Here's where we'll publish the latest on BigV, which is extracted from our main company blog; you might also want to check the frequently-asked questions list.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
0.6 client is out
There’s a new release of BigV’s client software – hurrah! So you are now able to “log in” or regenerate your profile on more than one machine. You can change your password rather than have to copy your .bigv folder around when (re)installing. The SSH key management is back, so you shouldn’t keep getting those prompts about host keys. You can create a VM with a CD-ROM ready inserted to speed installations.
More significantly you can also now create and delete usernames for other people – this means:
- you can use those handy privilege delegation commands to share a BigV account with other people;
- any users you create can log in and create their own BigV accounts that are nothing to do with you.
So if you have friends who would like BigV accounts, you now have the power to provide them with one.
There were also a two things I’d forgotten to document: did you know you can incorporate bigv invocation into other programs through YAML and batch modes? Or that there is an interactive mode which saves you entering your password every time you run bigv? They were always sat there in the interactive help, but I’d not written them up until now.
Update instructions are as usual: if you’re using Debian or Ubuntu you can “apt-get update; apt-get install bigv”. Everyone else, go to http://bigv.io/download to grab the latest tarball or installer. There are some Redhat / Fedora / CentOS RPMs that I’ve not fully tested but I hope to post in the next fortnight. Thanks to Jamie Nguyen for doing this work for us.
Finally, Bytemark is turning 10 years old this year; I should soon have good news about the end of BigV’s beta period, and a launch this summer.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
Two conference papers on Bytemark’s virtualisation (2004 & 2012)
Here’s the paper I wrote for last week’s FLOSS UK Spring 2012 conference. I don’t really do slides, just scrolling through text and pointing at diagrams. But hopefully this is more useful afterwards – the paper spills all the details on how we’ve been implementing BigV, our excellent new hosting system. Have a read, and I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comments.
I’ve also dug out the paper I did for the UKUUG 2004 Bournemouth conference on what we were doing with User-Mode Linux. There’s actually plenty there that’s still relevant to planning a virtualisation system – everything from TAP interfaces to economies of scale. Both papers are a combination of half-imagined technology & business, but we did OK the first time round, so I’m thinking we have a shot with BigV!
Also at the UKUUG conference, I was fascinated to learn of Iustin Pop’s work on Ganeti, a VM supervision system developed at Google. If you’re looking to deploy a cluster of VMs on your own hardware without the bureaucracy of Openstack or Eucalyptus, I’d suggest you look at that; I certainly will be. If you do just want hugely flexible VMs with up to 8 discs and 120GiB RAM on our well-managed infrastructure, BigV is clearly where it’s at 
Here are the two papers:
Posted by Matthew Bloch
New Client: 0.5.2, FreeBSD & compatibility mode
0.5.2 is out! It fixes quite a few bugs and will prompt you to remove your plain-text password from the bigv config file (sorry, that was the default until now).
I’ve documented a slightly clunky method of installing FreeBSD on BigV which we’ll replace with a proper image shortly.
Another feature snuck in to the last release which I’d not documented until now was compatibility mode, which lets you run OpenBSD, Solaris and other operating systems which don’t support qemu’s efficient “virtio” hardware model.
Finally you can now undelete accidentally deleted machines within 45 days of deleting them – see my notes on vm undelete.
0.6 should follow reasonably soon which will allow you to change your password, set up more easily on multiple machines and manage your IP addresseses.
You can update with the usual – either apt-get update; apt-get upgrade on Debian / Ubuntu. Or go to our download page and follow the instructions for your OS.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
Bytemark sponsor FLOSS UK, giving presentation on BigV
If you’re a follower of the Bytemark blog you might have spotted that I’m moving the BigV diary posts over here, and some old posts might have shown up as new. Sorry!
What I came here to say though: Bytemark are sponsoring the FLOSS UK conference in Edinburgh next month, (20-22nd March), and I’m proud to be presenting a talk on the Design and Implementation of BigV, alongside lots of other interesting speakers. If you saw my talk in Bournemouth in 2004, this is the sequel you’ll no doubt have been waiting for. I’ll talk through some of BigV’s implementation, especially the bits that are easy to copy in your own setups. If you didn’t know, FLOSS UK is the new name for the UK UNIX User Group, and they always put on an interesting 2 days of cross-disciplinary technical talks. I’m hoping my talk will measure up.
There’s a new BigV release out now – documentation and some more news on the beta test should follow later tonight.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
New Client: 0.4.1-1427 with privilege delegation & Windows support
I’d be really happy if you could give the catchily-titled 0.4.1-1427 BigV client a go.
