Wayne's picture

For evaluation purposes, I used your Redmine appliance as an ISO and loaded into VMWare WorkStation on my desktop. I upgraded Redmine, configured PostFix for email, added plugins, setup projects, etc.

1. How can I deploy my VM directly to Amazon Cloud services?

2. Will that still ensure TurnKey gets credit (well deserved) for creating the appliance?

Or, will it be necessary to start back from the beginning by deploying your applianced to EC2 and then redoing the upgrade, setup, and configuration of RedMine and PostFix?

Sincerely,

Wayne

Forum: 
Wayne's picture

Okay, searching around and found your EC2SDK appliance.

Very cool.   My guess is that the steps are:

1. Deploy the EC2SDK appliance.

2. Upload the VMWare VMDK machine.

3. Run a command that will convert the image. ??? But what command?

4. Download the resulting image, or, is it possible to directly deploy it from there?

You have very cool toys on this site, wow!

- Wayne

Wayne's picture

Any help on this at all? Sorry, I thought this was a support forum. Would expect a response within 24 hours. I did find another post about how to convert a custom VM to an ISO so I'm experimenting with that.

Is that the best way to go?

Jeremy Davis's picture

but you need to remember that these are cost-free open source appliances mostly developed and maintained by a 2 man team. And often they don't have a lot of spare time for support. All other work here is done by volunteer community members such as myself. We are all lucky that Alon and Liraz's employer allows them to work on this project (with little or no direct financial return) during work time or TKL would possibly not exist at all. You can not expect any level of support unless you are willing to pay for it.

That being said, if you are patient I'm sure Liraz or Alon will get to you when they have a chance. Or perhaps someone else who has knowlegde and/or experience with EC2 will help you out. Unfortunately in this instance I do not have enough knowledge to be able to answer your queries or really provide any support to you at all. Sorry about that

If your support needs are urgent then I suggest you look at negotiating some sort of paid support with Alon and Liraz, which will allow them to make you priority.

Alon Swartz's picture

Sorry for the late reply, we are in the middle of a development cycle so things are a little hectic.

One of the things we are working on is Backup and Migration, which is designed to solve your exact problem. Liraz said it best:

"Imagine being able to develop your site on a locally running appliance (e.g., running in VirtualBox or VMWare). Then, when you're ready you can automatically migrate your appliance, with all your customizations to a cloud hosting provider of your choice."

Regarding EC2SDK, that might work, though I haven't tried it and can't recommend it with confidence. If you can't wait for the backup/migration solution, I would have to recommend the manual way - launch Redmine on EC2 (TurnKey Hub makes this simple), then manually (re)configure it.

I know the manual way is not the solution you were looking for, but what you are, is on its way.

Wayne's picture

Thanks JedMeister and Alon,

After lots of studying on Amazon, their outstanding feature is that they do allow custom images.

Beyond that, many of the other clouds are more competivie on the other areas. So I'm looking for them to open up to accept custom images.

My dream for cloud computing is mobility of instances from the cloud to my desktop and back at any time. And so you're on the right track in my view and so are all these cloud providers.

As far as Amazon, getting support is important to me. Amazon wants $100/mo or $400/mo for support in addition to cloud charges.  That isn't billed hourly. It didn't seem so bad until comparing with other clouds.

Rackspace and LiquidWeb clouds include support and charge lower cloud prices than Amazon. Hard to beat that.

I use LiquidWeb for a VPS now and love, love, love their support so I prefered to try to stick with them.

And LiquidWeb is the better option in if you want a beefy instance and some bandwidth because they only offer solid machines with 1 or 2 Gig memory and such. Their bandwidth is only 15 cents/gig download.

Plus LiquidWeb will add managed support for your cloud instance if you run CentOs because it connects with their management tools to monitor whether your server is up and attempt to fix it.

But at Rackspace cloud you can choose even smaller instances of 256 mem and 10 gig disk for only $11 per month including support but bandwidth is a little higher at 22 cents per Gig.

Since the Redmine site needs very little bandwidth and few users starting out, we are starting with RackSpace. So charges are lower but then it's easy to quickly scale up as the number of users of our product grows.

Unfortunately, I'm now back in the stone ages of building the server package by package to get Redmine installed. And I'm stuck at the moment on my last step, configuring pure-ftpd to upload the Redmine railsapp from my local VM--of all things.

Otherwise, it has been rather straightforward to follow the Rackspace tutorials to add apache, mysql, ruby, thin, PostFix, etc.  All of that is done.  Still pre-built appliances are the cat's meow and definitely the future. So keep it up guys!!

Sincerely,

Wayne

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