Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
Rik wrote: On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 21:21 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote: I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. Take a look at Sun's VirtualBox. I cannot sing it's praises enough. I like the VB website and particularly the use of MIT licence for their code contribution policy - I've just finished writing a contribution policy to cope with a collaboration and this site was useful. As for Virtualization I'm a qemu, kqemu and kvm user. As with most things on the Open Source cutting edge, once you have a working recipe tailored to your requirements qemu and variants is very stable and performs well, in this case mainly as a non critical server and development environment host. I'm currently experimenting with the latest GUI virt-manager with kqemu, it's not working properly just yet but I think I'm close. Damian -- http://www.diaser.org.uk - DIASER - distributed internet archive system for educational repositories -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
One thing I've not seen that much comment on is ease of use and management (i.e you want to change settings etc). I find KVM very immature in this regard (particularly when you couple it with the equally immature libvirt* layer). If you want your life to be easy, choose vmware or virtualbox. If you want to be ahead of the game, choose KVM. If you have old boxes without hardware support (check BIOS) then Xen's paravirtualisation could be helpful in terms of performance. Adrian -- Email: adr...@smop.co.uk -*- GPG key available on public key servers Debian GNU/Linux - the maintainable distribution -*- www.debian.org -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 21:21 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote: I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. I've read a bit about Xen KVM and have had several companies visit College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) M$ HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for business critical systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be very important. Can anyone recommend a good book / books for me to start me down this road :-) Thanks Brian The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily the views of Portsmouth College Take a look at Sun's VirtualBox. I cannot sing it's praises enough. Last year we set it up with a couple of instances of server 2003 acting as Domain Controllers. The Host OS is Ubuntu with 3 NIC's, 2 are bound to the Virtual 2003 servers. Ironically we are now using it in production as it's so stable. There are only 40 of us so I can't say how it would cope with lots of users. That said, the company website is load balanced onto IIS running on it and that has been faultless too (the caveats being the usual Microsoft type issues - not the VB itself). It's worth a gold star and I can't shake a stick at it. VMWare is expensive, XEN is very good if you want to spend time learning it. VirtualBox you can have running in the time it takes to fry an egg. My plan was to cut my teeth on VB and move to XEN. So far no need. Good luck! -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 21:21 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote: I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. I've read a bit about Xen KVM and have had several companies visit College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) M$ HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for business critical systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be very important. Have you looked at VMware Server? It is free and can be upgraded at a later date to the ESX Server if you want a commercial, supported version though as you say it is rather expensive. I have been using Server at home for quite a couple of years at least. Right now I am running 2.0 on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS box. As clients I am running Win 98, NT4, 2K and XP and also OpenBSD. I did also try Sun's Virtual Box but the Open Source version does not (or at least did not at that time) support remote management, the commercial version does. Kind of a killer for me since I am running my VMs on a headless server. It could be configured via command line though but VMware's remote console is just so much easier. I have not really tried any other VM systems. Keep meaning to try KVM, probably will eventually since I know we have some customers who want to use it. As for books I am afraid I have not read any. Not seen the need as yet, which is unusual because usually the first thing I do before trying anything is buy a book! Rich -- http://radanter.deviantart.com/ -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:01:16 +0100 Rik hlug090...