Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Alain Péan
Le 22/06/2011 23:12, R P Herrold a écrit :
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
>
>> The problem with RHEL6/CentOS6 is that Redhat bought
>> Qumranet (the KVM company) and decided to only ship
>> KVM host support in RHEL6.
>>
>> RHEL6/CentOS6 runs as Xen VM though, so you can use
>> RHEL5/CentOS5 Xen host (dom0) and run EL6 VMs on it.
> The sources that will become CentOS 6 will run xen.org
> virtualization as a dom0, and KVM may be excluded
>

I am very surprised ot that affirmation. What of the binary 
compatibility of CentOS with RHEL ? It would be going in the opposite 
direction off Red Hat.

Alain

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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
On 06/22/2011 11:12 PM, R P Herrold wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
>
>> The problem with RHEL6/CentOS6 is that Redhat bought
>> Qumranet (the KVM company) and decided to only ship
>> KVM host support in RHEL6.
>>
>> RHEL6/CentOS6 runs as Xen VM though, so you can use
>> RHEL5/CentOS5 Xen host (dom0) and run EL6 VMs on it.
>
> The sources that will become CentOS 6 will run xen.org
> virtualization as a dom0, and KVM may be excluded

That makes not sense at all. Are you suggesting that Centos 6 will break 
compatibility with RHEL 6 completely?

Regards,
   Dennis
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Neil Thompson
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 05:12:27PM -0400, R P Herrold wrote:
> 
> The sources that will become CentOS 6 will run xen.org 
> virtualization as a dom0, and KVM may be excluded
> 

You said what?

Could one of the CentOS devs please confirm that you are going to
be breaking the binary/feature compatibility with RHEL that is one
of the most important facets of the CentOS project?

Thanks

-- 
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Neil

...aliquando et insanire iucundum est.
   -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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[CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Neil Thompson wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 05:12:27PM -0400, R P Herrold wrote:
>>
>> The sources that will become CentOS 6 will run xen.org
>> virtualization as a dom0, and KVM may be excluded

> You said what?
>
> Could one of the CentOS devs please confirm that you are going to
> be breaking the binary/feature compatibility with RHEL that is one
> of the most important facets of the CentOS project?

I did not say the CentOS project was ** going to ship ** 
xen; I said:
"The sources that will become CentOS 6 ** will run **
xen.org virtualization as a dom0, and KVM ** may be **
excluded"

CentOS proper at the 6 level will ship KVM as that tracks the 
upstream, warts and all

-- Russ herrold
herr...@centos.org
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Alain Péan
Le 23/06/2011 17:16, R P Herrold a écrit :
>
> I did not say the CentOS project was ** going to ship **
> xen; I said:
>   "The sources that will become CentOS 6 ** will run **
>   xen.org virtualization as a dom0, and KVM ** may be **
>   excluded"
>
> CentOS proper at the 6 level will ship KVM as that tracks the
> upstream, warts and all
>

I must say that the meaning of your message is not clear for me. What is 
the difference for you between "The sources that will become CentOS 6", 
and "CentOS proper" ? What do you have in mind ? Why "KVM may be excluded" ?

Regards,
Alain

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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Manuel Wolfshant
On 06/23/2011 06:28 PM, Alain Péan wrote:
> Le 23/06/2011 17:16, R P Herrold a écrit :
>> I did not say the CentOS project was ** going to ship **
>> xen; I said:
>>  "The sources that will become CentOS 6 ** will run **
>>  xen.org virtualization as a dom0, and KVM ** may be **
>>  excluded"
>>
>> CentOS proper at the 6 level will ship KVM as that tracks the
>> upstream, warts and all
>>
> I must say that the meaning of your message is not clear for me. What is
> the difference for you between "The sources that will become CentOS 6",
> and "CentOS proper" ? What do you have in mind ? Why "KVM may be excluded" ?
Without implying that I can read his mind, I guess he meant "People with 
enough skills will be able to tweak C6 to use xen as Dom0"

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[CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Alain Péan wrote:

> I must say that the meaning of your message is not clear for me. What is
> the difference for you between "The sources that will become CentOS 6",
> and "CentOS proper" ? What do you have in mind ? Why "KVM may be excluded" ?

for reasons out of scope here, CentOS 6 has not formally 
issued.  Thus I must speak of the 'sources that will become' 
CentOS 6, as there is no binary CentOS 6 yet

That said, I have been running private rebuilds of '[t]he 
sources that will become CentOS 6' at a virtual and colo 
hosting facility for which I admin, http://www.pmman.com/

As part of that work (related to KVM hardware minimum 
requirements, compatability with certain local libvirt based 
tools, and performance of KVM vs. xen), I and other techs have 
set up and run 'xen.org virtualization' to power the backend 
dom0's

