Tag Archives: computing

How To Create A Windows 8 Virtual Machine

Virtualisation is ideal for trying out a new operating system. Instead of installing the OS onto a live machine and potentially overwriting, or generally messing up a working OS, virtualisation leaves your current installation untouched.

No worrying about a messed up MBR, freeing up space on your drives for a new partition or having to route around for drivers just to get back online.

Virtualisation is a lot faster than it once was as well. Oracle VM VirtualBox is similar to Microsoft’s own VirtualPC, but boasts more advanced features and better system integration. It’s also free.

These both boast support for hardware virtualisation, which means you’ll enjoy a responsive machine after installation.

You will need a processor that supports hardware virtualisation, but given AMD and Intel have supported such extensions for a number of years, so as long as your PC is reasonably up to date, this shouldn’t be a problem.

In order to run a virtual version of Windows 8 you’ll need the Windows 8 ISO – we’d recommend grabbing the 32-bit, just because it’s a little less exacting specifications wise. You’ll need the virtualisation software for the host machine as well. For this tutorial we’ve used VirtualBox, although the setup is similar for VirtualPC as well.

1. Welcome to the machine

Install and run VirtualBox and then click the ‘New’ button to create a new virtual machine (or VM for short). Give your virtual machine (or VM for short) an obvious name, such as “Windows 8 CP” and then select Microsoft Windows as your OS type and Windows 8 from the drop down menu, or Windows 8 (64-bit) if you’re going down that route.

Windows 8 virtual machine

2. Minimum specifications

The next screen enables you to define how much memory your virtual system has. Windows 8 has a minimum memory requirement of 1GB for the 32-bit version, but we’d recommending electing to go for 2048MB unless your physical machine is a bit strapped for RAM. Click Next.

Windows 8 virtual machine

3. Create a drive image

The next step defines the virtual drive for your installation. Elect to go with the default setting to create a new hard disk. On the next screen leave the type as a VDI drive image – VirtualBox’s own file format. It’s fine to leave this virtual drive as being Dynamically allocated as well.

Windows 8 virtual machine

4. Size matters

Define where you want the Virtual disk to reside and change the initial drive size if you feel the need – although the default 20GB default size should be fine. After installation our Windows 8 sat at 7GB. Check the Summary is correct and then when you’re ready, hit the Create button.

Windows 8 virtual machine

5. Virtual optical

Right-click the Windows 8 CP and select Settings from the drop-down list. Click on Storage, then the CD icon under IDE Controller, next click the CD icon to the right of the controller to locate your Windows 8 ISO and elect to Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file… Point it at your Windows 8 ISO you have downloaded and then click Open.

Windows 8 virtual machine

6. Install Windows 8

You’re now set to install Windows 8 CP on your virtual machine. Just make sure the virtual PC is highlighted and then hit the Start button. The installation of Windows 8 is fairly straightforward, just ensure you elect to pick a custom installation. Complete the installation and log into your account.

Windows 8 virtual machine

7. Guest Additions

Installing Guest Additions is a little trickier, as you need to install them in Safe Mode. Go to the desktop view and hit [Win]+R and launch MSConfig. Click the Boot tab, check the Safe boot and Base Video options and then OK the changes, choosing to reboot into Safe Mode.

Windows 8 virtual machine

8. Improve system integration

Install the Guest Additions from the VirtualBox Devices menu, enabling full 3D support when prompted. Don’t reboot, instead clear the Safe boot and Base video options in MSConfig and then power off the VM. Increase the video memory to 128MB in the Display settings for the VM and enable 3D and 2D acceleration. Launch the VM and your d

Windows 8 virtual machine

Author: Matt Hanson

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meshIP Launches Two New Services!

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meshIP, LLC is please to announce the launch of two new services! meshIP was formed five years ago and has specialized in company formation, business plan development, funding and growth strategies. We are adding to our capabilities to assist small and mid-sized firms in their growth by offering hosted computing and telecommunications services. These offerings allow our clients to get out of the IT business and focus on their business.

