Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:00:00 GMT
Xensource announced availability of XenEnterprise 3.1 beta and “paid pilot” programs on November 6th. The release is based on the updated Xen 3.0.3.
Major touted features are:
- Packaged & Supported Xen Virtualization
- Easy Installation & GUI Interface
- Blazing Fast Performance for both * Windows & Linux Guests
- Powerful Management Console
- Affordable Annual and Perpetual Licensing Available
- 24/7 Support
See full press release at http://www.xensource.com/news/pr110606xe.html.
Posted in Xen, XenSource | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:31:00 GMT
Yesterday Red Hat offered a press release regarding virtualization in RHEL 5. Red Hat says:
“Customers care about open interoperability and certification for running joint Red Hat and VMware environments,” said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat. “With this relationship, the two virtualization platforms that Red Hat Enterprise Linux will support are the VMware platform and the Red Hat Integrated Virtualization platform that will be available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The wide adoption of open source is a result of the commitment to interoperability. Support for our joint customers is just one more example of the efficacy of true open source development.”
Red Hat Integrated Virtualization platform means Xen of course, combined with Red Hat’s libvirt and virtualization manager.
The release further states that “Red Hat has already certified VMware Infrastructure as both a certified software application and a certified virtual hardware platform for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”.
See full press release at http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/vmware.html.
Posted in Xen, Redhat / Fedora, VMware | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 07 Nov 2006 03:29:00 GMT
Today the Linux-VServer project announced a new development release. Release 2.1.1 includes these major feature additions:
- Per CPU Fair/Hard Scheduler
- Per Context System Time
- Dentry Accounting and Limits
- Lock Accounting and Limits
- Slab and Page Fault Accounting
- Context Privacy (Admin)
- Context Locking (reactivated)
- Context Capability Masking
- Full JFS Filesystem Support
- Full OCFS2 Filesystem Support
Announcement is at http://linux-vserver.org/Announcements/20061106. The patch applies to stable kernel 2.6.18.2.
Posted in Containers, Linux-VServer | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 29 Oct 2006 19:19:00 GMT
10 days ago YAVM (yet another virtual machine) came to light.
Avi Kivity posted to linux-kernel presenting the “Kernel-based Virtual Machine”. The work is “a device driver and userspace component for Linux that utilizes hardware virtualization extensions such as Intel’s VT to create virtual machines running on a Linux host.”
This work sounds very interesting and is apparently already capable of running full virtual machines (running Linux and Windows is mentioned).
Here is Avi’s full introduction on linux-kernel:
The following patchset adds a driver for Intel’s hardware virtualization extensions to the x86 architecture. The driver adds a character device (/dev/kvm) that exposes the virtualization capabilities to userspace. Using this driver, a process can run a virtual machine (a “guest”) in a fully virtualized PC containing its own virtual hard disks, network adapters, and display.
Using this driver, one can start multiple virtual machines on a host.
Each virtual machine is a process on the host; a virtual cpu is a thread in that process. kill(1), nice(1), top(1) work as expected.
In effect, the driver adds a third execution mode to the existing two: we now have kernel mode, user mode, and guest mode. Guest mode has its own address space mapping guest physical memory (which is accessible to user mode by mmap()ing /dev/kvm). Guest mode has no access to any I/O devices; any such access is intercepted and directed to user mode for emulation.
The driver supports i386 and x86_64 hosts and guests. All combinations
are allowed except x86_64 guest on i386 host. For i386 guests and hosts, both pae and non-pae paging modes are supported.
SMP hosts and UP guests are supported. At the moment only Intel hardware is supported, but AMD virtualization support is being worked on.
Performance currently is non-stellar due to the naive implementation of the mmu virtualization, which throws away most of the shadow page table entries every context switch. We plan to address this in two ways:
- cache shadow page tables across tlv flushes
- wait until AMD and Intel release processors with nested page tables
Currently a virtual desktop is responsive but consumes a lot of CPU.
Under Windows I tried playing pinball and watching a few flash movies;
with a recent CPU one can hardly feel the virtualization. Linux/X is slower, probably due to X being in a separate process.
In addition to the driver, you need a slightly modified qemu to provide I/O device emulation and the BIOS.
Caveats:
- The Windows install currently bluescreens due to a problem with the virtual APIC. We are working on a fix. A temporary workaround is to use an existing image or install through qemu
- Windows 64-bit does not work. That’s also true for qemu, so it’s probably a problem with the device model.
Eventually a sourceforge project page is likely to appear at http://kvm.sourceforge.net/.
Posted in KVM | 1 comment
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:44:00 GMT
Since I just started a new contract a few weeks ago, I thought it was time to resurrect my Xen on laptop efforts. As I mentioned before (here) my laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6400, and there are a few issues with it:
- no open source driver video driver integrated with X.org and kernel due to ATI being scared of open source
- on-board network uses the Broadcom b44 driver which has (or at least had) issues when loaded under Xen
I’m no graphics buff so the first issue isn’t a big one for me (1024×768 is fine) but the network card issue is a showstopper. So if you’re looking at running Xen on a laptop I don’t think that Dell is a good solution (at least not my Dell), I had much better success with an HP laptop (sorry I don’t recall the model).
