Linux Virtualization comments

"Google Virtual Server Management" by Billy

Sun, 9 Sep 2007 06:51:21 EDT

Man you don’t even know how long I’ve waited for this since disabling my own Movable Type widget (that doesn’t work since Haloscan bypasses that code).

THANK YOU !

"Google Virtual Server Management" by Fraser Campbell

Thu, 6 Sep 2007 10:20:02 EDT

I do agree to some extent. It depends what the target really is.

If you are virtualizing one Linux flavour (Debian or RHEL or …) then using Xen doesn’t really make sense.

If on the other hand you wish to virtualize multiple Linux flavours (Debian and RHEL and …) then Xen obviously makes a lot of sense.

I would have said in the past that Xen makes sense even for a single flavour of Linux due to it’s live migration support however, these days, even OpenVZ is claiming live migration support so the container solution is much more attractive.

And DRBD definitely seems strange to me, I don’t have any personal proof that it is flakey but it just doesn’t strike me as a solution that is likely to be high-performance or robust.

"Google Virtual Server Management" by Patate

Sun, 2 Sep 2007 11:34:57 EDT

I recently talked about this specific Google project in my blog, sorry it’s in french http://chercheletrouble.blogspot.com/2007/09/comme-google-utilise-xen-comme.html… but I don’t mind translate it in english.

but I can quickly translate the generic theme: I’m troubled about the fact google is still using Xen to do virtualization, considering they only virtualizing linux.

Xen is far more complex to use than OpenVZ and I personnaly wonder why DRBD ? unless it’s database or some data you can’t afford to loose… crunching node should not be kept in a redundant block device.

"openMosix project shutting down" by Dan Kusnetzky

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:34:50 EDT

Virtual Iron created a virtual machine/single system image clustering product and delivered it as the first few versions of their cleverly named product, Virtual Iron. They stepped away from the concept later to focus on their management tools and Xen. Their logic seems very similar to that expressed by Moshe Bar.

"Ulrich Drepper on hypervisors versus KVM" by Anthony Liguori

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:48:18 EST

KVM will eventually get its changes upstream. The 0.8.2 => 0.9.0 was unusually long for QEMU so for a while there was a huge difference between KVM and QEMU so merging was hard.

Now, KVM is against 0.9.0 so merging is much easier. The problem is that because of a bug in KVM , a modified BIOS is required. The BIOS that QEMU uses is actually from the BOCHS project so it’s desirable not to get a proper fix so that QEMU doesn’t have to maintain the changes.

So it’s just an engineering issue. Once it’s sorted out, expect to see KVM patches on qemu-devel.

"Ulrich Drepper on hypervisors versus KVM" by Kevin Dean

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 06:52:19 EST

Indeed, I agree with most of the points here.

I once said “I want to run guests on Linux, not Linux on Xen.” More broadly, I trust Linux more. Be it real or perceived, I find Linux to be more stable.

As to the re-merging of Qemu and KVM , I agree that on the surface that looks like a very good option. However, I think the design goals of each group may be divergant and it might not work, but i agree it would be a good thing. :D

"KVM: Kernel-based Virtual Machine" by frank

Sun, 5 Nov 2006 06:31:02 EST

I can hardly wait to try this thing out. I’ve been planning to get a hand on a hardware VT enabled machine to play around with Xen’s HVM feature, but now there are more things to pay attention to.

On an other note: I like this site, I wish to see it getting updates more often.

"Building Xen from source on Ubuntu to run Windows" by sven

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 07:58:51 EDT

gs-common(for ps2pdf) is also helpful

"Building Xen from source on Ubuntu to run Windows" by sven

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 07:49:13 EDT

On my fresh ubuntu-amd64-server I also have to install “patch”.

"Xen 3.0.1 Released" by tinkertim

Sun, 5 Feb 2006 10:18:39 EST

Looks like we’re going to see numerous (small) things addressed for different situations. I think versioning in Xen 3 is going to get a little hazy.

You have the folks pushing for Win32 Stable in VT platforms.

Then you have the folks who are bringing up SSI clusters with more than 3 GB per node managed via xen.

So many people want so much and it looks like xensource is trying to make everyone (at least to an extent) happy.

I wouldn’t go updating until you check the version notes to see what if anything may be different for you.

I think they’re also trying to reach out to the Fedora folks a bit more at the same time.

Nice blog folks :)

tinkertim