Our meshDESK service offering allows businesses to end the cycle of information technology overspending and support frustration by moving your users to on demand access of our global application and infrastructure cloud.

Cloud computing is enabling customers to access IT services without any infrastructure investment or any services deployed in-house. meshDESK is an integrated service that takes complex services and makes them simply consumable to businesses and agencies.

Our meshPBX service offering is an advanced telephone system platform that is owned and operated within the best data centers in the world – so you can safely transfer your operational needs and risk to us, while enjoying exceptional pricing.

Most importantly, meshPBX is highly configurable to demanding and unusual collaboration environments, while providing a long list of standard elements to meet your expectations of high mobility, messaging integration, security, and audit.

We are excited to be offering these two new services. Please check out www.meshIP.com to learn more about our capabilities

Sorting Out The Different Layers Of Virtualization

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Have you found yourself wondering what’s wrong with all of the marketing mavens out there in virtualization land? It seems that everything is virtualization and nothing is virtualization.

Over the years, I’ve developed a tool or a model that has helped my clients better understand all of the layers of virtualization technology so that they could sort out what would be useful and what doesn’t fit in their world (or their network for that matter).

As you might expect, this model has been the foundation for much of the commentary offered here. Several readers have asked for a more graphical view of this model and a quick description of what each layer of the model does to help organizations leap from the mundane world of hardware and software into the illusionary world of virtualization. Since we just live to serve, here’s the tool displayed as a graphic.

There are many layers of technology that virtualize some portion of a computing environment depending upon whether the organization is seeking performance, reliability/availability, scalability, consolidation, agility, a unified management domain or some other goal. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Access Virtualization — hardware and software technology that allows nearly any device to access any application without either having to know too much about the other. The application sees a device it’s used to working with. The device sees an application it knows how to display. In some cases, special purpose hardware is used on each side of the network connection to increase performance, allow many users to share a single client system or allow a single individual to see multiple displays.

Application Virtualization — software technology allowing applications to run on many different operating systems and hardware platforms. This usually means that the application has been written to use an application framework. It also means that applications running on the same system that do not use this framework do not get the benefits of application virtualization. More advanced forms of this technology offer the ability to restart an application in case of a failure, start another instance of an application if the application is not meeting service level objectives, or provide workload balancing among multiple instances of an application to archive high levels of scalability. Some really sophisticated approaches to application virtualization can do this magical feat without requiring that the application be re-architected or rewritten using some special application framework.

Processing Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides physical hardware configuration from system services, operating systems or applications. This type of Virtualization technology can make one system appear to be many or many systems appear to be a single computing resource to achieve goals ranging from raw performance, high levels of scalability, reliability/availability, agility or consolidation of multiple environments onto a single system.

Storage Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides where storage systems are and what type of device is actually storing applications and data. This technology also makes it possible for many systems to share the same storage devices without knowing that others are also accessing them. This technology also makes it possible to take a snapshot of a live system so that it can be backed up without hindering online or transactional applications.

Network Virtualization — hardware and software technology that presents a view of the network that differs from the physical view. So, a personal computer may be allowed to only “see” systems it is allowed to access. Another common use is making multiple network links appear to be a single link.

Management of virtualized environments — software technology that makes it possible for multiple systems to be provisioned and managed as if they were a single computing resource.

Each of these technologies has been available in data centers in one form or another for nearly 30 years. What’s exciting and new is that this technology is increasingly available for industry standard, high volume systems and operating system software.

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Cloud Customers Not Taking Steps To Secure Cloud Computing

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Despite their concerns about cloud computing security, cloud computing users aren’t taking all the steps they can to secure cloud computing, according to a recent survey of 1,200 IT pros in the U.S.

The survey by CDW LLC, a national IT solution provider based in Vernon Hills, Ill., polled IT pros from a variety of industries on their companies’ use of cloud computing and found that 28% are using cloud services today. Security continues to be a roadblock for cloud adoption for both non-cloud using organizations (45%) and cloud users (32%), the study showed.

