published by darrylbowler on Wed, 12/07/2011 - 13:53
I'm continually amazed that many development teams and enterprises do not use an artifact repository as a tool in their software development process.
An artifact repository is akin to what Subversion is to source code, i.e. it is a way of versioning code binary artifacts. In the Java world these artifacts could be jars, wars, ears, fully fledged applications, libraries or a collections of libraries that are packaged.
published by darrylbowler on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 17:32
Setting up vCenter and an ESX cluster
Recently I gained an interest in VMware vCloud Director, so I though I would give it a spin to see what it can do. vCloud Director requires an ESX/ESXi cluster and of course vCenter.
The configuration is fairly complex and there are multiple steps, this is going to be part 1 and I will document the setup of configuring vCenter and the ESX cluster.
published by darrylbowler on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 17:29
Here is a quick guide to installing VMware vCenter.
vCenter is used to manage ESXi and ESX systems and has some neat features
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VMware vMotion and Storage vMotion
This allows the live migration of VM's from one physical system to another.
Whereas Storage vMotion allows the migration for VM files from one datastore to another without service disruption.
HA for Virtual Machines, if the (ESX) physical system fails then the VM's will be restarted on a different ESX host.
published by darrylbowler on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 17:24
If you didn't already know Selenium is a great tool to automate web testing.
Before I delve into the details of configuring Selenium Grid with Amazon EC2 I should explain the components of Selenium so that the fundamentals are understood
First lets talk about why it should be used.
published by darrylbowler on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 17:10
To accomplish this you will need
1) a Red Hat or CentOS system, I'm using CentOS 5.4
2) Ant 1.7.x
3) JDK version 6
4) Selenium Grid
5) Firefox to demo an test setup
The following tutorial shows how to configure Selenium-RC on a single system
published by darrylbowler on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 17:05
Here is the presentation I delivered for ADP East Orlando on "Build and Test in the Cloud" on Nov 17th.
Download
published by darrylbowler on Fri, 10/14/2011 - 16:55
The first requirement is to make sure that you have "hardware-assisted visualization support" enabled in your bios. This is dependent on the hardware manufacturer, for example ASUS calls this "secure virtual machine"
1. VMware Workstation can be downloaded from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/
The product can be evaluated for free for 30 days.
VMware-Workstation-Full-7.1.2-301548.x86_64.bundle
2. The install process is very easy and I installed mine on RHEL 5.5 64 bit
published by darrylbowler on Tue, 10/11/2011 - 16:17
In the past I used a QNAP for my ISCSI and NAS needs. It did a pretty good job and I can't complain.
Like any inquisitive engineer I went the next step and built my own from a cheap PC. My first home made NAS was using FreeNAS and in general I was more that happy. It has a lots of features, obvious stuff like NFS, Samba, ISCSI but for the me the coolest was the inclusion of Fuppes for media streaming to PC's, Xbox and PS3 and yes I have all three!
published by darrylbowler on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 19:21
So what does the world of IT as Service and software development look like when they collide? So there are some obvious synergies. Software development over the many years has been moving to a model to deliver business value quicker in an ever expedited world of business where requirements change at a fast pace and hence Agile, Scrum, XP and LEAN etc. have gained popularity Cloud computing, the promise and the tool I believe can deliver some of that Here is some of what I think Cloud computing brings to the table.
