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Monday, February 25, 2013
The Evolution of Computing: The Mainframe Era
Modern datacenters have their origins in the huge computer rooms of the early computing industry. Old computers required an enormous amount of power and had to constantly be cooled to avoid overheating. In addition, security was of great importance because computers were extremely expensive and commonly used for military purposes, so basic guidelines for controlling access to computer rooms were devised.
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Sunday, February 24, 2013
The Evolution of Computing: Overview
In our time, cyberspace is an integral part of the lives of many millions of citizens around the world that dive in it for work or just for fun. Our daily life is now occupied by a plethora of user-friendly technology that allow us to have more time for other activities, increase our productivity and have a lot more access to all kinds of information. But it was not always so, and until we reach this stage we went through about 50 years of development. This series of articles will summarize the evolution of different computing models that underpin much of modern life and discuss some of the future trends that will certainly change the way we relate to information technology and interact with each other.
In recent decades, computer technology has undergone a revolution that catapulted us to a growing complexity of effects revealed in a new society and, from a certain point, we started to take for granted the use of all the technology at our disposal, without thinking about the future consequences of our actions. Therefore, amongst all that we take today for granted, cyberspace is near the top of the list. The promise of the Internet for the twenty-first century is to provide everything everywhere, anytime and anywhere. All human achievements, all culture, all the news will be within reach with just one simple mouse click. The history of computers and cyberspace is critical to understanding the contemporary communication and although they do not constitute the only element of communication in the second half of the twentieth century, they must, by virtue of its importance, come first in any credible historical analysis since they were handed a huge set of tasks that go well beyond the realm of communication.
For many internet users, the access to this virtual world is a sure thing but for many others it does not even exist. Despite its exponential growth and its geographical dispersion, the physical distribution of communications networks is still far from being uniform in all regions of the planet. Moreover, the widespread of mobile telecommunications gives cyberspace a character of uniformity which permits an almost complete abstraction of its physical support. The last few years have been a truly explosive growth phase in information technology, particularly the Internet. Following this expansion, the term cyberspace has become commonly used to describe a virtual world that Internet users inhabit when they are online, accessing the most diverse content, playing games or using widely varying interactive services that the Internet provides. But it is crucial to distinguish cyberspace from telematics networks, because there is a widespread conceptual confusion.
Telematics produces distance communication via computer and telecommunications, while cyberspace is a virtual environment that relies on these media to establish virtual relationships. Thus, I believe the Internet, while being the main global telematics network, does not represent the entire cyberspace because this is something larger that can arise from man's relationship with other technologies such as GPS, biometric sensors and surveillance cameras. In reality, cyberspace can be seen as a new dimension of society where social relationships networks are redefined through new flows of information.
We can visit a distant museum in the comfort of our home, or access any news of a newspaper published thousands of miles away, with a simple mouse click on our computer. Thus, it becomes necessary to think about a regulation of this area in the sake of the common good of the planet. The economy of cyberspace has no mechanism of self-regulation that limits its growth so the current key issues for business are getting cheap energy and keep the transmission times in milliseconds. Revenues from services like Facebook and YouTube are not derived from costs to users so, from the user's point of view, cyberspace is free and infinite. As long as people don't feel any cost in cyberspace usage, they will continue to use it without any restrictions and this is will some become unbearable.
Therefore, the purpose of these articles is to present a brief analysis of the rise and transformations through which these machines and associated technologies have undergone in recent decades, directly affecting the lives of human beings and their work and communication processes.
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In recent decades, computer technology has undergone a revolution that catapulted us to a growing complexity of effects revealed in a new society and, from a certain point, we started to take for granted the use of all the technology at our disposal, without thinking about the future consequences of our actions. Therefore, amongst all that we take today for granted, cyberspace is near the top of the list. The promise of the Internet for the twenty-first century is to provide everything everywhere, anytime and anywhere. All human achievements, all culture, all the news will be within reach with just one simple mouse click. The history of computers and cyberspace is critical to understanding the contemporary communication and although they do not constitute the only element of communication in the second half of the twentieth century, they must, by virtue of its importance, come first in any credible historical analysis since they were handed a huge set of tasks that go well beyond the realm of communication.
For many internet users, the access to this virtual world is a sure thing but for many others it does not even exist. Despite its exponential growth and its geographical dispersion, the physical distribution of communications networks is still far from being uniform in all regions of the planet. Moreover, the widespread of mobile telecommunications gives cyberspace a character of uniformity which permits an almost complete abstraction of its physical support. The last few years have been a truly explosive growth phase in information technology, particularly the Internet. Following this expansion, the term cyberspace has become commonly used to describe a virtual world that Internet users inhabit when they are online, accessing the most diverse content, playing games or using widely varying interactive services that the Internet provides. But it is crucial to distinguish cyberspace from telematics networks, because there is a widespread conceptual confusion.
Telematics produces distance communication via computer and telecommunications, while cyberspace is a virtual environment that relies on these media to establish virtual relationships. Thus, I believe the Internet, while being the main global telematics network, does not represent the entire cyberspace because this is something larger that can arise from man's relationship with other technologies such as GPS, biometric sensors and surveillance cameras. In reality, cyberspace can be seen as a new dimension of society where social relationships networks are redefined through new flows of information.
We can visit a distant museum in the comfort of our home, or access any news of a newspaper published thousands of miles away, with a simple mouse click on our computer. Thus, it becomes necessary to think about a regulation of this area in the sake of the common good of the planet. The economy of cyberspace has no mechanism of self-regulation that limits its growth so the current key issues for business are getting cheap energy and keep the transmission times in milliseconds. Revenues from services like Facebook and YouTube are not derived from costs to users so, from the user's point of view, cyberspace is free and infinite. As long as people don't feel any cost in cyberspace usage, they will continue to use it without any restrictions and this is will some become unbearable.
