This years second edition of Cloud Conference in Kista starts on the 26:th of october. Cloud Conference is Swedens most comprehensive and independent forum for cost effective IT solutions. Just like last time it´s a conference covering The Cloud and it´s possible use and we will be there to show up our Cloud Computing service, City Cloud! all information about the conference can be found at: www.cloudconference.se (Swedish)

Free tickets
We have some free tickets to the conference (Value: 995-2995SEK depending on when you make your booking). First come, first served and registration is made to sales@citynetwork.se with:

• Name
• Company
• Adress
• Phonenumber
• E-mail adress

After registering to us you will be contacted by Conductive, the conference organizer, and receive your tickets. Last day for registration is the 30:th of september! Spread the word and please link to us, it is much appreciated.

We hope to see as many of you as possible on the 26:th of october at Cloud Conference.

Cloning of servers is a function that was first introduced back in Q1 2010. The cloning function has not been given the attention that it deserves until now.

So, imagine that you are in need of several servers with the same configuration, perhaps for loadbalancing. In previous releases of City Cloud you had to create the server itself, configure it and do it all over again until you had the amount of servers you needed. Well not any more, now all you have to do is to create one server, configure it and then clone it as many times as you wish.

After having created and configured a server, shut it down and press clone as shown in the image below.

It takes about 10 minutes for the image to be cloned and voilá! You have an exact copy of your previous server ready to go.

The clone is, as per definition, an exact copy of the server which it orininated from. Now it´s easier than ever to create backup servers, load balancing servers, clusters etc.

While in beta we have had great hopes of sticking very close to 100% up time in City Cloud. However yesterday (Sunday) we had our longest outage where some customers were out of service for as long as 10-11 hours. Completely unacceptable of course – in particular in a service were we want to set a new standard for up time. With this blog post we want to spend a few minutes giving more detail as to what happened.

To understand better, our cloud environment is built on multiple blade servers in the front which connect to a common storage pool via redundant switches and servers for performance. We have made multiple changes to how we connect to our storage since we started. This to find the ultimate balance and how we can grow in a sound way and get best performance.

Our problems started early Sunday morning just after 06:30 CET. An indication had come in earlier where a customer had expressed that their server was “slow” based on the load that they were seeing. We did investigate this and it happened to be that one blade had been very heavily loaded and we made sure a few VMs were moved to a different blade server with less load.

In a similar fashion data started moving slowly at 6:30 Sunday morning and by 7:30 a majority of the servers had come to a halt – or where responding so slow that it resembled being down. It was clear that the communication was clogged somewhere. A series of events had taken place where at the heart two faulty controllers where the issue. However time was spent on several areas before identifying the controllers.

With the issue identified – taking down the hundreds of servers took significant time due to the problem with how data flowed through to our storage systems. It was important to let them shut down properly to ensure data integrity – although it caused significant addition to down time.

All servers were up again at approximately 17:30 Sunday afternoon. However with knowledge of some disks reporting problems we chose to also take the system down at 05:00 this morning for about one hour to make adjustments in a number of disks – as a precaution.

We are monitoring the various controllers as well as disks that caused the trouble. We are also discussing how we will improve on this not happening again – despite existing redundancy.

While financial compensation does not recover lost up time – all paying customers will receive compensation as per our guarantees. You will see this in your next invoice where there will be a 50% deduction made for this month.

We hope this gave some insight – albeit at high level.

Thank you for being a City Cloud customer and thank you for you patience with this issue.

The first time we presented the CityMonitor back in April we still wrote in Swedish. Now that we have the holiday season and all, we thought that a presentation in English would be in place.

The CityMonitor is an app developed by one of our customers actually. Anders Wiredal, a developer and consultant in Jönköping, created this app in the beginning of 2010 just after the release of our API for the City Cloud Service. He submitted it to the App Store on the 22:nd of April. It was accepted and can now be downloaded directly to your iPhone.

