Russell Coker <[email protected]> writes:

>> My fallback would be NFS shared ZFS in the domU - much cheaper because
>> you only have one ARC, set of checksums, etc, to manage, but with the
>> added bonus of NFS between the domU and dom0.  Fun times.
>> 
>> Are you sure that LXC or OpenVZ wouldn't better fit your needs than
>> Xen?  You trade off marginally less isolation between containers for
>> the simplicity of having a single kernel image - so native ZFS
>> performance.
>
> That's a possibility.  What is the support for them like in Debian/Wheezy?

I am currently running LXC on 2.6.32, to separate services (e.g. apache,
postfix/dovecot, nsd3), on consolidated hardware.  IME LXC as at 2.6.32
was inadequate for this task -- in particular, per-container resource
allocation and encapsulation (e.g. of /sys) was not ready.

Wheezy will be 3.2.  I have not done any significant work on LXC on a
post-2.6.32 system, but AFAICT it has vastly improved, especially in the
areas that annoyed me.  IMO LXC on 3.2 is definitely worth at least
considering.

Important things to note:

 - the "lxc" and "libvirtd" packages provide COMPETING implementations
   of the LXC userland tools; you only need one.  The former had much
   more functionality last time I looked; the latter might be useful if
   you need to give partial privileges to other users (e.g. to manage
   their own containers).

 - by default LXC containers are not very secure; if you care about
   security it is definitely worth spending time dropping as many pcaps
   as you can (esp. CAP_SYS_ADMIN and mount privileges), and limiting
   what resources you meaningfully can.

   This *will* break containers that are stock debootstrap, and you will
   need to fiddle with init scripts increasingly as you lock it down.
   http://cyber.com.au/~twb/snarf/lxc-create may be helpful there.

 - obviously since the kernel is shared, and you (probably) drop
   modprobe privs within the containers, stuff like iptables-restore
   can't implicitly load new modules, they have to be modprobed in
   advance in the host OS.  Likewise exposing hotplug equipment to the
   container is extremely nontrivial.

 - OTOH, you can choose which parts to containerize, e.g. you can have a
   separate filesystem but the same network interfaces, or vice-versa.
   I'm not sure how useful this is in practice.

Regarding OpenVZ, AFAIK it was dropped by both Debian and Ubuntu years
ago, so the only reason I can think of to run it if you're already
invested and LXC doesn't yet do what you need.

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