The 2016 DI2E Plugfest planning is gearing up! Join R2AD and many other industry partners as we team together to develop needed applications and services to improve interoperability through standards, cooperation, and hard work!

R2AD plans to code and integrate using the Intelligence Community Identifier (IC-ID) specification, One of our focus items this year. 

Shink your Linux VM using UNIX and VMware commands

There are many reasons why you would want to shrink the overall size of your VM.  Here are a few: Conserve Disk Space (the final frontier); Fit the VM on a CD or a DVD; reduce time to transmit the VM over the network; reduce overall backup time.
This entry provides a summary of a basic technique that we use.  I'm sure this is documented elsewhere, however sometimes unique perspectives can be illuminating.

Open two terminal windows and use sudo or become root.  In one terminal, issue the dd command shown in the image below to create a huge file in /tmp to fill up the disk space with zeros. Zeros are highly compressible.  You can repeat the command or change the arguments, depending on the size of the volume.

• dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/full bs=100M count=500

While that is running, check the progress using the df command in the other terminal window. When the disk is full, stop the dump command (ctrl-c) and then remove the huge temporary files and then shutdown your system. 

Next, run the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe utility to decompress and shrink your virtual disk volume.  So first use the -d option, passing in the name of the VMDK file, and when that is completed, run again with the -k option.  In our case, the resultant OVA file went down from 17GB to 1.3GB.  Cool Bytes.
 

(Windows Example is referenced below)

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware>"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe"
VMware Virtual Disk Manager - build 1895310.
Usage: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe OPTIONS |
Offline disk manipulation utility
  Operations, only one may be specified at a time:
     -d                   : defragment the specified virtual disk. Only
                            local virtual disks may be defragmented.
     -k                   : shrink the specified virtual disk. Only local
                            virtual disks may be shrunk.
   

R2AD attending DoDIIS Worldwide 2015

DoDIIS WorldWide 2015...
R2AD is supporting ONI at DoDIIS WorldWide 2015!  Stop by the JDISS booth (#232) to see great cloud related demonstrations.    R2AD has been busy migrating modern applications such as FOM and TMSWeb as new Intelligence Mission Applications (IMAs) into the JDISS portfolio. Learn more at the DoDIIS Worldwide.

OGF-43 and GENI Engineering Conference 22...

R2AD is attending and participating in the Open Grid Forum 43 (OGF-43), the GENI Engineering Conference 22 and US Ignite Application Summit.  It is hosted by the George Washington University, March 23-26, 2015.
GENI Engineering Conferences (GEC) are regular open working meetings where researchers, developers, industrial and international partners and the GENI Project Office meet to advance infrastructure planning and prototyping for the GENI project. The GEC focuses on how to design and build a suite of infrastructure that can best inspire and support creative research. The conference is open to all.
R2AD is a active member of the Open Grid Forum. 
If you're interested in future cloud and computer networking, check out the 22nd geni conference agenda!