Adopt a ZENBU

The ZENBU system is designed for users to work with their data and with their collaborators. Although the convenience of using the online public zenbu http://fantom.gsc.riken.jp/zenbu has many advantages, we understand that some users will want to install a local copy of ZENBU.

ZENBU is available via both open source code and as a fully functional virtual machine.

ZENBU source code
The ZENBU source-code is available on source-forge https://sourceforge.net/projects/zenbu

The full installation instructions are describe in our Installation Guide section of the wiki

ZENBU virtual machine
The ZENBU virtual machine is built using the free VirtualBox virtual machine server https://www.virtualbox.org/ and the Debian7 linux operating system http://www.debian.org/. The virtual machine ZENBU provides a complete system but without data. Users can use any harddrive for data outside of the virtual environment using the virtual-box shared folder feature. This enables a fully functional ZENBU with user-login, data-upload, data-sharing, and local collaboration. The ZENBU-vm runs as if it were a server on the network and thus allows users to access it using the web browsers on their desktop/laptop machines on their local network.

Current specifications of the ZENBU-vm


 * Debian7 linux operating system
 * ZENBU 2.8.0 installed and running
 * virtual machine image is 8GB in size
 * runs very well on a laptop as a personal-zenbu or as a multi-user server
 * use external zenbu_data folder for data/caches and thus no limits to data loading
 * based on debian 6 and using the free virtualbox virtual-machine using an 8GB virtual root harddrive
 * users can use their web browser of choice on your laptop/desktop. No need to use the web browser inside the virtual machine.
 * if virtual-machine is running on a network, then other users can access the virtual machine from their laptops
 * data is mounted via 'shared folder' zenbu_data which means is uses a directory outside the virtual-machine. This means the data directory can be whatever size of the external harddrives on the laptop/server. On a laptop this shared-folder could be several 100GB in size, or an external USB harddive of several TBs. But if the ZENBU-vm is running on a vm-server, the shared_folder can just as easily be a 20TB network-attached-storage device. This is where all user-uploads and caches go. no limits to how much data you can load into the virtual machine. same as a real server install. will not be limited by the 8GB root drive of the virtual machine.
 * internal mysql5 server for user, configs, sessions (not data nor cache). But possible to reconfigure using an external mysql-server if someone wants install this VM on a server.

Please contact severin@gsc.riken.jp if you are interested in installing this virtual machine.