Category: vCluster

vCluster is our scalable PHP cloud hosting product. These posts will cover topics such as development progress, new feature releases, design ideas and customer feedback.

8th April 2013 by in Cloud, Labs, LogPipe, Technology, vCluster

Advanced PHP error handling in the cloud

LogPipe is a PHP extension module that extends the default PHP error messages with additional information and allows you to pipe the logs to an external program or write them to a syslog facility.

When a user connects to a PHP website hosted on a cloud platform like vCluster, the response may come from different web servers running on different virtual and physical machines. This introduced the problem of needing to aggregate the PHP error logs from different cluster nodes and then split them up again based on the virtual host. Unfortunately the default PHP error message handler does not provide the information or ability to pipe the error logs to an external program, unlike the CustomLog directive in Apache does.

Read More…

22nd October 2012 by in vCluster

vCluster Development Update 3

Following on from vCluster update number 2 I have plenty more to share with you as we approach the private beta stage of vCluster development.

Rapid Deployment

An important part of the vCluster stack is the ability to deploy the entire virtual environment very quickly and with as little manual involvement as possible. This is not only part of our long term plan to offer availability zones, but also makes us able to rapidly repsond as resource and availability requirements change.

Read More…

4th September 2012 by in vCluster

vCluster Development Update 2

As I said in my previous vCluster update post earlier this month, I want to publish regular updates as we approach the launch of vCluster version 2. So what have we been working on over the last few weeks, and what have we achieved?

Database Migrations

As existing customers will have seen, we have carried out three maintenance windows over the last couple of weeks. These windows were to migrate and virtualise our existing production database servers to new hardware, and to perform a round of software updates on the new guests.

Read More…

7th August 2012 by in vCluster

vCluster Development Update

As followers of CatN will know we have been in beta for a long time, this last beta stage has lasted for about a year. Technically we came out of beta for a couple of months and unfortunately went back to beta again when we found some underlying technology issues.

I have received a lot of emails and comments recently from beta testers and interested parties asking when we are going to be coming out of beta and opening up the product for new accounts again. I wanted to answer those questions with a development update so everyone can understand where we are up to and what tasks remain before we can launch.

Read More…

15th June 2012 by in Labs, TCPWeblog, vCluster

TCPWebLog – Collecting and Aggregating Web Logs on the Cloud

TCPWebLog is a Free Open Source Software system to collect and aggregate Web-type logs (i.e. Apache, Varnish, PHP, FTP …) from multiple GNU/Linux computers running on a Cloud.

When a user connects to a Website hosted at CatN, the response may come from different Web servers running on different virtual and physical machines. This first introduced the problem of needing to aggregate the logs from multiple cluster nodes to a central log server, and then split them up again based on the virtual host. Here at CatN, for each virtual host we used to write on a central place distinct log files for Apache Access log, Apache Error Log, Varnish, etc. These files are then rotated and processed using other software tools which required a significant administrative overhead.

Read More…

15th June 2012 by in Labs, TCPWeblog, vCluster

How to create TCPWebLog RPM packages for Enterprise Linux

This is a short hands-on tutorial on creating TCPWebLog RPM packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL).

TCPWebLog is a Free Open Source Software system designed to collect and aggregate Web logs (i.e. Apache and Varnish) from multiple GNU/Linux computers running on a Cloud. For more information please read the blog post: TCPWebLog – Collecting and Aggregating Web Logs on the Cloud.

Read More…

12th June 2012 by in Government, vCluster

Making sales with G-Cloud

I’m happy to announce that we have made our first sales to UK central government through the G-Cloud programme. This success has come from over a year of work attempting to break into the central government hosting market.

Regular readers of the blog will know about our experiences with various projects such as the Innovation Launchpad. Take a look at some of the links in the search results below if you wish to familiarise yourself.

Read More…

16th May 2012 by in Products, vCluster

vCluster package structure for version 2

With the launch of CatN vCluster version 2 nearing, I will be following on from the previous posts introducing the new version and the vCluster timeline to explain one of the major changes we will be introducing. Previously we offered packages with a tiered pricing model, allowing you to select one of three pre-defined vClusters. After previewing an early alpha version at WordCamp last year as well as the feedback received from users of old version, we have dropped this rigid pricing structure in favour of a more flexible and customisable option.

When you purchase a vCluster in version 2, you will be faced with a single vCluster package option with a base subscription price of £5.00 per month. The package itself contains two products, one vCluster and a Shared Database, which are managed independently within the Control Panel and have their own add-ons and overage costs applied despite being part of the same package.

Read More…

11th May 2012 by in Technology, vCluster

Openindiana vs Nexentastor vs FreeNAS

In my previous post I gave a (very) high level overview of ZFS and why I think it is a solid foundation for vCluster. What I did not say though, was why we chose OpenIndiana over the other operating systems offering ZFS.

CatN EnterpriseBespoke ZFS powered Enterprise storage solutions created by CatN cloud hosting experts.Find out more

Just before Sun was bought by Oracle, Solaris came in 2 flavours. Solaris and Opensolaris. As the name suggests, OpenSolaris was open source and Solaris was the closed source variant. OpenSolaris was to become proper Solaris some day and development was to be made in the open. Because OpenSolaris was opensource, many different projects were born out of it. Nexetnta made a storage appliance. Belenix was a generic desktop with KDE. StormOS was a simple desktop with Xfce. FreeBSD which had lost it’s edge to Linux over the years, took the chance and ported ZFS with great success. Joyent based their cloud 100% on Opensolaris. They even offer their version, called SmartOS, free to download and use in production.
Alas, Sun was bought by Oracle, Oracle closed the Solaris source code and open development of OpenSolaris ended.

Read More…

11th May 2012 by in Technology, vCluster

An introduction to ZFS

One major part of the new vCluster release is storage. As you may know, vCluster uses NFS extensively, so we want to make sure that it works reliably. Reliability means that the data stored is always available, meaning that the server should be able to handle the load and be stable, but also that the data is written correctly and consistently on disk. We also need some kind of replication for backups and maybe fail over.

There are lots of systems we could use to serve NFS. There is Linux of course, FreeBSD, OpenIndiana and a slew of commercial solutions from companies like EMC, NetAPP, HP, Dell etc. Looking around and testing various solutions we decided that Openindiana is the best solution for our needs. The main reason is ZFS.

Some background

ZFS is a filesystem originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It was released in late 2005 in the development builds of Solaris. When it was released it obliterated anything freely available at the time. It had features that where not even in the radar of other filesystems. Read More…

← Older posts