Calsoft Blog

Now that you know what a container is, let me try and explain what a Docker container is. It is like a framework which provides easy "knobs" to provide a similar isolated environment as Type 1/2 Hypervisors but without the "layers". It allows easier maintenance of such "containers" with the wrappers which is called as Docker containers. There are other containers like LXC, Open-VZ. However there are claims that the Docker interface is more user friendly than others.   Why everyone loves Docker?   Hypervisors like Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, ESX etc are all based on emulating virtual hardware. That means hypervisors are heavy in system requirements. Containers, however, use shared operating systems. That means they are much more efficient than hypervisors in system resource terms. Instead of virtualizing hardware, containers rest on top of a single Linux instance. This means you can leave behind the useless 99.9% VM junk, leaving you with a small, application ...

Once upon a time there was a country with lot of houses. But there was an anomaly with all the houses, every time a person went and stayed in it, it sinked a little in to the ground. So a great visionary from that country said that at this speed it can only allow 10000 times for a person to come and stay in it, irrespective of the amount of time a person spends in that house. The time duration for the stay in the house could range from a jiffy to infinity.  Also the designer who designed this was not sane enough, and he designed the houses in such a way that a single house was not directly accessible, so whenever the country requires a particular person’s service, an entire colony had to be called, out of which only the person whose services are required is summoned, the remaining people were told to return to their respective houses.  This particular way of calling a person lead to discomfort for all the neighboring people, also it increased the frequencies of coming and s...

Today Docker is becoming highly popular buzzword in the field of Virtualization and Cloud computing. Today there are so many businesses that are already moving their production application from virtual machines environment to Docker, In addition there are several banks who have already shifted their beta Docker deployments to fully production deployments.   What is Docker? As the Dockers says, Docker is, Build, Ship and Run, Any App, Anywhere! In layman's terms, running an application with Docker is like running an application in its own little bubble. This means that application can run in isolation, so if it breaks or goes down, it doesn't affect anything else. Virtual Machines have a similar use. So with a Virtual Machine you run an operating system on top of the base operating system or a bare metal Hypervisor. So if the VM breaks (or an application running on the VM breaks), the base system is isolated from this, and can stay up. How containers differ from VMs i...

Those of you who have been kind enough to follow Calsoft may know of the wonderful blog our folks over in pre-sales and marketing put out on a regular basis. The content is of a uniformly high quality and focused on the technology. Despite that there have been regular calls from my marketing team as well as from others I meet to start a blog of my own. I have resisted – only partly because I was not really sure of what fresh perspective I could bring to the activity. In recent times though, it’s become quite apparent that the technology has a business side that is perhaps just as important. Now that this “fresh perspective” has presented itself I guess I have no choice but to fall in line with my Marketing team’s gentle prodding so here goes. In this, hopefully regular, series of posts I will try to focus on the area of overlap between the business and technology issues that our customers in the Storage, Virtualization, Cloud and Networking product space and their end use...

There are many more ways automation can greatly affect functionality of virtual network like performance testing, network auditing etc. So far we have discussed about advantages of automation on different scenarios. This discussion does not end without really knowing the various methods of automation which can help us to decide the automation framework to be chosen for NFV. Different methods of automation are - API based automation CLI based automation (command and scripting) Automation using existing tool / framework API based automation is most popular technique in the recent days. Programming with APIs from different vendors leverages the power of scripting languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby etc. Here is a list of few popular APIs available for NFV automation. CLI automation is nevertheless another good way of automation. It gets powered by various types of shell commands and scripts. Here is the list of most popular CLI options for automation for different virtualiza...