Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:57:00 GMT
Dell has released a whitepaper entitled “VMWare VMotion Performance on the Dell PowerEdge 1855 Blade Server”. Download it here.
The whitepaper addresses Windows live migration and the performance impact that users may see as a migration is in progress. Even though the virtual machines are quite small (512MB RAM) the performance numbers and total time for migration do seem quite impressive.
This paper doesn’t mean much for a Linux admin but it at least shows what may be possible.
Does vmotion work with Linux, does it work well and with stability? I have learned to not trust anything that a software vendor promises.
If anyone has used Linux and vmotion together in any large scale deployment I would be very interested to hear about it. I am planning on doing similar tests myself with Xen and Linux virtual machines, stay tuned.
Thanks to Alessandro Perilli for the news.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:27:00 GMT
Redhat employee Daniel Veillard has announced “Libvir the virtualization API”.
The goal seems to be creating a stable C API that might eventually be hypervisor agnostic (currently only the Xen hypervisor is supported).
Python bindings are being worked on, let’s hope for Ruby bindings soon.
See Libvir homepage for details.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 29 Dec 2005 01:49:00 GMT
Some nice prebuilt Debian kernels with VServer support have been made available at http://linux-vserver.derjohn.de/.
Combine this with the step by step guide to getting VServers going on 2.6 kernel (http://linux-vserver.org/Step-By-Step+Guide+2.6) and you should have your Debian unstable box VServered in no time.
As always, the Linux-VServers page is the place to go for further information.
Posted in Linux-VServer | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 23 Dec 2005 14:05:00 GMT
Kris Buytaert has an excellent article on automating Xen infrastructure using a number of open source tools such as SystemImager. See the article at
http://howto.x-tend.be/AutomatingVirtualMachineDeployment/.
This article should give you many things to think about.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:34:00 GMT
Xen 3.0 is available for general use but there are a few major shortcomings for a typical Linux administrator:
- patches that are necessary for Xen functionality are not available in the standard kernel
- there are no good high level tools available (not that we have any proof of at least)
I cannot address the first issue, I can only hope that Xensource and Redhat do a good job of reworking their patches and getting them into the mainline kernel.
The second issue, I have decided, I can do something about. After poking around in the Xen libraries and perhaps inhaling too much polluted Toronto air, I have decided I will write the high level tool that people need.
The project will be released under an open source license (undecided on which license so far) and it will be called GOXen. The GO portion of the name was chosen because the software will be mostly written while travelling on a GO Train between Toronto and Georgetown (Ontario, Canada).
The heavy lifting for interfacing with Xen is done already in the open source product. LGPL licensed libraries in C and python are available. The key component missing for a usable Xen environment is the high level interface suitable for multi-server use.
I will document my trials and tribulations on the GOXen website, as soon as useable code is available it will be released for public consumption.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 04:24:00 GMT
Ziff Davis author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote an opinion piece recently stating that Xen is not the next killer app. It is refreshing to see something other than an article which resembles a Xensource corporate press release.
Xen is a very powerful piece of software, it is a very useful and important piece of software but it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Xen appears to bring large performance improvements to the x86 virtualization game but the end-user experience isn’t significantly different with Xen than with other virtualization solutions (VMWare’s ESX for example).
Xen will gain steam through 2006 but until it is integrated with the mainline kernel (the kernel from kernel.org) it is likely to remain a small player.
If we see the Xen architecture integrated with mainline soon (we can always hope), then Xen deployments will grow like wildfire.
I believe Xen will remain a Linux/BSD/Solaris only solution for at least 2-3 years, if Windows proves to work well on VT-x capable hardware then Xen could eventually become a major player.
Yet another possibility is that Microsoft releases a Windows port to Xen and users can take advantage of paravirtualization even on Windows. A Windows port to earlier versions of Xen was mostly complete so I expect the job would be an easy enough. However, chances are good that Microsoft won’t want to touch an open source hypervisor.
If you really want to find the next killer app (open source or not) I think we have it, it’s Ruby on Rails.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:04:00 GMT
The Linux VServers project today announced availability of development branch 2.1.0. New features in this branch appear to be:
- Bind Mount Extensions (for ro—bind mounts)
- Copy on Write (CoW) link breaking
- I/O scheduler queue per context (CFQ)
- Quota Hashes (prereq. for per Context Quota)
- kernel thread protection/handling
- persistent/empty Context Support
- XID propagation (non persistent tagging)
- improved debug support
Release is in the usual place, start at Linux-VServer site for full details.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:08:00 GMT
Generally availability of VMWare Player was announced on December 12th.
The “player” is a proprietary product available as a free download.
Several flavors of virtual machines are supported:
- Microsoft Virtual Server
- Symantec LiveState Recovery disk format (not actually a virtual machine format)
- VMWare ESX
- VMWare GSX
- VMWare Workstation
All of the products listed above are commercial products which cost real money but the ability to use virtual machines created by these products at no charge (beyond the OS license, if applicable) is definitely a revolution on VMWare’s behalf.
Both 32 and 64 bit machines (host and guest) are supported. We wonder what a VM player having integrated Google search means???
Many prebuilt virtual images are available via the Virtual Machine Center.
This is bound to revolutionize the low-end virtualization market particularly for Windows users wanting to try Linux. We wonder will Microsoft be releasing a downloadable image of XP for VMWare Player soon? Might be a shrewd move …
See VMWare’s announcement for more details.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 15 Dec 2005 19:57:00 GMT
The OpenVZ project today announced updated releases of all their operating system templates, it appears to be mostly a bugfix release.
Currently downloadable templates exist for CentOS 4, Fedora Core 3 and Fedora Core 4.
See OpenVZ News page for full details.
Posted in OpenVZ / Virtuozzo | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:25:00 GMT
Linux-VServer stable release 2.01 was announced today. This was a bugfix release, see Linux-Vserver hompage for details.
Posted in Linux-VServer | no comments | no trackbacks
