[atlas] Atlas probe - virtual appliance?

On 18.06.2013, at 20:07 , Daniel Suchy <danny at danysek.cz> wrote:

> Hello,
> 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.
> 
> I think this may be interesting to consider.
> 
> With regards,
> Daniel
> 
> 

From https://atlas.ripe.net/about/faq/ :

Why did you choose a hardware solution instead of software?

With a pure software solution, distribution costs are low and the number of potential hosts is very large. However, there are several significant downsides to a pure software approach:

	• Host machines may not run continuously over long periods, which affects our ability to gather round-the-clock measurements.
	• Measurements can be influenced by sharing systems and network resources with other applications on the host computer.
	• It is often not possible to install software like this in a corporate or computer centre environment.
	• It is easier to tamper with the results. This is also why we chose not to release a software version in tandem with the hardware solution.
Because of these drawbacks, we opted to develop the RIPE Atlas probe as a stand-alone piece of hardware.