About 10 years ago I started writing my own code. Unfortunately for me I chose directory based software which meant that I had to be running almost every email or directory server known to man. The technology of the day was the KVM switch, essentially you could hook this up to a bunch of computers and share a single keyboard, monitor and mouse between them. At the peak of this configuration I was running eight machines in my basement. The noise was so annoying that I invested in a cat-5 based KVM extender, which I still think is a cool piece of technology.

Enter VMWare. They were one of the first commercial ventures into the world of virtualization. Imagine running a full virtual computer in a window on your host PC. The first few versions were a bit of a kluge but workable. In a scant week I had suddenly moved all of my development environment into a single desktop PC, all for the price of around $350. Less than the cost of a single physical machine. I was hooked.

For more than 5 years I had religiously used this piece of software, moved on to the VMWare server product which allowed the use of a headless PC as the host environment with remote connections. AND because of pressure in the market they ended up making the code (though closed source) totally free. Absolutely brilliant!

This all came crashing to a halt with version 2.0 of their server product. I got a pretty foreboding feel when the web site required a user account. OK, the account is free they just want some personal information. No problem, just an annoyance. Whoops the download is 500 meg! My first thought was my god that's practically 5 times the size of the original version... That little voice in the back of my mind started getting worried. In the past versions the installation was literally 2 minutes: install the software, compile the kernel modules (yes a Linux host) and restart the service. This new install had all of that and a web interface.. hmmm. Despite all of my work and consulting user forums ad nausium I just could not get it to work. One other administrator admitted that he had to hack selinux (some security strap-ons to Linux) to make it perform. That pretty much was the last straw for me. I gave up and reverted to the old version.

While looking for technical information to help my plight I ran across a 'roundup' of virtualization products that were Linux friendly. At the very bottom of the article was this odd footnote about a product from Germany called VirtualBox. One very sleepless night I decided to look into this oft-known program. I found some follow on reports that VirtualBox was acquired by Sun to enhance their Virtualization position. But there was an interesting piece of news, Sun had open sourced the code!

Madly racing to my Linux box, on a whim I searched for VirtualBox for my Linux distro. It turns out that Debian (king and protector of open source) had a copy of the software ready to install. In less than a blink of an (apt-get) eye I had the software installed and running! That little voice started getting cautious, this can't be that easy after all we tried Qemu and Xen and it was not as powerful or graceful as VMWare.

Wonder of wonders! A truly open source virtualization product that performs actually better than the version of VMWare server I was running in the past. It even has a few very neat enhancements including support for virtualization hardware (found in all modern 64bit CPU's). With the latest version of 2.1.0 I am now running 7 different machines from my laptop. Everything from Linux to Windows 2008 server (x64) has run flawlessly. By the end of the year we will be completely cut over to VirtualBox for all development and testing for both SimpleSync and Profiler. AND since this runs so effortlessly on our laptops, we can carry our complete lab environment around with us.
 

Happy Holidays!

We have seen a lot of movement towards cloud based computing in the past few month. More specific to our industry, customers are outsourcing their email and directories to (using an old term)  ASP's (Application Solution Providers).  What's more interesting is these companies are not moving over EVERYTHING to the cloud.  For various reasons they are partially migrating to outsourced positions.  There are very good reasons for this:

• Remote Offices who are too small to manage their own email system.  Home office stays on a central server.
• Political reasons: Organizations jump to the cloud because it's new..,,
• Company acquisitions.  Maybe the acquired company is in the cloud while the parent is not.

To this end we have committed resources to fully support as many cloud based email systems as possible.  In the up and coming release of SimpleSync, we will have full support for Google Apps.  SimpleSync will be able to pull all email addresses from an apps account and sync them anywhere.  In addition Google Apps account provisioning support will also available.

Microsoft is also promising the same kind of cloud solution for email and directory with their Live and Azure announcements.  However there does not seem to be much information about it other than the fact that it's basically setup as a Resource Forest.  Something SimpleSync already supports in it's production code.

The Oracle DB support has been removed from SimpleSync in the up and coming version.  The main reason of this was the API's restriction that it would only work with one version of the Oracle client at a time.  This was an enormous pain because each version of SimpleSync could ONLY support one version of the Oracle client.  So we threw our hands up and chucked the whole set of code.  Problem solved..

At this point the Oracle customers have now come back to their computers after falling out of their chairs.. 

The answer is pretty elegant -- ODBC.  Oracle ships ODBC drivers for every flavor of Windows.  The nice thing about ODBC is code once and walk away.  The ODBC code has been massaged a bit to better fit with the ODBC Oracle drivers.  In fact we have an existing customer using the patched code with great success. 

So the rule of thumb for those current Oracle users is ... Do nothing.  Wait for the next release to come out.  The Oracle code will be gone but the ODBC support will be there so you can make the easy transition.