As such, we have working installations that demonstrate that a 
person may CHOOSE to fork from CentOS's prospective KVM 
virtualization providing mechanism (that is, may choose to 
NOT use KVM), and rather one might instead use xen.org based 
tools

Yes ... I agree, English can be a unruly language to parse 
certain conditional constructs

-- Russ herrold
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[CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:

> Without implying that I can read his mind, I guess he meant "People with
> enough skills will be able to tweak C6 to use xen as Dom0"

Wolfie beat me to the post by eight seconds, it seems

Yes, it appears that he can read my mind

-- Russ herrold
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Tom Bishop
Russ if you have time can you elaborate more about why you are continuing to
go down the Xen path, I for one would love to hear the why's and what for.
I can understand the hardware requirements, and I know xen is generally
going to be faster but my small requirements have decided to start moving
things to KVM since that is the direction of the upstream...would welcome
your opinions if you have time available...Thanks in advance :)

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 10:49 AM, R P Herrold  wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Alain Péan wrote:
>
> > I must say that the meaning of your message is not clear for me. What is
> > the difference for you between "The sources that will become CentOS 6",
> > and "CentOS proper" ? What do you have in mind ? Why "KVM may be
> excluded" ?
>
> for reasons out of scope here, CentOS 6 has not formally
> issued.  Thus I must speak of the 'sources that will become'
> CentOS 6, as there is no binary CentOS 6 yet
>
> That said, I have been running private rebuilds of '[t]he
> sources that will become CentOS 6' at a virtual and colo
> hosting facility for which I admin, http://www.pmman.com/
>
> As part of that work (related to KVM hardware minimum
> requirements, compatability with certain local libvirt based
> tools, and performance of KVM vs. xen), I and other techs have
> ..snip...
>
> -- Russ herrold
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Alain Péan
Le 23/06/2011 17:49, R P Herrold a écrit :
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Alain Péan wrote:
>
>> I must say that the meaning of your message is not clear for me. What is
>> the difference for you between "The sources that will become CentOS 6",
>> and "CentOS proper" ? What do you have in mind ? Why "KVM may be excluded" ?
> for reasons out of scope here, CentOS 6 has not formally
> issued.  Thus I must speak of the 'sources that will become'
> CentOS 6, as there is no binary CentOS 6 yet
>
> That said, I have been running private rebuilds of '[t]he
> sources that will become CentOS 6' at a virtual and colo
> hosting facility for which I admin, http://www.pmman.com/
>
> As part of that work (related to KVM hardware minimum
> requirements, compatability with certain local libvirt based
> tools, and performance of KVM vs. xen), I and other techs have
> set up and run 'xen.org virtualization' to power the backend
> dom0's
>
> As such, we have working installations that demonstrate that a
> person may CHOOSE to fork from CentOS's prospective KVM
> virtualization providing mechanism (that is, may choose to
> NOT use KVM), and rather one might instead use xen.org based
> tools
>
> Yes ... I agree, English can be a unruly language to parse
> certain conditional constructs

Hi Russ,

Thanks for your explanations. I agree that a personal rebuild of CentOS 
source may choose a Xen kernel instead of upstream kernel, and tools 
associated with this.

I must add that, due to the fact Dom0 has been included in recent Kernel 
3.0 tree, it will certainly be possible in future releases of RHEL, then 
CentOS, to choose either Xen or KVM as virtualization solution.

Alain

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==
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94100 Saint-Maur des Fossés
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Manuel Wolfshant
On 06/23/2011 06:54 PM, Tom Bishop wrote:
> Russ if you have time can you elaborate more about why you are 
> continuing to go down the Xen path, I for one would love to hear the 
> why's and what for.  I can understand the hardware requirements, and I 
> know xen is generally going to be faster but my small requirements 
> have decided to start moving things to KVM since that is the direction 
> of the upstream...would welcome your opinions if you have time 
> available...Thanks in advance :)

I'll give you my reasons :
- existing infra, setup and knowledge
- RH gave up promoting xen because it was acquired by a competitor, not 
because it was not good ( or worse ) than kvm


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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Alain Péan
Le 23/06/2011 18:04, Manuel Wolfshant a écrit :
> I'll give you my reasons :
> - existing infra, setup and knowledge
> - RH gave up promoting xen because it was acquired by a competitor, not
> because it was not good ( or worse ) than kvm

I think there was another very good reason why Red Hat chose KVM instead 
of Xen : the fact that Xen was not included in mainstream kernel. It was 
painful to maintain a patched kernel for it.

KVM is included in mainstream kernel since 2.6.20.

