Metztli Information Technology Blog

The embrace of cloud computing appears to proliferate with greater momentum in the hosting and service provider market. Indeed, hosting providers seem to be currently at the cutting edge in adapting this recently introduced computing paradigm into their core business. Progress in the cloud is aided by the maturity of open source virtualization technologies like Xen and the emergence of KVM -the latter heavily promoted by Red Hat. As a way to illustrate that assertion, I will examine the self-serving facilities (one core aspect of the cloud delivery model) that Cloud Sigma, a European cloud hosting provider, makes available for an typical customer desiring to deploy virtualized GNU/Linux instances in a cloud environment. I will walk the reader through a basic scenario on deploying an x64 Fedora distribution. In this particular case I will use a live Fedora distribution media from Cloud Sigma image library catalog; the image has an option to install to the virtual hard drive that we will create as well. Alternatively, I could have selected an Debian or (Open)SuSE, or any other suitable distribution -even if proprietary; however, I wished to test install the IBM Lotus Symphony 3 beta 3 into an x64 Fedora 13 and verify that my list of aggregated 32-bit Fedora packages, based on the ia32-libs package for Debian, still enables 32-bit applications to execute into an 64-bit Fedora environment. more »