Sim-onDemand: OpenSim on EC2
November 30, 2008 6:11 pmVirtual Land is always there, even if you can’t login to reach it. Regardless if you’re using it or your customers are. Regardless if you’re on a two-month break from Second Life or not. And you’re not likely to ‘get rid of it’, as Linden Lab does not offer you the ability to save the current state to put it back somewhere in the future when you’ll need it again. Of course, there are programs that let you take a ‘backup’ of an entire sim, but most of the time full perm on all objects is needed, and what about the scripts and interactive objects you’ve spend that much time on? So you keep paying your land tier, because you know it will be pain if you have to recreate all.
Balaji Sowmyanarayan and Venkatraman offer you a way to by-pass this, at least, if you wish to go ‘OpenSim‘. Their solution was baptised ‘Sim-onDemand’, and exists of OpenSim servers running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. “It is like using an auditorium in real life. You book it and use it only occasionally.” I have not tried this yet, and although they claim to be aiming their service at non-tekkies, I had to re-read the ‘about’ section a few times. This is what I understood:
- You will be billed according to Amazon’s EC2 pricing, with in addition a monthly fee of 40 cents.
- When not using your sim, it’s in “pauze”. Taking it out of pauze, your saved date will still be there: “The Sim-OnDemand saves the data in AWS’s Elastic Block Store (EBS). This ensures that the data persists across the runs.
- Presently only standalone mode is supported. Although they are willing to look into running multiple connected regions and connecting to a grid if the users ask for it.
- You need at least some SSH knowledge.
Balaji Sowmyarnarayan writes: “Sim-OnDemand in its present form is just a proof of the concept. It is a way to validate if there is enough interest in running OpenSimulator on EC2 on an On-Demand basis. Few more features are essential to make it useful. Here is my take on the list: User Management, Multiple regions, Grid Mode, Ability to attach to to public Sims, Previewing the latest OpenSim software - hot off the source code repository, Ability to run custom applications, Automatic scaling with load, regions, number of users logged in, Integration of OpenSim forge community contributions.”
More information at the Sim-onDemand website, Getsatisfaction.com and Mr Balaji’s blog.
As I am to much of a ‘non-tekkie’ to test this, did anybody do so already? What are your findings? And can you think of any ‘use case scenarios’ for Sim-onDemand?
Tags: cloud computing, EC2, open sim, sim onDemand, SLinovation
8 Responses to “Sim-onDemand: OpenSim on EC2”
Hey Vint,
Thanks for the very detailed coverage of Sim-OnDemand here. I’m indeed motivated to make the next version available. Thanks for the feedbacks( like: ‘I had to re-read the ‘about’ section a few times’)
More than the technical part, getting the communication right is an interesting challenge. Coverage and feedback like yours are very valuable.
I’ll keep you posted as I develop Sim-OnDemnad.
-Balaji S.
Chennai, India.
No problem, I find it interesting, and hope some of my readers are actually interested/willing to test/testing this, so I can learn a bit more. :D
As for the communication:
* Info is shattered over your blog, the website & getsatisfaction, would be great to gather that all on your blog also? (or on the getsatisfation webpage.)
* On your blog, clicking the ‘Sim-onDemand’ tag on your blog entries, returns 0 entries. Which is pretty disappointed, as I wanted an easy way to see all things you wrote about Sim-onDemand on my quest for info.
* Probably you have some stuff up on twitter also, so doing a ‘everything I twitter about Sim-onDamand gets a weekly summary on the blog’ might be interesting too.
A few ‘bullet point lists’ on the website might help also:
* What are the system & user requirements (SSH knowledge, … )
* What can I do with the sim I set up? (can I let other people visit my sim, what scripts will it run, … )
* What can’t I do with he sim I set up (yet)? (connect to another grid, … )
* What are we working on.
* List of people that are already testing/using. (So people who wish to know more can also test those.)
* Use cases. (Except for a virtual meeting room & data visualisation. ;))
Nice service.
We at TalentRaspel virtual worlds Ltd. already offer a similar service for the european market. It consists of using a standalone home sim “Sim-O-Box” to offline edit your content, upload it to our content archive (storage, buy, sell) and put it live by using on-demand resources from our TalentRaspel Grid (run your sims, present you work for competitive rating by others). You can even exchange content, regions, assets and inventory with Second Life and OpenSimulator based grids, as long as the media is your property.
If interested just drop us a mail at info@talentraspel.de or visit our website at http://www.talentraspel-mmokit.de/portal/.
Greetings from the real world,
Kai Ludwig
Director
TalentRaspel virtual worlds Ltd.
http://www.talentraspel.de
Interesting…
The TalentRaspel Sim-O-Box HE (HomeEdition) is free of charge and now available for alpha testing. It consists of a bootable ISO image that can be written to a CD and used to start a PC as dedicated OpenSimulator server and enable it for connections from other computers running the standard Second Life viewer as 3D client software. Alternatively the TalentRaspel Sim-O-Box HE can be started within a virtualization package provided on the same CD and run on Windows, Linux, OS X, using the server computer for running the 3D client software too.
looks interesting have nearly set it up — need more newbie directions eg windows how do you link login to short cut and can you use on OSX
[…] recently sim-on-demand launched, and now during the Valentine days, they are doing a damn great promo […]
>You can even exchange content, regions, assets and inventory with Second Life and OpenSimulator based grids, as long as the media is your property.
Er…Have the creators of these items given permission to have their creations ported to other grids, copied, put on standalone sims or linked into other grids?
What is there to do by yourself on a stand-alone sim? At least people into cybersex in Second Life can find somebody *else* to masturbate with.
Somebody farted ???
Care to comment?