This app gives you realtime monitoring of your virtual machines in City Cloud. You can also scale your VM´s, start, stop, pause, show the logg and view the details of your machines such as IP-number etc.

We want to point out the fact that Anders Wiredal doesn´t have any connection to City Network or City Cloud other than being a customer. We are very happy that he developed the app though, it certainly helps us in our everyday work and probably yours too.

Once again, Thank you Anders for this app and good luck with your future projects!

In this article we will show you how to set up a Mumble server on a Virtual Machine in City Cloud. If you need to have a quick tour of the City Cloud service, please watch the following video. We want to show you a quick, simple and most of all a cheap way of having your own Mumble server. In this guide we will use Ubuntu OS which has no licence fees.

Step 1 – Create an Ubuntu server in the City Cloud dashboard

Go to the App Center, find Ubuntu and click the plus sign.

Name your server, choose the hardware template and click create

When your server is installed and ready (takes about 15 min) it will show up under the “VM” tab.
 

Step 2 – Connect to your server, update the repository and install Mumble

As seen in the image below taken from the App Center, the standard login information is adminuser/CityCloud2 (You will have to change it when connecting to your server later on)

The IP-adress for your server is found by klicking on the “details” button on your Virtual Machine, under the “VM” tab.

Now that we have got the IP-adress and the login information, it´s time to connect to the server. We use Putty. Insert your IP-adress and click “open”.

Provide your login credentials and press Enter. At this stage, you will be asked to change your password.

NOW it´s time to install the Mumble server

Use these three commands to install the Mumble server
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:slicer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mumble

Congratulations, your Mumble server is installed and now comes the tricky part. How to setup your Mumble server

We hope that this guide was useful for those of you who are looking for a hosted Mumble server. The guide also applies if you are looking for a hosted Ventrilo server, War server or any other kind of gaming server.

We have an awesome service and the possibilities in the Cloud are huge so we thought that it was time to share some information on how you can use City Cloud for gaming.

City Cloud allows you to create small (or big) servers which you pay for by the hour. You only pay for the resources you use and the servers are created within 15 minutes. This means that you can create and start using a war server, Mumble server or a Vent Server very fast. The best thing about City Cloud though, is that you only pay for the resources you allocate – by the hour. You can also scale your server up and down as you wish. If you need more power, you just upgrade your server directly within the service. If you shut down a server, you stop paying for it. The allocated disc space and licence fees (if you use windows) are being charged even if the server is shut down.

When you sign up for City Cloud you receive an email with all the details on how to get started. Signing up is totally free. However, you can only run a server with the “small” harware template (1CPU, 512MB RAM) and the server shuts down every 6 hours. If you want to unlock your account for unlimited use, you start off by paying a small fee in advance. Your first invoice will be reduced by the same amount later on.

We include 500GB of data traffic per month with every server. If you use more we charge 0,05 EUR (5 Euro cents) per GB of traffic.

Gamers can use City Cloud and the Virtual Servers to install Mumble, Ventrilo, War-servers and a range of other software. Lets start off by showing you how to get started with City Cloud.

Join us next week for a complete guide on how to install a Mumble server on a Virtual Machine in City Cloud

We are working as fast as we can to deploy new and updated Operating Systems. During this week we have been working hard to make Ubuntu 10.04 64bit available in the App Center and now it´s ready!

There are a whole lot of news in the 10.04 version and if you want to read about all of them, please visit: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Server/TechSpecs/new

Our goal is to update all our existing Operating Systems during the summer. New ones are also in the roadmap and our customers first choice is clearly Free BSD which we will launch later in the summer.

We hope you enjoy our latest addition and as always – you can write us at support@citycloud.eu to suggest what else you would like in terms of operating systems.

At the beginning of last week we performed major upgrades to our City Cloud service. One week later we are happy to present a new Operating system in the App Center, Microsoft Windows 2008 R2.

This is the first of many new and/or upgraded Operating systems that we will launch over the next couple of weeks.

We are continuing with the low prices for our Windows applications. Windows Server R2 costs as little as 20 Euro (199 SEK) per month.