Therefore, the purpose of these articles is to present a brief analysis of the rise and transformations through which these machines and associated technologies have undergone in recent decades, directly affecting the lives of human beings and their work and communication processes.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2012
How to use the Virtualization Lab (II)
Picking up from where I left, it was now time to change the setup into something very different. The first step was the creation of another VM inside Hyper-V to be used as an alternative source for iSCSI storage. I achieved this by installing the Microsoft iSCSI Target 3.3 on a new Server 2008 R2 x64 VM. I created this machine with two vhd files; one for the OS and the other one for the iSCSI storage.
I will now show you the steps taken to create three new iSCSI virtual disks:
Creation of the iSCSI target:
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Tuesday, January 3, 2012
How to use the Virtualization Lab (I)
I finished last post on this series with a fully working cluster installed between two Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) using a virtual iSCSI solution installed on a Virtual Box VM as depicted in the next picture:
Before moving on in the process of adding complexity to the lab scenario, don't forget to safeguard your work; although this just a lab, it doesn't reduce the nuisance of having to reinstall everything in the event of any failure. So, create VM snapshots:
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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
High Availability with Failover Clusters
Before moving on to the next chapter on my virtualization lab series, I think this might be a good opportunity to review some of the clustering options available today. I will use Windows Server Failover Clustering with Hyper-V because in today's world the trend is to combine Virtualization with High Availability (HA).
There are many ways to implement these solutions and the basic design concepts presented here can be adjusted to other virtualization platforms. Some of them will actually not guarantee a fault-tolerant solution, but most of them can be used in specific scenarios (even if only for demonstration purposes).
In this scenario an HA cluster is built between two (or more) virtual machines on a single physical machine. Here we have a single physical server running Hyper-V and two child partitions where you run Failover Clustering. This setup does not protect against hardware failures because when the physical server fails, both (virtual) cluster nodes will fail. Therefore, the physical machine itself is a single point of failure (SPOF).
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There are many ways to implement these solutions and the basic design concepts presented here can be adjusted to other virtualization platforms. Some of them will actually not guarantee a fault-tolerant solution, but most of them can be used in specific scenarios (even if only for demonstration purposes).
Two virtual machines on one physical server
In this scenario an HA cluster is built between two (or more) virtual machines on a single physical machine. Here we have a single physical server running Hyper-V and two child partitions where you run Failover Clustering. This setup does not protect against hardware failures because when the physical server fails, both (virtual) cluster nodes will fail. Therefore, the physical machine itself is a single point of failure (SPOF).
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| (Click to enlarge) |
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Monday, December 12, 2011
How to Setup a Virtualization Lab (III)
Failover Cluster Networking
The first step in the setup of a failover cluster is the creation of an AD domain because all the cluster nodes have to belong to the same domain. But before doing so, I changed the networks settings again in order to adjust them for this purpose.
LAB-DC:IP: 192.168.1.10
Gateway: 192.168.1.1 (Physical Router)
DNS: 127.0.0.1
Alternate DNS: 192.168.1.1
LAB-NODE1:
IP: 192.168.1.11
Gateway: 192.168.1.1
DNS: 192.168.1.10 (DC)
Alternate DNS: 192.168.1.1 (Physical Router)
LAB-NODE2:IP: 192.168.1.12
Gateway: 192.168.1.1
DNS: 192.168.1.10
Alternate DNS: 192.168.1.1
LAB-NODE3:
IP: 192.168.1.13
Gateway: 192.168.1.1
DNS: 192.168.1.10
Alternate DNS: 192.168.1.1
LAB-STORAGE:IP: 192.168.1.14
Gateway: 192.168.1.1
DNS: 192.168.1.10
Alternate DNS: 192.168.1.1
Therefore, I created a domain comprised of 5 machines; a DC and two member servers as Hyper-V VMs, a member server as a VMware VM and another member server as a VirtualBox VM.
So far I have demonstrated the possibility of integrating in the same logical infrastructure virtualized servers running on different platforms using different virtualization techniques; in this case we have VMs running in a Type 1 hypervisor (Hyper-V) and in two distinct Type 2 hypervisors (VMware Workstation and VirtualBox).
The option to create a network with static IP addresses is as valid as the alternative of using DHCP. Later on I plan to explore the several options provided by the cluster networking in Windows 2008 but for the time being I kept my network in a simple and basic configuration in order to proceed with the lab installation.
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Friday, December 2, 2011
How to Setup a Virtualization Lab (II)
As mentioned at the end of my previous article, the installation of my lab continued with the creation of virtual machines on the desktop computer. But this time I used VMware and VirtualBox to explore the possibility of using a set of virtualized servers across different and competing virtualization technologies.
I insisted on the network configuration details because that is the basis of all the work ahead; a single virtual machine may be important but I want to show how they can work together and therefore the correct network configuration of paramount importance.
Import a Virtual Machine into VMware
I started by installing a VM on VMware Workstation. Better yet, I took advantage of what was previously done and used the generalized .vhd file I left behind! Since VMware does not directly support the use of .vhd files, I had to convert the file from the format used by Hyper-V (Virtual Hard Disk, i.e., .vhd) to the format used by VMware (Virtual Machine Disk, i.e., .vmdk).
The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone utility is a free application which can be obtained directly from VMware’s official site but doesn’t solve the problem as it doesn’t support this type of conversion, although it can convert from other formats and even directly from servers running Hyper-V. But what interested me was to use the work already done and so I resorted to the WinImage tool.
The process was very simple:
I selected the appropriate option from the Disk menu and select the proper source file;
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