At the same time, however, the results indicated that cloud users aren’t taking advantage of available security features or aren’t verifying their cloud provider’s security. Among the findings: Only 54% said they encrypt data in transit, 50% manage employee access to cloud applications, and 44% require password changes every 90 days.

“Good security practices apply everywhere. The things you should be doing for traditional IT are in many ways the exactly the same things you should be doing in a cloud environment,” David Cottingham, senior director of managed services at CDW, said in an interview.

He acknowledged that some security functions cited in the survey, such as physical security of a data center, are out of the hands of a cloud customer. But he added that the study showed cloud users aren’t taking steps to ensure their cloud providers are doing the security they say they’re doing. Only 31% of cloud users said they certify their cloud provider’s security measures. Customers should conduct high-level audits and ask for proof of a cloud vendor’s security claims, whether that’s PCI DSS certification or a SAS 70 Type II report.

“What are the standards, policies, procedures the cloud provider has in place? If you get a blank stare when you ask those questions, you probably want to move to the next provider,” Cottingham said.

The study showed that companies are using cloud computing mostly for commodity applications such as email, file storage and video conferencing. Cottingham said they may figure the cloud provider’s security is good enough for those types of applications, and are holding back on moving more critical data to the cloud.

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Vast Majority of Small Businesses Unaware of Cloud Computing

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Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of small businesses surveyed by Newtek Business Services said they have never heard of cloud computing, underlining a fundamental lack of knowledge about the technology. Based on a poll of approximately 1,800 respondents, the survey found only 26 percent of those who had heard of cloud computing could describe what it was.

Seventy-one percent of respondents acknowledged they do not keep their critical business files and data backed up offsite—only 29 percent of respondents said they did. Barry Sloane, president and CEO of Newtek said cloud computing would be the next important trend in the U.S. economy for businesses large and small, and there is no doubt that business owners will embrace the cloud concept and over time gravitate towards its massive benefits. “We surveyed over 1,800 independent business owners and discovered that the concept of cloud computing has begun to disseminate into the marketplace, due primarily to large advertising programs by entities like Microsoft, Cisco and others,” he said. “Business owners will need to understand what the cloud is and what it can do for their businesses in the areas of cost control, data security, data protection, accessibility, efficiency and productivity to facilitate a smooth running technological platform for their business.”

Sloane said about 25 percent of their business owners said they understood what cloud computing was, but when they drilled down deeper most, 78 percent, thought that their data was secure. Meanwhile, 71 percent stated their data was not backed up offsite. “Server huggers beware,” he warned. “The cloud is approaching; the security blanket of the server in the closet onsite and having an assistant backup important business data and confidential client information needs to be behind us all. Our survey this month is quite telling about what independent business owners really need to know about the cloud and how misinformed they are about data safety and security.”

A report earlier this month from by Verio, a provider of online business solutions to SMBs, came to a similar conclusion, finding more than two-thirds of respondents are uncertain if they would purchase a cloud solution in the near future. However, despite this lack of knowledge, respondents sought the benefits of a cloud offering, with 21 percent citing the ability to share resources and 20 percent citing on-demand resources as important, showcasing a need for education on cloud benefits specific to small businesses.

With the proper knowledge and education on cloud technology, 20 percent of decision makers stated they were “likely” or “very likely” to implement a cloud computing solution in the next 12 months while almost 10 percent were “likely” or “very likely” to implement in the next three months, according to survey results.

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CIOs Predict Hybrid Cloud Will Dominate IT Architecture

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Cloud computing will become the dominate architecture for IT, according to a Colt study.

The survey of 500 CIOs across UK, France, Germany, Spain and Benelux highlights that, while few businesses in Europe have company-wide implementations of cloud computing to date (16%), many believe the cloud will be their most significant IT operating method by 2014 (60%).

The biggest challenge adopting cloud computing is ease of transition (58%). Quality assurance (55%), cost justification (55%) and regulation on security and control of customer data (54%) were also top concerns.