Thank you all for your feedback. We are also increasing the system disk to 50GB as Windows in general, and combined with log files, require more than our initial 20 GB. We will keep 20 GB on our Linux distributions.

Feel free to let us know what you would like to see be added to our app center and if there is a particular operating system you lack.

Read more about the news in Windows Server 2008 R2

Theese last weeks have been really exciting as we move towards a worlds class Cloud Computing service. We started off by upgrading the entire architecture and now have a faster and more reliable service. You can read more about the upgrade here: http://blog.mycitycloud.se/drift-i-molnet/upcoming-changes-in-the-city-cloud-service/

The upgrade enables us to start providing the latest OS relases and also implement a range of brand new ones. Our first priority is to have Windows 2008 R2 and Free BSD ready for you as soon as possible.

What the upgrade also means is that we are able to start providing third party applications. First up is op5 Cloud Monitor which will be available in the App Center as of NOW! You can choose to install a monitoring server just by selecting the op5 image in the App Center and have it up and running within 10 minutes. op5 can monitor both the servers that you have in City Cloud and other services outside our datacenter. op5 will offer the Cloud Monitor exclusively through City Cloud thus making it possible to buy monitoring on demand.

This is an exciting first step towards becoming the leading Cloud Computing service in Europe. op5 brings out the essence in Cloud Computing and shows the true meaning of how to run your applications in the cloud. Using City Cloud, you have your own server, running your own copy of a monitoring application and best of all, You are in charge how it´s being used.

So, If you are in need of monitoring and want to be in control of both cost and performance, check out City Cloud and the op5 Cloud Monitor. If you want to learn more about op5, visit www.op5.com and read more about their excellent services.

Here are some screenshots from the op5 Cloud monitor

We would like to thank all of our users for the feedback you have given us since the launch of City Cloud back in November 2009. We have listened to you and now it´s time for the biggest update in the history of City Cloud!

On Monday the 28th of June between 00:01 and 06:00 the Cloud Computing service, City Cloud, will go through some important changes in order to improve our service.

The changes are made in the architecture to improve stability and performance. The update will also improve other areas such as compatibility. New and updated Operating Systems will soon be available as images within the service.

What will be launched

• Performance and stability enhancements
  We are doing a total rework of the Storage subsystem providing storage space for all City Cloud customers. The new system will provide much better performance and with that comes better reliability. Also we switch from the Xen hypervisor to using KVM instead which will also improve performance.
• Compatibility
  The switch from Xen to KVM also means we’ll be able to provide a wider range of OS images. Immediately after the upgrade we will start upgrading OS versions (for example to Windows 2008 r2 and Ubuntu 10.04).
• New Operating Systems
  Also completely new images will be provided shortly after the upgrade. For example FreeBSD and NetBSD.
• User Interface upgrades
  Providing a number of useful features for customers including the ability to add and remove extra storage devices to existing VMs, improvements in the listing of running VMs in the UI, control of more advanced tunables for each VM, and a range of other improvements.

What´s been keeping us busy

• Migration to ZFS
  The new storage system is based on ZFS which provides lots of features that are useful in this environment. For example deduplication means that the available storage will be used more efficiently, block checksums makes detection and correction of silent data corruption possible and the I/O performance will also get a significant boost.
• Switch from Xen to KVM
  As mentioned above this will widen the range of Operating system images we’ll be able to provide. Also it will significantly improve network performance. The user interface, APIs and such will not be changed due to the switch so from a customer perspective everything will work as before, only better.
• Backup service
  We already have backups for disaster recovery, but are also working on a customer administered file backup system enabling users to install a small client in the VM and configure their backup needs and pay per megabyte. We will get back to you with more information on this.
• Firewall service
  Today customers requiring  firewalling of their services can use the built in firewall of the operating system of the VM. We are working on a more centrally administered firewall service for all City Cloud customers providing simple firewall configuration. We will get back to you with more information on this as well.