@buzzhost.co.uk wrote: On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 21:21 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote: I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. I've read a bit about Xen KVM and have had several companies visit College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) M$ HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for business critical systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be very important. Can anyone recommend a good book / books for me to start me down this road :-) Thanks Brian The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily the views of Portsmouth College Take a look at Sun's VirtualBox. I cannot sing it's praises enough. Last year we set it up with a couple of instances of server 2003 acting as Domain Controllers. The Host OS is Ubuntu with 3 NIC's, 2 are bound to the Virtual 2003 servers. Ironically we are now using it in production as it's so stable. There are only 40 of us so I can't say how it would cope with lots of users. That said, the company website is load balanced onto IIS running on it and that has been faultless too (the caveats being the usual Microsoft type issues - not the VB itself). It's worth a gold star and I can't shake a stick at it. VMWare is expensive, XEN is very good if you want to spend time learning it. VirtualBox you can have running in the time it takes to fry an egg. My plan was to cut my teeth on VB and move to XEN. So far no need. VirtualBox _is_ very easy to use. I have just installed the Sun* version and got XP-Pro running in about half an hour. It helped that I already had an XP.iso on my hard drive. *Sun version 'cos I've had module-mismatch errors trying to use the Debian sid version. Everytime there is a kernel update (a fairly frequent occurrence with sid) I'd get errors next time I tried to start XP. I tried rebuilding the modules but to no avail so when a message popped up saying Sun had an upgrade available to download I went for it. VirtualBox is now installed in /opt which is not the 'Debian Way' of doing things and I don't get VirtualBox as a applications option in the windowmaker menu but that is easily solvable. It looks like it is easily un-installable too. -- John Lewis using Debian Sid with windowmaker for a nicer desktop -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
On Sun Apr 12, 2009 at 21:21:26 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote: I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. I've read a bit about Xen KVM and have had several companies visit College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) M$ HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for business critical systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be very important. The management is where most of the open solutions fall down. Your choices are probably going to be: uml - obsolete xen - heavyweight. waning support. qemu/kvm- fast. regular updates. vmware - closed source. good reputation openbox - ? UML is only useful for hosting Linux guests on a Linux host, and while it has performance problems it is very stable and simple to get started with. Xen is an oddity - at one point it looked like it was going to take the world by storm. Since it failed to get integrated into the mainline kernel it has suffered a lot, and to be honest these days I'd ignore it as a stagnant irrelevancy. KVM builds upon the stunningly featureful Qemu software, and adds a kernel-based driver which boosts performance. It is very easy to get started with, and has the bonus that if you're running a recent kernel you probably have over half the software you need already present. VMWare have made a lot of their lower-end software available for free, but it isn't open source. If you only one one-ten guests then it works very well, but if you want to use it heavily you're going to miss the nice admin tools they have - as they're still commercial. Openbox I've never used, so I cannot comment. But people do say nice things about it. In short if you don't care about the closed nature then VMWare has always had a nice reputation, and if you want to be open-source friendly then I'd strongly recommend KVM. (Or openbox; can't recommend it as I've never tried it.) In all cases though your biggest problem will be the admin side, tools to create, manage, control, and copy the guests are lacking in the open world. Right now, for example, my KVM guests are running inside GNU Screen which is functional but hardly very attractive. Still for most of the basic tools kvm, qemu, lguest and uml the basic process is very similar: 1. Create a volume dd if=/dev/zero of=path/to/disk.img bs=1024 count=8192k 2. Launch the software pointing at the virtual disk kvm -hda /var/kvm/etch64.security.build.img ... 3. Setup appropriate networking support. Each of these operations is very well documented, so you probably don't need a book. Just pick one of the packages and read the documentation. (VMWare/OpenBox are more GUI applications so you might try those first if you're hazy on the command line stuff.) Steve -- Managed Anti-Spam Service http://mail-scanning.com/ -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
2009/4/13 john lewis johnle...@hantslug.org.uk: *Sun version 'cos I've had module-mismatch errors trying to use the Debian sid version. Everytime there is a kernel update (a fairly frequent occurrence with sid) I'd get errors next time I tried to start XP. Have you got dkms installed? If so that should dynamically recompile the modules when a kernel update comes in, so you wouldn't have to worry about that. I tried rebuilding the modules but to no avail so when a message popped up saying Sun had an upgrade available to download I went for it. The closed version (that you now have) also supports USB which the open one in the repo doesn't. Cheers, Al. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
