Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sat, 03 Mar 2007 05:38:00 GMT
This week Red Hat made available a BETA of their 5th update to RHEL 4 (we would call it RHEL 4.5).
Most noteable in this release is that Red Hat now includes a kernel that can run paravirtualized on top of Xen.
This will mean that Red Hat shops can jump on paravirtualized Xen virtual machines with relative ease, and quite soon. RHEL 5 can be used for the base of the Xen virtualization solution but all of those virtual machines that your developers use can stick with the tried and true RHEL 4.
Thanks to internetnews.com for the news. See their article for more details.
Posted in Xen, Redhat / Fedora | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Wed, 28 Feb 2007 02:52:00 GMT
For those who missed it (like me) Enomalism 0.6.3 was released on Feb 22nd. Additions are:
- HVM support
- real SSH serial terminal
- VNC virtual desktop (alpha)
- appliance repository (alpha)
- 5x faster provisioning
- better / smarter installer
- lower processor usage
- better xen config scripts
- networking fixes
Go check it out on the sourceforge page or at http://www.enomalism.com/.
Posted in Xen, Enomalism | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:05:00 GMT
Ulrich Drepper is lead maintainer of the Linux C library (GNU libc), works for Red Hat and is well known in Linux circles – basically he is one smart cookie.
Last night he has posted a great article entitled Xensource/VMWare start sandbagging.
The article discusses the fact that Linux already has great support for NUMA, SMP, scheduling, hardware drivers, etc. My favorite “As for better scheduling with a hypervisor: that can only be a joke.”.
We can expect the marketing machines to crank out reams of verbage in the next 6 months but I trust Mr. Drepper more than I would trust anything I see coming from the corporate presses.
Linux as the hypervisor just makes sense. Jeff Dike has been pushing the idea for years with UML and UML continues to move forward.
The only slight beef (or question) I have with KVM is why has it diverged from QEMU? More specifically KVM relies on QEMU for it’s device emulation but it also requires hardware virtualization. Now that QEMU’s kernel accelerator is open source could KVM and QEMU not be merged back together to give us one high performing solution that would support both VT and non-VT capable hardware?
Posted in Xen, XenSource, QEMU, VMware, KVM | 2 comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:45:00 GMT
news.com has a very good article about KVM. It discusses plans of some of the major Linux distributors as well as some of the social issues around why KVM is rapidly gaining acceptance while Xen is still fighting for it (within the kernel community).
See KVM steals virtualization spotlight. for full story.
Posted in Xen, KVM | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:46:00 GMT
With the just announced open sourcing of the QEMU accelerator it would be interesting to have some idea of the performance differences between QEMU, QEMU + accelerator and KVM.
It turns out that someone has already done the hard work for us. See http://linux.inet.hr/ article Finally user-friendly virtualization for Linux.
KVM and QEMU with it’s accelerator both appear to be capable of utilizing CPU and memory at close to native speeds (perhaps 80%). Definitely worth another look on the laptop.
Posted in QEMU, KVM | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:39:00 GMT
Today a new version of the QEMU accelerator was released. There are some new features but the most noticeable change is that the module is now open source (GPL version 2). See announcement on the QEMU News page.
This move is not too surprising considering that there are now so many open source virtualization solutions for Linux. Fabrice has done a great favour to so many projects – Win4lin, KVM, Virtualbox and Xen all use QEMU in some form – let’s hope he can continue to hack on QEMU and be rewarded for it.
Besides the license change another noteable feature of the updated code is full x86_64 virtualization support.
With the relatively high performance CPU emulation provided by KQEMU I wonder if we might not see Xen patched eventually to provide full virtualization support without VT extensions?
Posted in QEMU | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:08:00 GMT
Coinciding with superbowl Sunday is the release of kernel 2.6.20. From Linus’ announcement:
As ICD head analyst Walter Dickweed put it: “Releasing a new kernel on
Superbowl Sunday means that the important ‘pasty white nerd’
constituency finally has something to do while the rest of the country
sits comatose in front of their 65” plasma screens”.
The big features for 2.6.20 (at least for virtualization nerds) are paravirtualization support (x86) and KVM support (x86 and x86_64).
Posted in Kernel, KVM, Paravirtualization | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:42:00 GMT
We briefly mentioned lhype back in November (see lhype hypervisor). Since November the project would appear to have been renamed to lguest.
LWN recently published An introduction to lguest, it’s worth a read if these things interest you.
Update: lguest homepage is at http://lguest.ozlabs.org/.
Posted in Kernel, Paravirtualization, lguest | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 21 Jan 2007 04:18:00 GMT
QEMU has to be the king of open source virtualization:
- Xen uses QEMU for device emulation in non-paravirtualized operating systems (HVM)
- KVM uses QEMU, same reason as Xen
- finally the recently open sourced VirtualBox also uses QEMU
Qemu currently does not support any migration capability natively athough Qumranet has added “dead migration” capability to their patched version.
Anthony states that he doesn’t like the approach KVM has taken to migration and goes further to say:
The biggest problem I have with KVM and Xen’s migration is that it uses open TCP ports. This is just such a bad idea.
It is easy to agree with this statement.
Anthony has designed a migration system for QEMU that let’s the user define how the migration happens (for example an encrypted and securely authenticated SSH channel).
Here’s hoping that ideas like this start to filter into Xen down the road, depending on a “private” management network for security isn’t the best option for sure.
Anthony’s original post can be read on his blog here and he includes links to the QEMU patches.
Posted in QEMU | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 21 Jan 2007 03:53:00 GMT
Today Enomaly announced version 0.6 of their Enomalism Virtualized Management Console for Xen.
Some of the features that caught my eye:
- native LDAP support to provide centralized authentication for entire virtual environment
- ability to resize partitions on virtual machines using Logical Volume Manager [LVM]
- cleaned up AJAX interface
- improved API and web services support for true service oriented architecture
- Multi-server support for upcoming Enomalism commercial release (Feb 07).
- Windows support
- open architecture that integrates with Plesk, EC2, Ensim and others
Full press release can be viwed at http://enomalism.com/Pressroom.136+M597503d8a57.0.html.
The code is licensed under the LGPL license which is open source but the leading “L” in LGPL will allow commercial applications to be built on top of the enomalism base.
Also interesting is Enomaly’s ElasticLive service. This is a mashup of Amazon’s EC2 and Virtual Workspaces. I expect we may start seeing a lot more of these services built around EC2, let’s hope Amazon gets out of BETA soon.
Posted in Enomalism | no comments