The main addition is that we have Windows support, so if your usual computer is Windows-based, there’s now an installer and command line for you.
You can also now install BigV servers running Windows Web Server 2008R2. There’s no charge during the beta period (even though it costs us), you just ask for the catchily-titled “winweb2k8r2″ distribution when you next run bigv vm new.
You might also want to read about the new privilege system.
This allows you to delegate some account management privileges to other BigV users, though at the moment a few features are missing to help you manage those privileges.
Finally please note that each account has a limit of 32GiB RAM and 500GiB of disc space – total. If you need more please ask, being sure to specify the account or machine that needs it.
For customers that are using BigV in production and need urgent assistance, you can now email support-urgent@bigv.io for 24 hour help, though as with our normal support channelsplease use it only when a production service is affected.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
New client out: 0.2-1168
As promised, the new client allows you to add secondary IPv4 addreses on demand, and expand your discs. Beta testers should go and download it.
We’re happy to have knocked some reliability problems on the head lately which will have caused some unnecessary reboots, and there’s also some more SSD space due to popular demand.
If you wanted to try scripting bigv, I can now disable V-Key authentication on a per-account basis, so just let me know your username if you’d like me to do that (ask at support@bigv.io).
If all goes to plan, we should get keys out to everyone who has asked for them in the next 6 weeks.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
Extra IPs, disc expansion soon
The next client update should allow you to add further IPv4 addresses to your VMs (for SSL etc.), and change the size of your discs, as well as a few bug fixes – I hope it should be ready by the end of the week.
I’m also working on stopping the cluster from unnecessarily rebooting your VMs during migrations, which has been a bit of a problem the last couple of weeks. I’d always advise you to test that your production systems can reboot properly, but it’s not something we want to force on you
We ran out of SSD disc space – sorry, requests for that won’t work at the moment, but there is some more on the way.
Finally, for those of you who want to use the system without a V-Key, please let us know your username, and I can temporarily disable the requirement for it. There is a better privilege system in the works, but it may be a few more weeks in coming, so we’ve put a temporary fix in place for now, for people who want to try scripting their VM creation.
We’ll email when it’s time to update your software, and send out another big batch of V-Keys.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
New(er) client is out!
Just to let you know there’s a new client out, as promised. Debian users can just type:
apt-get update; apt-get install bigv
Or you can download a manual installer as a tarball.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
Distro fixes, feature update
CentOS images now work, but sometimes you need to bigv vm restart after installation to get them to boot. Sorry, still looking at that. Ubuntu is fine now we’ve enlarged the default /boot partition.
There should be a new client release in the next day which cleans up some of the ugly output from many of the commands, and improves usability.
Bugs update: We’re still working on why reboot sometimes – doesn’t, and the DHCP server is a little flakey. Also the V-Key operation can throw “unauthorized” messages in various situations where it needn’t, and make you type the command again.
Features update: The newest features will concentrate on creation and handling of multiple accounts, so you can create accounts for your clients and customers, and keep their stuff separate from yours. Each VM belongs in a group, each group belongs in an account, and each account has one bill-payer. At the moment the client doesn’t facilitate handling several accounts, but it will do as soon as the current crop of usability bugs are fixed.
I’m expecting 500 new Yubikeys tomorrow, and a batch of 50 should go out as fast as we can program them, including to some international testers.
Please keep the bug reports & feature requests coming.
Posted by Matthew Bloch
More testers every week
We’re sending out V-Keys every week now, and I’m really grateful to the testers who are helping us out. All your suggestions go into our bug tracker, and are being worked through.
One problem in the first couple of weeks have been a flakey DHCP servers which made installations unreliable. That’s because we wrote our own in Ruby, and for whatever reason it ain’t fast enough to respond reliably. So it’s being ripped out and replaced with something a bit more standard. In the mean time you might find you need to reboot a couple of times more than normal to access our console shell.
We’ve also found that our CentOS installs are lacking virtio drivers, and that means you can’t use them (unless you are very clever and like fiddling with your boot sequence). That should be fixed in the next few days.
We’re distributing the client as portable tgz files, with a basic installer. This should help cover some other UNIXes, and I’m working backwards to make sure older systems are supported easily. Once that’s in placed we will build up the functionality of the client and know that as many OSes as possible are supported.
Finally – of course – usability will be a battle and we’re overhauling each command to make it easier to understand. I’ve done another pass at the documentation recently and hope it’s only getting easier.
I’m still keen to hear what you think, and what you’re using BigV for. Email support@bigv.io or call 01904 890898 with any urgent problems.
