Dedicated banking Virtual Machine!

Do you do internet banking a lot ? I am sure we all worry about internet security and the constant need to protect our computers. There are number of viruses and malware that specifically target your banking web sites. Despite the efforts by the banking industry to protect consumers from these there are number of cases where the security has been breached and will continue to do so in future. If you think about it, how do viruses get in to your computer ? They find their way via e-mail, websites, free software, social networking and other common day to day internet related activities. You can protect your computer by dedicating a computer for use for  banking applications only, so that you use that dedicated computer to visit your bank web sites and refrain from doing any other day to day internet related activities with that. This way you can be assured that you will not provide any means for the viruses to enter your computer. Setting up a separate computer for just banking is not very convinient both from a cost and usage perspective.

This is where virtualzation technology such as VMware, Virtual PC or widely avaiable free Linux virtualization solutions can come in handy. Set up a virtual machines just for banking applications within your laptop or primary PC and ensure you don’t do any other internet related activites using that virtual machine. This way you can be assured, your virtual machine environment will be free of viruses and malware.

Pexus LLC is passionate about vitualization technology. We offer number of solutions to solve a range of IT application management problems. Come and talk to us how virtualization technology can help solve yours.

Visit – http://www.pexus.com

Error opening OVF files using VMware Workstation

I have tried to open quite a few OVF files using VMware Workstation 7.1 and VMware Player, but I keep getting the error such as “Failed to query source for information” or when trying to import the OVF file – “The OVF descriptor file could not be parsed”. Not sure why this is not handled correctly even with the latest version of VMware software.

I found that if you convert the OVF file to a virtual machine using the VMware converter it works fine.

Sofware Appliances 101

Want to know the buzz around software appliances ?
Check out this -> Software Appliances .

Contact us to see how we can custom build software appliances for IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager – ITCAM for all your enterprise monitoing needs – from transactions to resources to SOA and application diagnostics. (http://www.pexus.com)

Spring, Hibernate and WebSphere

Often architects are faced with situations where they have to decide on open source  and commercially available technologies.

Spring (lightweight application container) and Hibernate (persistence framework) are popular opensource projects that claims to even be a substitute for J2EE container. Here is a good article on how to get the most of these open source technologies along with popular comercial application server from IBM – WebSphere.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0609_alcott/0609_alcott.html

Virtual Network Editor in VMware Server on Windows 7

If you run Virtual Network Editor in Vmware Server on Windows 7, you will notice that the OK button is disabled. This tool needs to be “Run As Administrator” for the OK button to be enabled and make any changes to the virtual networking configuration.

Build your own private Cloud!

Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. Ever wanted to try building your own cloud and check it out. Ubuntu Distribution 9.10 now includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that you can download and build your own cloud that is compatible with Amazon EC2 platform and images. It uses an open source implementation for cloud infrastructure that is available from http://open.eucalyptus.com/.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud distribution is available from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-server

To deploy a minimum cloud infrastructure you will need two systems. I am in the process of trying this out using two vmware images. Stay tuned for more information as I report my results.

WebSphere Process Server Topologies

WebSphere Process Server  (WPS) consists of 3 key functional components – User Applications, Messaging Infrastructure and CEI (Common Event Infrastructure) support Infrastructure. WebSphere Process Server can be deployed in various topologies depending on how heavily each of these infrastructure components are used. Popularly called as “bronze”, “silver” and “gold” topologies address these different usage requirements.

“Bronze” or Single Cluster topology is used when WPS is deployed with all the 3 infrastructure in a single cluster

“Silver” or Remote Messaging topology is used where user application and CEI share a single cluster and messaging infrastructure is deployed in it’s own cluster. This is the best option when CEI infrastructure is not used heavily

“Gold” or Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology is used when each of the 3 functional infrastructural pieces of WPS has it’s own cluster.

For a very informative article refer to the following developer Works article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0803_chilanti/0803_chilanti.html

WPS InfoCenter document also provides additional information on these depoloyement topologies: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dmndhelp/v6r2mx/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.wps.620.doc/doc/ctut_buildingclusteredtopologies.html