On Feb 8, 2013, at 3:07 PM, Wido den Hollander <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 02/08/2013 10:34 AM, Dave Cahill wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Recently I encountered two "nested virtualization" use cases which made me
>> want QEMU hypervisor support in CloudStack. I'm interested to hear if
>> anyone else is interested in this feature, and any notes on how it should
>> be implemented.
>>
>> Here is a good explanation from OpenStack docs [2] on why they support QEMU:
>> "From the perspective of the Compute service, the QEMU hypervisor is very
>> similar to the KVM hypervisor. Both are controlled through libvirt, both
>> support the same feature set, and all virtual machine images that are
>> compatible with KVM are also compatible with QEMU. The main difference is
>> that QEMU does not support native virtualization. Consequently, QEMU has
>> worse performance than KVM and is a poor choice for a production
>> deployment."
>>
>
> So, I've been reading into the code and found this on my Ubuntu systems.
>
> root@stack01:~# ls -l /usr/bin/kvm
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Oct 4 02:44 /usr/bin/kvm -> qemu-system-x86_64
> root@stack01:~#
>
> Imho Qemu is Qemu and KVM only comes into play when the kernel module 'kvm'
> and 'kvm_amd' or 'kvm_intel' is loaded.
>
>> Here are the use cases I encountered:
>>
>> [Use case: Dev environment]
>> Wanted to use Vagrant [1] to create a portable multi-node dev
>> environment; however Vagrant uses VirtualBox, which doesn't support KVM.
>> Also, devcloud uses VirtualBox and devcloud-kvm uses kvm-within-kvm. I
>> imagine maintenance of devcloud and devcloud-kvm would be easier if
>> devcloud-kvm could use VirtualBox too.
>> Note: Of course, I'm aware of devcloud-kvm as an alternative for this
>> use case, and I'll be looking into that next.
>>
>> [Use case: Demo environment]
>> We may want to spin up a multi-node CloudStack install in Amazon AWS
>> for demo purposes.
>> Again, AWS instances don't support KVM, so this is not possible without
>> QEMU support.
>>
>> [Implementation ideas]
>> The management server currently does a check for KVM support ("kvm-ok")
>> on the host, and refuses to add the host if that fails. I think this check
>> could be removed, as the agent setup scripts will fail anyway if the user
>> is trying to setup a certain hypervisor on a machine which doesn't support
>> it.
>
> This way you could do nested virtualization indeed, but it could also hurt
> users who have their BIOS set to disabled and could lead to long debugging.
>
>> Create a new setting in agent.properties like "use_qemu", with a
>> default of "false". If the person deploying CloudStack agent sets this to
>> "true", cloud-setup-agent and other setup scripts would ignore lack of KVM
>> support as long as QEMU support was available.
>
> cloud-setup-agent generates a agent.properties, so at that point it doesn't
> know that the user intents to use the system without KVM support.
>
>> Lastly, when creating the libvirt XML file for a VM, set hypervisor to
>> QEMU rather than KVM in the XML file depending on the config setting.
>>
>
> That's not hard coded. The Agent does a getCapabilities() call to libvirt
> which returns a list of possible emulators.
>
> /usr/bin/kvm is just one of them which is returned and matches the
> architecture.
>
Wido,
So can I add a "KVM" host that would in fact just use qemu ?
How would I do that ?
-sebastien
> Wido
>
>> Thanks for reading,
>> Dave.
>>
>> [1] http://www.vagrantup.com/
>> [2]
>> http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-compute/install/yum/content/qemu.html
>>
>