I personnally chose KVM as virtualization solution because I know it is 
in fact available in every Linux distribution. So if one fails, you can 
choose another, free, solution.
But with 3.0 kernel, it will perhaps also become true for Xen...

Alain

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[CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Tom Bishop wrote:

> Russ if you have time can you elaborate more about why you are continuing to
> go down the Xen path, I for one would love to hear the why's and what for.
> I can understand the hardware requirements, and I know xen is generally
> going to be faster but my small requirements have decided to start moving
> things to KVM since that is the direction of the upstream...would welcome
> your opinions if you have time available...Thanks in advance :)

I wasn't hiding my reasoning -- part of my reasoning is soft 
and 'touchy, feely' but you asked ... ;)

>> As part of that work (related to KVM hardware minimum
>> requirements, compatability with certain local libvirt based
>> tools, and performance of KVM vs. xen), I and other techs have

1. support for an existing hardware delivery base
-- I find that the upstream is falsely assuming
everything fielded has (or should) hardware virt
bits enabled.  This does not match the
refresh lifecycles I observe at _my_ customers,
nor at our shop

2. we have a substantial investment in libvirt tools which are
unproven and unqualified as to KVM until we get our
hands on the official 'as issued' CentOS 6.

I've been VERY frustrated with the update API compatability
in the upstream's 5 product line in this regard, as
gratutitous changes, not documented, creep in, and
remain unresolved for months, if not full point update
cycles.  I'm not a 'big enough fish' for those
customers running the 'supported' product to get
updates released, and so we are very conservative
in what we deploy

# 649438 still NEW, opened 2010-11-03, confirmed in
5.6 on 2011-05-26
# 506688 closed unfixed 2010-11-03, opened 2009-06-18

3. performance of KVM vs. xen -- formal metrics will be issued
by me once CentOS 6 issues, but in identical hardware
side by side tests, xen zips, and kvm waddles

Upstream has its investment in the KVM technology to
justify, and it may well be that things 'get better',
but if one is not pulling metrics against the
competition, one is deluding onself; I do not see
evidence that this is occurring

I put numbers on out production bottlenecks; we use agile 
techniques to address the 'hottest' issues daily, tdd to 
prevent unspecified behaviours from creeping in, and 'belt and 
suspender' techniques to design out recurrence errors in our 
processes.  KVM is 'not there yet' for me

-- Russ herrold
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[CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Alain Péan wrote:

> I must add that, due to the fact Dom0 has been included in recent Kernel
> 3.0 tree, it will certainly be possible in future releases of RHEL, then
> CentOS, to choose either Xen or KVM as virtualization solution.

perhaps, but this is in part a LKML political question, is it 
not?

also, upstream's 7 is some time away ... Q4 2012 is the 
current roadmap for 'RHEL NEXT' [1] from a recent public 
presentation they made

-- Russ herrold

[1] http://www.pmman.com/Red_Hat_IBM_s390_ISV_call_May-2011.pdf
(PDF, 3.6M) at page 5
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread Tom Bishop
Thank You Russ and Manuel Wolfshant, I don't know you well enough to call
you wolfy ;),  for your comments, greatly appreciated.  I support my home
stuff and a small install at my church.  Since Redhats' decision to go KVM
and since my install will be Centos I was/have been migrating over to it...I
actually cut my teeth on Xen and felt that it was more mature but for my
small needs KVM had gotten close enough for my meager needs to start using
it...

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:19 AM, R P Herrold  wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Tom Bishop wrote:
>
> > Russ if you have time can you elaborate more about why you are continuing
> to
> > go down the Xen path, I for one would love to hear the why's and what
> for.
> > I can understand the hardware requirements, and I know xen is generally
> > going to be faster but my small requirements have decided to start moving
> > things to KVM since that is the direction of the upstream...would welcome
> > your opinions if you have time available...Thanks in advance :)
>
> I wasn't hiding my reasoning -- part of my reasoning is soft
> and 'touchy, feely' but you asked ... ;)
>
>
..Snip...
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Re: [CentOS-virt] Recommendations, please

2011-06-23 Thread lsc
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:16:47AM -0400, R P Herrold wrote:
> 
> I did not say the CentOS project was ** going to ship ** 
> xen; I said:
>   "The sources that will become CentOS 6 ** will run **
>   xen.org virtualization as a dom0, and KVM ** may be **
>   excluded"
> 
> CentOS proper at the 6 level will ship KVM as that tracks the 
> upstream, warts and all

I have been looking at:

http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/RHEL6-xen-and-dom0-kernel-to-test-td4413579.html

which sounds like a /very/ interesting package for CentOS plus.  

-- 
Luke S. Crawford
http://prgmr.com/xen/ -   Hosting for the technically adept
http://nostarch.com/xen.htm   -   We don't assume you are stupid.  
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