There is also growing interest among CIOs in private clouds, but these overcome security concerns while compromising on scalability and cost savings. One in five companies (21%) say they prefer a hybrid approach.

Through a hybrid cloud CIOs can balance the security strengths of a private cloud with lower costs and stability available when using a public cloud service.

Mark Leonard, executive vice-president responsible for the CIO office at Colt, said: “Companies are evaluating and deploying cloud services at a higher rate year-on-year, driven by the need to be more agile and responsive in today’s business climate. There is now a demand to bring together computing and network services supported with advanced systems that deliver a truly integrated end-to-end experience and ensure the predictable quality of service.”

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Big Data Runs Afoul of Big Lawyers

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If you’ve read anything about the phenomenon of Big Data, then you probably picture armies of servers chugging some form of the Hadoop ecosystem to crunch mountains of information streaming from internal corporate transactions, emails, instant messages, and Web logs or external social media interactions and public information.

Sounds expensive, right? Not necessarily. Thanks to cloud computing, freely available tools, and limitless free data, you can do major league Big Data analysis for a C-note.

At a GigaOm conference on Big Data last week, Pete Warden, who claims he lives on ramen noodles, described how he spent just $100 to scrape 500 million Web pages, including 220 million Facebook public profiles, using his own Web crawler and a 100-machine cluster running on Amazon EC2. He was able to analyze the information to match Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts with the email accounts of users of his email tool.

Then, just for fun, he created interactive maps showing how various countries, U.S. states, and cities connect with each other over social media and what types of fan pages they frequent. For example, users in Idaho and Utah tend to connect with people inside their state and nearby states, while East and West Coast cities have lots of connections with each other. Los Angeles users tend to like Michael Jackson, Starbucks, and Megan Fox fan pages, while Eastern Idaho users are more into Glenn Beck and the Church of Jesus.

The result was legal action from Facebook, which cost him about 30 times more than he spent collecting and displaying the data. However, he was able to reach an agreement that didn’t run him anything beyond the legal fees.

Warden has just announced the release of his Data Science Toolkit, a set of free tools and interfaces that enable you to analyze massive amounts of unstructured data. It includes OCR capabilities that can convert scanned images and PDFs to text files and tools for filtering geographic locations from news items and blogs. You can run it on a Hadoop cluster in an Amazon EC2 cloud or download the toolkit as a virtual machine.

Additionally, an eight-person company called Tap11 has a tool for tapping and analyzing 140 million tweets daily to help companies understand what users are saying about their brand and products. Client Goldman Sachs, for example, discovered a lot of talk about criminals and bonuses. Another financial planning tool startup called Bundle provides a service that taps Citi customer transaction data to allow users to discover how other people in their geographical area or the area they’re moving to typically spend their money.

So it turns out Big Data doesn’t necessarily cost big bucks, which means that the potential for hundreds of startups analyzing just about everything is enormous. It’s a new frontier. Just watch out for lawyers guarding territory already staked out.

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Cloud Computing Driven By Innovation, Not Cost

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Cloud computing adoption is being driven by the desire to innovate rather than save money.

That was the message sent out during IBM’s Pulse 2011 event this week in Las Vegas as the man in charge of the cloud for Lockheed Martin and Big Blue’s cloud champion talked up the benefits on offer.

Cloud computing marks a turning point in the “industrialisation” of the IT industry, according to Ric Telford, Tivoli’s vice president of autonomic computing, who likened the transition as akin to the key changes that happened when we went from making matches, nails and pins one-by-one – resulting in every one being different – to en masse.

“It wasn’t an industry. It was a craft. In some ways that’s very similar to how IT has been. We’re craftsmen. But it doesn’t scale,” he said.

Using another analogy, this time how the financial services industry coped with growing demand, he added: “[The banks] just couldn’t keep adding tellers so the ATM network was born. At any time of the day, in any place in the world you are now able to draw cash out. What this self service model brought to banking is akin to what we’re seeing.

