The concerns I was told about have nothing to do with anything technical.
They are more along the lines of supporting XS users. If someone wants to
install XS in a VM, there is often a presumption that we are experts in
their virtual server software and how it is setup, even if they want to
install a XS server for a large school in a tiny, non-preallocated image
for VMware Player on a teacher's ancient Windows laptop. (For the record,
this is probably not a good idea.)
Deployments tend to vary widely in technical expertise. It is much easier
for us to figure out hardware requirements without virtualization and say
"install on this" than to take a stab at what the minimal virtual
environment needed is for any given virtualization platform, and provide a
set of instructions on how to setup and debug that as well.
For demonstration and test purposes virtualization may work. Having
administered a small VMware vCenter farm at my last employer, I am not
criticizing you for making the image.
But until I'm told otherwise or someone corrects my misunderstanding,
virtual images are not something OLPC wants to support at this time for
deployments. I am just noting this for the record in case someone stumbles
upon this email thread, and thinks about using a virtualized image for
their school.
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 5:57 PM, Sameer Verma wrote:
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 8:20 PM, Samuel Greenfeld
> wrote:
> > At least historically, I have been told that OLPC does not support the
> XS in
> > virtual environments.
> >
> > This does not mean it is not possible; but officially OLPC may not be
> able
> > to support such VMs.
> >
> > I vaguely recall the reasons for this; but as it has been a while, I will
> > leave the official explanation to someone else.
> >
> >
>
> I did try to install XS 0.6 in VM, but I quickly gave up because of
> the lanbonding stuff. I'm not even sure if it could be done, but
> nevertheless I gave up. With XS 0.7's simpler networking options
> (eth0, eth1) its a lot easier to run this server in VM.
>
> We are planning on some training sessions for teachers in Jamaica over
> the summer, and the main effort will focus on Moodle. Moodle is used
> extensively at Univ. of the West Indies (http://ourvle.mona.uwi.edu/)
> and at e-Learning Jamaica (http://www.e-ljam.net/moodle/) Most of the
> people in the Jamaica team are everyday users of Moodle. SF State also
> runs Moodle extensively. So Moodle is low-hanging fruit for us. The
> ability to run a local server in VM makes it a lot easier at training
> sessions where a good Internet connection may be absent. That's one of
> the motivations for creating this VM.
>
> As for official support business, I haven't seen much for Moodle (who
> uses Moodle?), so I hope that will improve (hint, hint).
>
> cheers,
> Sameer
>
> > On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Sameer Verma wrote:
> >>
> >> I've uploaded a copy of a XS 0.7 VM to dev.l.o Details are at
> >>
> >>
> https://schoolserver.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/school-server-holodeck-style/
> >>
> >> Try it out!
> >>
> >> cheers,
> >> Sameer
> >> --
> >> Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
> >> Professor, Information Systems
> >> San Francisco State University
> >> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
> >> http://commons.sfsu.edu/
> >> http://olpcsf.org/
> >> http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/
> >> ___
> >> Server-devel mailing list
> >> Server-devel@lists.laptop.org
> >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
> >
>
___
Server-devel mailing list
Server-devel@lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
