FoswikiStandardVirtualMachines

Foswiki Standard Virtual Machines

IMHO, using standardized VM's for development and testing would be a good idea (if you all are not already doing it).

A side benefit would be to let new users try official Foswiki-team generated VM's with Foswiki pre-installed.

-- BobBagwill - 28 Nov 2008 - 18:30

Related links

• http://fosiki.com/blog/twiki-423-jeos-virtual-machine/ - Sven's TWiki 4.2.3 VM
• http://foswiki.org/Tasks/JeOSVirtualMachine - tracking for same

I wanted to put these two links here not because they're related to the standard Foswiki VM concept, but because they're VM related and this hit shows up in searches.

-- RasmusPraestholm - 09 Dec 2008 - 02:35

Bob, Martin and others that like the idea of a Foswiki VM - could you compare and contrast the utility to you and similar users between a VM, set up using Debian linux, vs a portable native environment such as the one that strawberry perl Portable offers on windows?

I'm working with the idea that I should be able to build portable Foswiki environments for several systems, using the Standalone Foswiki component (ie, not requiring Apache, and able to run from USB stick etc. There's quite some work to do for non-windows, but I'd like to get a feel for the user response

And so begins the quest for FoswikiOnAStick.

-- SvenDowideit - 09 Dec 2008 - 04:37

What I had in mind is something like http://www.jumpbox.com/product/Wiki. They provide pre-configured VM appliances for various web-based applications. The VM makes it easy to try out an application. Installing any new application creates risk on a production server. The VM's reduce the risk by providing security and resource isolation.

-- BobBagwill - 09 Dec 2008 - 14:45

VM's are certainly 'marketed' that way, and I'm planning on making a set for those that do like them - but my experience recently is that VM's aren't good for real production use, and terrible for beginners to try out. The first due to a lack of determinism in IO and CPU usage on shared systems, and the second becuase most beginners also don't know the intricacies of driving vmware etc, and of the OS that the VM's are based.

personally, I love using VM's - but i have been using them for over 8 years.

-- SvenDowideit - 10 Dec 2008 - 11:02

My experience with TWiki is that it's so slow, running it on an underpowered VM doesn't make it any slower. My original suggestion, though, was that developers use standardized VM's for testing and development, so that everyone's working from identical distributions, without any "extra" packages or modules.

-- BobBagwill - 10 Dec 2008 - 12:13

I'm generally a fan of the VM approach as well from the end user/IT perspective. There are plenty of users setting up Wiki "appliances" whose knowledge of *nix's is just enough to get by. There's a great level of comfort in a known, validated, secure starting point. Additionally it's easy to snapshot and/or revert. I've wrestled some keeping an instance on Windows through 4.2.0,1,2,3 And various issues have had me working on test environments on Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu, and JeOS, in and out of VM's. As to the Performance issues, there's some merit there to a hesitation virtualize, but on the other hand, once it's virtualized there's a great freedom to be able to add resources or move it to beefier hardware. Additionally I imagine continued code optimization and cheaper faster hardware will both continue to help on this front. One can however google a significant number of end user comments along the lines of "Twiki is great once we had it finally setup, but the setup and securing was a bit of a bear". Apart from virtualization, I don't yet get any sense of a short term fix in the works to address that. The VM approach can really help mitigate that initial bump. For some time to come I think it will be more practical to ask/expect an end user to grok the required VM(ware) skillset, than it is to ask them to get comfortable with bare metal *nix installs, once they become frustrated trying to nurse Twiki (and plugins) on Windows with documentation that understandably has a *nix leaning with Windows as an afterthought. A final thought on your planned "set" of VM's Sven... May I submit a vote for a set ready to run on ESXi? I've been struggling for a good chunk of this morning trying to get your JeOS VM to properly convert from VMWare Server to ESXi, and haven't yet made it. If performance is an issue with VM's it certainly seems that ESXi would be a better base than VMware Server or Player.

-- CraigBowers - 10 Dec 2008 - 14:37