On 6/18/13 20:07 , Daniel Suchy wrote:
maybe should be interesting providing RIPE Atlas probe as an virtual appliance (VMWare, XEN, VirtualBox etc). Handling will be much easier and deployment cheaper (as no extra hardware will be required to run new probe).
Virtual apliance should be still managed by RIPE NCC (like current hardware probes) in terms of upgrades and so on.
One thing to keep in mind is that, apart from the obvious issues with getting reliable timings out of a virtual machine, this proposal may have significant development and operational costs. These costs may be high enough to offset the benefits of not having to buy new hardware. Setting up Atlas on a VM may easily be more expensive than a probe. Developing Atlas 'firmware' for common VMs may also cost enough that in the end there aren't any savings.