“What’s changing now is a shift in focus on the cloud from cost control to driving business innovation. Now I can get my services to move faster, be more dependable and repeatable, what can I do differently?”

Melvin Greer, senior fellow and chief strategist for SOA and cloud computing at Lockheed Martin echoed Telford’s claims that times were changing.

“We at Lockheed Martin have a unique perspective on how to approach cloud computing. We have less of a discussion around the technical definition of cloud and more of a discussion on what we can do with the cloud,” he said.

“It’s important to get context as to why cloud computing is so hyped. We have a global economic situation…. This global context has created a new normal.

Given the US government’s mandate to invest heavily in the cloud to the tune of $20 billion, Lockheed Martin does and will continue to play a key role in providing those cloud computing services.

As to the benefits of this cloud-centric approach? “Now we can consider whole new levels of business opportunities that never existed before,” added Greer.

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Pentagon Looks to Militarize the Cloud

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Store tactical military data on distributed servers, accessible through networked computers or mobile devices? Ask most officers about cloud computing and they’ll look at you patronizingly and say: Yes, Google Docs is nice, but it’s not secure enough for our secrets. (I write from experience.) But Darpa’s new budget shows that it wants the military all the way up into the cloud, and plans to set up mobile wireless hotspots so troops can reach the cloud from the most connectivity-forsaken places.

Appropriately, the goal of getting big data files to troops on the move in the middle of nowhere is, well, distributed between two new programs from the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers. Cloud to the Edge looks to essentially ape Google’s tools (other than search) to create a military cloud. And Mobile Hot Spots wants to carry connectivity anywhere troops need to share those big data files.

Wherever the military goes, it brings bandwidth with it. But it’s easier to set up networks around big bases than it is to have them follow troops in the field, especially if those troops have to send or receive large data packets, like video from drones overhead. Some companies are combating the problem by mounting cell towers under the bellies of drones, beaming connectivity below.

Mobile Hot Spots is Darpa’s way to even out what it calls the “100-1000x mismatch of data needs and available network capacity.” Starting out with a $10 million request to Congress, it looks to “create high-capacity and secure wireless technologies by exploiting advances in high-frequency and new security paradigms using RF, millimeter wave (MMW) and/or optical transmission.” If approved, it’ll spend its first year of life developing hardware and network architecture for the mission. And it’s considering going the under-drone route, proposing to “explore hardware, software, and waveform options to include unmanned aerial systems, soldiers, and mobile platforms connected into network topologies.”

Then there’s the place where the data carried over those networks will reside. Cloud to the Edge has no problem distributing that around through the ether. Unlike Mobile Hot Spots, it’s not even asking for money yet — perhaps because what it’s proposing is so ambitious it first needs to see about feasibility. Not only will it store data in “distributed servers and advanced networking and information database technologies,” it seeks to minimize human interaction in retrieving the data, “autonomously seek[ing] out relevant information and mov[ing] it to where it is needed in a timely and assured manner.”

The budget proposal doesn’t give any hint about how it’ll do that yet, proposing for now just to study “information flow patterns through the regional and localized network” and write software for “distributed data dissemination.”

Neither does Darpa explain how to keep its Cloud secure. Instead, it flips the security question back around, asserting that the “current centralized or regional storage and dissemination of information presents security, reliability, and capacity challenges in identifying and getting relevant information to users at the edge.”

At a time when Special Operations Forces are turning to Android-powered tablets to read their data in the middle of nowhere, Darpa looks to be focused on setting up the supporting infrastructure that lets U.S. troops access more information in more remote areas. It might not be Google Docs. But it’s something.

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Tag Archives: computing

How To Create A Windows 8 Virtual Machine

1. Welcome to the machine

2. Minimum specifications

3. Create a drive image

4. Size matters

5. Virtual optical

6. Install Windows 8

7. Guest Additions

8. Improve system integration

Sorting Out The Different Layers Of Virtualization

Cloud Customers Not Taking Steps To Secure Cloud Computing

CIOs Predict Hybrid Cloud Will Dominate IT Architecture