Forum OpenACS Q&A: ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM)

Posted by John Sequeira on 04/21/02 12:05 AM

I've updated my VMWare release of OpenACS to reflect the latest 4.5 beta, and cleaned up the installation instructions a bit. You can download it using BitTorrent, a p2p downloading client, from here (~ 200Meg), on Musea's web site. Anyone with download issues ( typically firewalled folks) can send me an email and I'll provide an HTTP download link.

For more background, here's the original announcement and a writeup on why I think this is a great thing for Windows folks interested in test driving the OpenACS platform.

I received some positive feedback from people on the first release, but most people had difficulty getting the network up and running. I realize that I oversold the ease of deployment a bit. It is very very easy to deploy if your network architecture looks like the one in my home-office ( behind a NAT/DHCP gateway appliance. ) If your LAN doesn't look like mine (likely), the VM's networking configuration will have to be changed. If you're not VMWare and *nix networking savvy, this will require a bit of reading on VMWare's support pages, an email or two to me, and you should be able to get coding on OpenACS. Although more hassle than I'd like, I think it's the way to go if you're on Windows and want to see the OpenACS in action. I can pretty much guarantee that that the alternatives: getting the whole (cygwin or linux)/aolserver/postgres/openacs stack working on your own hard drive will take longer.

Thanks once again to Musea for hosting this, and I'll see all you Boston-area folks at the Cambridge social on Tuesday.

2: Response to ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM) (response to 1)

Posted by Vadim Makarov on 04/21/02 01:20 AM

VMware costs $300 beyond the 30-day evaluation period.

3: Response to ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM) (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 04/21/02 03:15 AM

This is pretty interesting stuff. Thanks John. What would be really great is if we could skip the $300 bill to VMWare and setup an installer for all the pieces. Anybody?

4: Response to ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM) (response to 1)

Posted by John Sequeira on 04/21/02 08:28 PM

I guess I should have mentioned the $300. The way I look at it, you have 30 days to see if OpenACS is for you. From day 1, you should be able to write code and see if Tcl/ADP/etc agrees with you, and if the modules actually do what you want or can be tweaked to do it easily.

If they do, in 30 days you get to make another decision: is it worth $300 to not allocate a new hard drive/partition/box and set up Linux/Pg/OpenACS on it? For those of you with (lots of?) time or interest in learning how to set up software, go the do-it-yourself route. For people who'd rather dive right in and code, and forego all that wonderful sys-admin and hardware-compatibility knowledge, pay the VMWare people for taking that task away.

I think the no-cost-for-30-days try-it-and-see approach benefits people in both categories.

I think that a Windows-installer type of thing is a good idea, but realistically OpenACS is going to be a second-class experience on that platform for a long time, esp. given the AOLServer development roadmap.

5: Response to ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM) (response to 1)

Posted by Tom Mizukami on 04/26/02 09:42 AM

Is VM's GSX server software good enough to run OpenACS on a Windows 2000 server for a production but low volume intranet site. And is this how hub.org is providing virtual machines.

6: Response to ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM) (response to 1)

Posted by John Sequeira on 04/27/02 12:50 PM

Tom,

A client of mine has purchased GSX Server to use as a build/staging/test environment. They idea is that it should support a low-volume intranet site just fine, but despite installing the software I honestly can't say I know how it performs from first-hand experience (we haven't installed anything on it yet)

What I do know is that VMWare introduces about a 30% overhead on your box. Another way to look at it is that your 2GHz server will only operate like a 1.25GHz server. That's really not a big deal - with Moore's law, you're essentially rolling back the clock ~6months on your hardware.

Given that fact, and the fact that VMWare sells the software to support exactly the scenario you describe (running low-volume production systems on consolidated h/w), I would say you shouldn't have a problem.

I'm not sure if you can download a demo... but the software I have installed (GSX running on W2K) looks a lot like they just slapped a perl API on top of their workstation product. I would say if the VMWare workstation product supports the load you're expecting (find out really quickly with my VM), GSX will be fine.

7: Response to ANN: Oasis 4.5 (Updated OpenACS VM) (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 04/28/02 05:32 AM

Tom, no, hub.org is using FreeBSD's jail facility, not VMware. Or rather, hub.org (annoyingly) doesn't say much of anything at all about how they implement their "Virtual Machine" service, but they do say they run FreeBSD on all their servers, so I assume they must be using jail.

I don't know much about FreeBSD, but I've seen at least a few knowledgeable folks comment on running AOLserver, OpenACS, etc. on it here.