EC2 is awesome, but...

While I've been working towards getting stuff to work on Amazon EC2, I'm living a bandwidth-challenged lifestyle where DSL doesn't reach.  Shuffling images back and forth to Amazon is not awesome.

After discovering vmrun, I knocked together a handful of scripts to provide a workflow similar to EC2, but locally, using VMWare on my workstation.

VM2: Virtual Machine Mesh

I present VM2: Virtual Machine Mesh.

It is not intended to be exactly compatible with EC2, but to provide "close enough" match in workflow and functionality, particularly spinning up multiple instances from a single image, and boot user-data for configuration injection.

The JBoss-Cloud project can generate a VMWare bundle, which we register in VM2:

leonard:vm2 bob$ vm2 register /Users/bob/oddthesis/jboss-cloud/build/appliances/jboss-as5-appliance-1.0.0.Beta2-1.tgz
registering jboss-as5-appliance-1.0.0.Beta2-1 as vmi-b175c299b3

We can poke around and see the registered images

leonard:vm2 bob$ vm2 describe-images
VMI             Name                                     User         Date
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vmi-7839267fe0  postgis-appliance-1.0.0.Beta2-1          bob          Wed Dec 31 15:08:23 -0500 2008
vmi-b175c299b3  jboss-as5-appliance-1.0.0.Beta2-1        bob          Wed Dec 31 16:55:12 -0500 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 images

When registered, the image bundle gets stashed away in ~/.vm2/images/ for safe-keeping.

From there, we can launch instances from the image.  The bundle is expanded into a unique directory under ~/.vm2/instances/ for each instance you want to spin up.

Here we spin up 2 instances of the jboss-as5-appliance.

leonard:vm2 bob$ vm2 run-instances vmi-b175c299b3 -n 2

You can review the status of your instances

leonard:vm2 bob$ vm2 describe-instances
Instance ID   VMI             State       IP Address        User                 Created
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i-c160b05b43  vmi-b175c299b3  PREPARING   -                 bob                  Wed Dec 31 16:59:42 -0500 2008
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It'll go through the the following states

• PREPARING as it expands the image bundle for the instance
• STARTING as it boots up enough to know an IP address
• RUNNING when it's fully launched (init.d may still be churning)
• STOPPED when it's not actually running

Once they're running, vm2 describe will show you their addresses:

leonard:vm2 bob$ vm2 describe-instances
Instance ID   VMI             State       IP Address        User                 Created
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i-c160b05b43  vmi-b175c299b3  RUNNING     192.168.237.153   bob                  Wed Dec 31 16:59:42 -0500 2008
i-d864f89097  vmi-b175c299b3  RUNNING     192.168.237.152   bob                  Wed Dec 31 17:00:33 -0500 2008
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At this point, the guest images require open-vm-tools and a special RPM called vm2-support that is available in the jboss-cloud project.  Thankfully, all of the JBoss-Cloud images automatically include both.  Gee whiz.

It all operates on the local filesystem, and is not multi-user safe.  I also need to master some fork/exec Zen, to make it less blockfull.  It also assumes root's password is "thincrust" since I'm using the Thincrust tooling to create these images.

In addition to the EC2-alike commands of run-instances and terminate-instances, there's shutdown-instances which allow you to shutdown but retain the image for future use with start-instances.

Boot user-data gets injected into /etc/vm2-user-data.conf at this point.  I may try to add an EC2-alike magic metadata webserver, but I think the direct file inject will play friendly enough with Puppet for now.

Get it

You can track VM2 from the bobmcwhirter/vm2 GitHub repository.