How to use Elastic Drive VMWare virtual appliance

Abstract: This article describes installation of Elastic Drive application as VMWare virtual appliance.

VMWARE PLAYER OR SERVER

- download virtual appliance from following link:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/vmware_appliances/khaz_VMWare_Debian_ElasticDrive_Public.rar
- unpack it to your Virtual Machines directory.
- File > Open > Browse > path to your dir > filename.vmx
- in Debian terminal, when you see command prompt, use following credentials: username khaz / password khaz / superuser khazrocks99

VMWARE APPLIANCE CONFIGURATION

- change root passwd, delete user khaz
- setup environment up to your taste, if you want

CONFIGURING APPLICATION

- edit /etc/elasticdrive.ini
- add credentials in [drives] section (after 's3://S3ACCESSKEY:S3SECRETKEY')
- create bucket name (maybe instance id + number)
- specify disk size by setting '&blocks=' (default setting of 65536 blocks gives you 268Mb)

RUNNING APPLICATION

- /etc/init.d/elasticdrive_khaz start
- application should automatically startup on reboot

USING YOUR NEW FILESYSTEM

Now you can use your filesystem, that is persistent to Amazon Simple Storage (S3).
Try copy some files to /data/s3, or 'umount /fuse2/ed0' (if you have lots of data, this would require more time, well, up to 30 minutes), 'ls -al /data/s3' should show nothing when unmounted, reboot, 'ls -al /data/s3'.

EVACUATION OF DATA FROM VMWARE APPLIANCE

This basically covers unmounting your current filesystem and transferring it's state to external persistence source.
Initially I tested creation of 24Gb, placing different size files and unmounting. First umount took about 20 minutes or so, all subsequent worked in a less than minute.