I have seen one person reporting that their b44 network driver was functional under Xen but so far I have not been able to reproduce that so I am unconvinced.
In the meantime rather than trying to find corrections for the network driver I decided to try different network cards. The Inspiron has no cardbus slots so the only option is ExpressCard, here in Ontario it seems most computer stores haven’t even heard of ExpressCard. Finally, in my local small computer store the guy suggested to try USB ethernet instead (I hadn’t even considered that).
I plugged in the USB network card and much to my surprise it was immediately recognized, they allowed me to connect to the Internet from the store to ensure that it was functional. The USB ethernet dongle is completely devoid of any identification so I cannot say with certainty the manufacturer. When plugged in my kernel automatically loads the asix driver and identifies it as ASIX AX88772 USB 2.0 Ethernet.
Since my first article about running Xen on Ubuntu I have upgraded my desktops to the newer version of ubuntu (the just released Kubuntu 6.10).
Ubuntu 6.10 includes Xen kernels and the Xen hypervisor already built and installable (no need for source builds anymore). In my case I installed the following packages:
- libc6-xen
- libxen3.0
- python-xen3.0
- xen-doc-2.6.17
- xen-docs-3.0
- xen-hypervisor-3.0-i386
- xen-image-xen0-2.6.17-6-generic-xen0
- xen-ioemu-3.0
- xen-restricted-modules-2.6.17-6-generic-xen0
- xen-tools
- xen-utils-3.0
I’ve been using this on my laptop for 3 days now, running a few instances of RHEL3 and one instance of Windows XP Home SP2. I haven’t observed any instability or issues (either with virtual machines or domain0). I am using Domain 0 as my main desktop, eventually it would be nice to have domain0 as a very thin layer and run my desktop from a domU but it’s not a big deal (for a personal laptop system of course).
Now if Microsoft could just fix their software so that I don’t have to call them to reactivate Windows every time I boot my legally licensed Windows XP under different hardware (native, versus Xen, versus QEMU) ... one copy of XP Home, one computer, thanks guys wonderful customer experience. Thankfully for myself Windows is an afterthought, I only need it occasionally to verify correct function of web sites under Internet Explorer.
Posted in Xen, Ubuntu | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:28:00 GMT
Kir Kolyshkin provides a good write-up on his blog detailing the OS-level virtualization patches that are going into the 2.6.19 kernel.
I mentioned these patches last week in News from 2.6.19 article but Kir certainly provides more detailed coverage. Also I couldn’t agree more with Kir, it is great to see that the patches are coming from a variety of contributors – better code and a wider understanding are sure to result.
Read Kir’s post at http://community.livejournal.com/openvz/10141.html.
Posted in Kernel, Containers | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 02:38:00 GMT
It looks like Virtual Iron 3.0 might finally be out of beta. If you go to VI’s download page you will be able to request your licence keys and download.
See download page at http://www.virtualiron.com/products/download_Virtual_Iron.cfm.
There has been no announcement as yet (that I have seen) but it’s there and can be downloaded.
Posted in Xen, Virtual Iron | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:46:00 GMT
Network World has a nice article titled “A Virtual Breeze”.
If you’re just starting down the virtualization path you may find some of the tips useful. Read original article here.
Posted in General | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:34:00 GMT
SuSE has long been championing the reiserfs filesystem but it now appears likely that SuSE will head in other directions.
Jeff Mahoney recently posted a Proposal: Change in default fs for releases >= 10.2. The email is well worth reading, it points out quite a few issues with reiserfs (v3) of which I was unaware.
I have used a combination of reiserfs and xfs on the majority of my desktops, laptops and servers for years. The major advantage that I see is the ability to resize both of these filesystems online (provided you are also using LVM). I can’t count the number of times I have resized filesystems (servers, laptops, desktops, etc.) and taking a filesystem down for resize (especially on a large server) just seems wrong to me.
ext3 does have online resize capability but at this moment I’m not sure how many distribution kernels actually enable that (I think not many).
Posted in Novell / SuSE | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT
Some good news is appearing in the changelogs for the upcoming 2.6.19 kernel. Quite a few features useful for virtualization and general clustering:
- GFS2 cluster filesystem is likely to be added (see http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/)
- OCFS2 cluster filesystem will lose it’s “experimental” monicker
- groundwork for container based virtualization (namespace patches for utsname and SYSV IPC)
- some paravirt patches also appear likely to be included (paravirt will allow paravirtualized kernels to run under multiple hypervisors – eventually)
- UML patches (doesn’t look like anything major)
- reiser4 – nah just kidding – maybe in 2.6.20
You can read Andrew Morton’s email titled Patch: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans for details on other potential kernel improvements.
It’s great to see that the kernel will soon include 2 production ready (?) cluster file systems. It would be good to hear from anyone who has extensive testing with either OCFS2 or GFS2, I myself have done some minor testing with OCFS2 and found that if the stars were correctly aligned it functioned as expected.
Posted in Kernel, Containers | no comments
