My first 2 Cents ..

Enough theory, let's do something handson today. Let's setup a Box for preparing the Cloud Stack.. I carefully picked-up the box by running "egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo" command. Because I would like to have a box that has a hypervisor support and can yield optimized results for the instances to run in the Cloud. I took a box with AMD processor and 8GB RAM , 320GB HD.. After thinking twice, I took Centos5.3 64bit OS to install. I took 64bit as this provides the best & versatile support to create both 32 & 64 bit instances on the Cloud.
During installation I chose All the default options, except Selinux & Firewall Off. Since I'm within Corp-Net, I dont want doubly protected!!
Also I created some LVG(logical-vol group) around 50GB, so that I can use it for RAW image creation later.. Hope you appreciate that using LVM image creation is pretty flexible..

This point, letmm explain a bit about what I'm looking for:

If you are familiar with the conventional Grid Computing which unifies the processing power of the multiple machines as surface to collimated usage; inturn you should also appreciate that people will be looking for some ROI out-of-it.. And, that is fulfilled by the Utility Computing..
Cloud Computing goes one step ahead to warp them and present in a SAAS enabled model. Apart from grid & cluster; cloud added a fine grained control as middleware to the architecure. This works a brain for the Cloud building blocks. Typically Client Apps on Cloud use the Middleware to position themselves on the Cloud..

Cloud usage has two facet; the transient Cloud Apps and persistent Cloud Data (used by Apps).. And you also knew, to achieve Cloud Data persistency and failover always includes the cost of redundancy.
There're various interface softwares to provision and govern Cloud & its resources; mostly recalling & acknowledge EC2 as consumable.

Next post I will blog more about the Lifecycle of Cloud Apps and its operational Data..
Till then, stay tuned -: )