April 12 and 13, we organized a Symposium on Open Source Software at the Computer Center, Maharaja Sayajirao University(MSU) of Baroda, Vadodara, India. The event was attended, well over our capacity, by varied group such as students, educators, professionals working in industries around Baroda.

Thanks to Sandeep Menon, Novell India, for sending excellent kits for all the participants. Huge thanks also goes to Dr Dhanesh Patel, the symposium Director, Mr Vinay Pandya, Mr Devendra Jadav, Mr Kishor Gorasia - the symposium co-ordinators, Mr Dhaval Pancholi, Mr Brijesh Bhatt, Mr Ambrish Vadnekar, the technical team of the Computer Center for setting up entire IT infrastructure required, Mr Sandip for handling all our accounting and Punjabhai and all the other staff of the centre for their contributions.

The event inauguration panel consisted of the Chief Guest, Mrs Shobhna Jain, the Director General of the Railway Staff College, presided by the MSU Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor S M Joshi and the guest of honor Mr Ashok Shah, IT head of Modern Petrofils.

The training sessions were conducted by Mr Vinay Pandya and Mr Devendra Jadav on MySQL administration on openSUSE, Mr Nilesh Vaghela on Mailserver and Clustering on Red Hat Linux, Mr Ashish Bhavalkar on Squid proxy server on openSUSE and Oracle 10g implementation on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and sessions on Virtualization and Thin Client Computing using KIWI-LTSP on openSUSE by me. We will be putting up online, the slides and other documentations given to the participants.

Professor Bhuvan Parekh, the Dean, the Faculty of Engineering and Technology presided over the closing ceremony.

I would not be doing the review of the event instead here is the review by Ishan, one of the participating students to give you an idea about how the event went (btw, yaar with any number of ‘a’ means ‘friends’).

Here is the walk-through of the event in pictures.

While things are quite at compiz front, I experimented a bit with Xen.

I was under the impression that to do a “live” migration gigaport switch, shared storage and über powerful servers would be required, I was pleasantly surprised with what I found out.

Two AMD Sempron 2700+ PC(no fancy VT/Pacifica) with 1 GB RAM connected with 10/100 ethernet are used for this experiment.

Step 1. Install SLES 10 SP 1 on both PC with Xen pattern. Disable Firewall in both during installation.

Step 2. Install SLES 10 SP1 in Xen on PC1(10.0.0.1)

Step 3. NFS Export /var/lib/xen from PC1 and mount it on PC2(10.0.0.2) (not sure if this is required)

Step4. Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp to uncomment (xend-relocation-server yes) and (xend-relocation-hosts-allow ”) and reboot(not sure if reboot is required either)

Step5. Open Xen Manager in YaST on both PC, start sles-10-1 virtual machine on PC1. xm list to know the name on your setup.

Step6. Magic begins.. run

 xm migrate --live sles-10-1 10.0.0.2

on PC1 watch as it “shutoff” on PC2 and come up in PC2.

To make sure the migration is “live” you can keep the ping going on the IP of the virtual machine. Theoretically there should just be 60 - 100 ms drop in service, not really noticeable.

Note: Live migration means: moving a running virtual OS from one physical machine to another.

I’ve used SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as it is best suited to do this kind of tasks easily, but this should be possible on anything that has kernel with Xen support.