At 13:28 13/04/2009, you wrote: 2009/4/13 john lewis johnle...@hantslug.org.uk: *Sun version 'cos I've had module-mismatch errors trying to use the Debian sid version. Everytime there is a kernel update (a fairly frequent occurrence with sid) I'd get errors next time I tried to start XP. Have you got dkms installed? If so that should dynamically recompile the modules when a kernel update comes in, so you wouldn't have to worry about that. I tried rebuilding the modules but to no avail so when a message popped up saying Sun had an upgrade available to download I went for it. The closed version (that you now have) also supports USB which the open one in the repo doesn't. Is the closed version not free then? I tried to get my palm TX to run in VMware via USB but VMware seems to go through the host OS first which has a palm Treo 680 installed. Windows the host OS doesn't like the palm TX as its got a palm Treo on it already hence me trying to run XP in VMware to avoid the palm conflict. Mickeysofts Virtual PC doesn't support USB at all I was wondering if Suns VM works differently so theres no mismatch in device drivers. Martin N Co-Moderator of MiniDisc and amithlonopen yahoo groups. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:28:56 +0100 Alan Pope a...@popey.com wrote: 2009/4/13 john lewis johnle...@hantslug.org.uk: *Sun version 'cos I've had module-mismatch errors trying to use the Debian sid version. Everytime there is a kernel update (a fairly frequent occurrence with sid) I'd get errors next time I tried to start XP. Have you got dkms installed? If so that should dynamically recompile the modules when a kernel update comes in, so you wouldn't have to worry about that. I did try installing dkms but it doesn't appear to be in the debian sid repository -- John Lewis using Debian Sid with windowmaker for a nicer desktop -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
Steve Kemp wrote: On Sun Apr 12, 2009 at 21:21:26 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote: I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. I've read a bit about Xen KVM and have had several companies visit College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) M$ HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for business critical systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be very important. The management is where most of the open solutions fall down. Your choices are probably going to be: uml - obsolete xen - heavyweight. waning support. qemu/kvm- fast. regular updates. vmware - closed source. good reputation openbox - ? UML is only useful for hosting Linux guests on a Linux host, and while it has performance problems it is very stable and simple to get started with. Xen is an oddity - at one point it looked like it was going to take the world by storm. Since it failed to get integrated into the mainline kernel it has suffered a lot, and to be honest these days I'd ignore it as a stagnant irrelevancy. KVM builds upon the stunningly featureful Qemu software, and adds a kernel-based driver which boosts performance. It is very easy to get started with, and has the bonus that if you're running a recent kernel you probably have over half the software you need already present. VMWare have made a lot of their lower-end software available for free, but it isn't open source. If you only one one-ten guests then it works very well, but if you want to use it heavily you're going to miss the nice admin tools they have - as they're still commercial. Openbox I've never used, so I cannot comment. But people do say nice things about it. In short if you don't care about the closed nature then VMWare has always had a nice reputation, and if you want to be open-source friendly then I'd strongly recommend KVM. (Or openbox; can't recommend it as I've never tried it.) In all cases though your biggest problem will be the admin side, tools to create, manage, control, and copy the guests are lacking in the open world. Right now, for example, my KVM guests are running inside GNU Screen which is functional but hardly very attractive. Still for most of the basic tools kvm, qemu, lguest and uml the basic process is very similar: 1. Create a volume dd if=/dev/zero of=path/to/disk.img bs=1024 count=8192k 2. Launch the software pointing at the virtual disk kvm -hda /var/kvm/etch64.security.build.img ... 3. Setup appropriate networking support. Each of these operations is very well documented, so you probably don't need a book. Just pick one of the packages and read the documentation. (VMWare/OpenBox are more GUI applications so you might try those first if you're hazy on the command line stuff.) Steve -- Managed Anti-Spam Service http://mail-scanning.com/ Thanks guys I'll have a play and see how I get on. Brian The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily the views of Portsmouth College -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
[Hampshire] Recommendation on Virtualisation books
I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it. I've read a bit about Xen KVM and have had several companies visit College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) M$ HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for business critical systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be very important. Can anyone recommend a good book / books for me to start me down this road :-) Thanks Brian The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily the views of Portsmouth College -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
