Community

Hello Nimbula Community,

I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Jay Judkowitz and I run product management at Nimbula. I'd like to get your input on what you are looking to accomplish with the product, what your feedback on the product is, and where you'd like to see things go.

If you want to just drop us some quick observations and comments that you think would benefit the community, please do respond to this thread and we can all discuss online.

I would also like to invite you to have deeper conversation where we delve into the specifics of your needs and where you can provide feedback on the top development decisions we have open right now. If you are interested in this, please respond to me personally. My contact is jay@nimbula.com. I'll be happy to get back to you and arrange a time to talk over the phone.

Welcome to the Nimbula community and thanks for trying out the product!

Best regards,

Jay

I am curious why the platform was switched from Debian to CentOS. There wasn't really any notification of this, what gives?

What would be useful would be a community edition of nimbula already running so tools products (like my EC2Dream tools) and potential users can kick the tires.
Eucalyptus have one at http://open.eucalyptus.com/CommunityCloud

thanks
Neill Turner

It would be great if Nimbula would allow for iSCSI / Diskless setups. (PXE Boot with iSCSI Root Disk).

This is supported by CentOS and Ubuntu out of the box - so it would be easy to implement.

sdamron@gmail.com
I am curious why the platform was switched from Debian to CentOS. There wasn't really any notification of this, what gives?

Scott, sorry for the lack of notice. It was a late decision. We had some serious corner case issues with the Debian kernel that were discovered close to GA. There was not sufficient explicit demand from the customer base to stop shipping over.

In terms of adding it back in, is that something that you want/need? If so, can you share the reason? Or are you more concerned with the notification issue? With regard to notification, I can promise that we'll give more notice on changes of that magnitude in the future now that we have a publicly shipping GA product.

neillwturner@gmail.com
What would be useful would be a community edition of nimbula already running so tools products (like my EC2Dream tools) and potential users can kick the tires.
Eucalyptus have one at http://open.eucalyptus.com/CommunityCloud

thanks
Neill Turner

Neill, thanks for the suggestion. We do have a hosted version now, but it's not at a scale that we can make public as of this time. If you (or anyone else out there) would like to give it a spin, please contact me (jay@nimbula.com) or mail the sales team directly (sales@nimbula.com)

reg@elconas.de
It would be great if Nimbula would allow for iSCSI / Diskless setups. (PXE Boot with iSCSI Root Disk).

This is supported by CentOS and Ubuntu out of the box - so it would be easy to implement.

Robert, thanks for the input. I agree that this is becoming an ever more popular datacenter configuration. It's not completely trivial to add as it does introduce certain corner cases and our services need to be possibly altered and certainly tested to deal with situations where storage comes and goes.

But, to your point, the fundamental ability is there in the common OS/hypervisor products and is something that we should add in to the product over time.

While we do not have a public-facing roadmap to announce on the forum, we'd love to discuss your need in more detail and learn where you are going with your cloud design. Also, under NDA, we can discuss future plans somewhat more concretely. Feel free to contact me directly at jay@nimbula.com.

sdamron@gmail.com
I am curious why the platform was switched from Debian to CentOS. There wasn't really any notification of this, what gives?

One of the reason for this switch is related to the kernel, especially when it comes to driver support for server hardware. RHEL based distributions have an extended exposure to server hardware, so we made the switch.

How does Nimbula implement add storage to all the existing and running virtual instances? Can we implement iSCSI targets and extend drives? if yes, How?

manpreetdhillon1@gmail.com
How does Nimbula implement add storage to all the existing and running virtual instances? Can we implement iSCSI targets and extend drives? if yes, How?

Manpreet, in 1.0, the best way to use iSCSI for your VMs would be to use the initiator inside the VM and mount the volumes that way. In the future, we are looking to have more options than that.

If you need details on roadmap or want to provide input on what you would like to see, mail me at jay@nimbula.com to set up an NDA session.

Thanks!