ‘em?

Well, I have spent the past five years thinking about all of the
criticisms that have been levelled against configuration management
tools and it dawned on me that I know the answers well enough. The
criticisms have all be justified, but the interim solutions have
not. I still recall Andrew Hume telling me in 2003 at the
configuration management workshop: “You realize this is all your fault
for starting this discussion.” Well, I am happy to take responsibility
for starting a field of research, but I am not so happy with all of
the so-called “next generation cfengines” that have been coming out.
You have to recall what The People told Henry Ford when he was talking
about solving the transport problem: “what we need is more horses — none
of your fancy pants inventions”. Hmm.

My solution? Go back to theory, abstraction and modelling. Put away
the coding gloves for a while until I know how to do something
better. Simpler. Anyone can make something different. The next
generation has to be simpler and still more powerful. Well…

Back in Oslo again, catching up on my teaching and how my colleagues
are getting on at the cfengine company. I managed to meet my friend,
professor of logic Jan Bergstra from Amsterdam in the evenings of my
visit wrote a draft paper together about promises. Looking at my
notes, it reminds me that I originally conceived of the idea of
promise theory precisely to solve these questions about configuration
management — as the only model that could describe the way that
cfengine’s autonomous maintenence works (that is, without throwing all of the
important properties of cfengine away with the bath water). After 5
years of working on promises, I realized last year that I knew how to
make the “next generation cfengine”. The real thing.

So I’m back to coding.  As I work on cfengine 3, I find myself growing
embarrassed about all the cfengines that have come before. Well, it is
difficult to say that they weren’t the best that I could do at the
time. I didn’t deliberately make something inferior and yet cfengine 3
is potentially so far ahead of any of previous version that it makes
me want to rewrite history and bury the others in the sand.

Cfengine 3 can already do things that no other system can currently
approach and I am not even close to running out of ideas for the
future. The time for its development has never been richer. And now I
have a plan for protect myself from academic funding time-wasters and
get back to where I need to be: out there, close to the people and
environments using these things.  People might have scoffed at my
harping on about “promises” and even “promise theory” for the past few
years, but it has paid off. Thanks to that work, all of the problems
with cfengine 2 have been addressed and in a way that both simplifies
and extends. This is about as exciting as research gets.

My mind wanders back to LISA 2004 where Aeleen Frisch and I presented
the initial ideas for cfengine 3 at the BoF, but it took too long to
get me started. Too many burdens.  The ideas we worked on together
during Aeleen’s visit to Oslo were not far off but there were still
details to be worked out. Now all the pieces are in place and more. I
am lucky to have all these amazing cfengine user around me, sharing
their experiences, teaching me about the problems and trusting me to
do what I do well. I am still learning and finding new ways to
understand this. It’s research, innit?

So, now it is time to give back to the users. I am ready to share my
solution for cfengine 3. There will be a BoF and two tutorials. I can
show new technology and enhanced practices. I can unveil something
smaller but more wide-ranging, simpler but more powerful, and
something that is generically extensible — in other words a real
investment for the future.

Yep. Looking forward to LISA this year.

Mark is a  Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, Norway (a member of the EMANICS Network of Excellence). He is the author of the configuration management system Cfengine and of several books and many papers on the topic, including the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Engineer’s Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, coauthored with Æleen Frisch.

Find out more about Mark’s classes:

Integrating Cfengine into Organizational Service Management (New!) and Cfengine 3 (New!)

New in ’08, we’ve got the LISA ’08 Facebook page up and running. Spread the word about LISA! Sign on here to chat with other attendees before the event or even to find a roomshare.

Don’t forget:

1. The LISA ’08 Early Bird Registration Deadline is Friday, October 17.

2. If you’re attending with more than 5 people, take advantage of the savings offered by the Multiple Employee Discount.

3. The Student Grant Submission Deadline is Friday, October 3.

Stay tuned for guest blogs from tutorial instructors, material previews, and a whole lot more.

See you in San Diego!

The Advanced Topics Workshop has been held at every LISA since 1995, and it became the model for workshops centered around other topics, such as the Andrew File System, Configuration Management, University Issues, and many others. As the conference planners committed more space to workshops, the list of topics has grown. Some workshops continue to be popular and timely, and are held every year.

This year I am very pleased to provide you with 7 workshops spanning three days. Of course the granddaddy of them all, the Advanced Topics Workshop, will be returning under the careful ministrations of Adam Moskowitz. The Configuration Workshop, which has proved to be incredibly useful to it attendees, will again be hosted by Paul Anderson. Tom Limoncelli and Cat Okita will be returning with their workshop on Managing Sysadmins. The University Issues Workshop will also be making a reappearance, hosted by John “Rowan” Littell.

We have several new workshops this year as well. One that I am particularly excited about is the workshop on Datacenter Management, hosted by Robert Sidney Wilroy. This is an excellent place for people to share ideas on building and maintaining data centers. Sandra Bittner will be hosting a workshop on Software Licensing, where participants can discuss the very difficult problem of managing a large number of licenses across an equally large installation base. Finally, Luke Kanies and Narayan Desai will be presenting a workshop on Configuration Tools. This workshop is a bit different from Configuration Management as its focus is specifically on the tools that can be used to implement configuration management, such as Puppet and Bcfg2. It should have a more practial bent than its counterpart has traditionally had.

Some of these workshops have very specific entrance requirements, so be sure to read the details for the workshop that you are interested in. Workshops do cost some extra money, and this is used to cover the expense of the hotel meeting space and the lunch. Did I mention that lunch is provided for workshop attendees? I should also mention that you don’t pay for a workshop when you pre-register for the conference. During pre-registration you can express an interest in attending one of the workshops. But you don’t actually pay for the workshop until the day you show up for the conference. So bring your credit card with you!

I have attended nearly every Advanced Topics Workshop since the first year it was presented. I have also attended many of the configuration management workshops. I have always found the workshops to be a great experience. I hope that you have a chance to try one out this year.

This year at LISA 06 we are trying something a little different. We will be presenting a lunch-time talk, and we will be inviting attendees to go grab lunch and bring it back to this presentation. It is a unique format for a unique talk. Dr. Alva Couch will be presenting his thoughts on the future of system administration, and how you can best prepare yourselves professionally to take the most advantage of these emerging technologies and business models. It may be controversial, and it will certainly be enlightening. So I hope you will join him at this year’s special lunch and learn on conference Friday from 1 to 1:45. The morning sessions will end at 12:30, and that leaves you just enough time to race out to a fast food place, grab something on the go, and bring it back to the lunch and learn.

Truth be told, this isn’t really the first “lunch and learn” that we’ve done at LISA. Last year (LISA 05) one of our speakers had an unexpected conflict and was unable to make his presentation on the date and time we had scheduled. We held his talk during the lunch hour on the next day. So although this year’s lunch and learn isn’t the first, it is the first time we have done one intentionally.