Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:06 AM, zxq9 z...@zxq9.com wrote: On Monday 07 April 2014 22:52:57 Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: Name 2. Seriously. The KVM management tools are *not* good., at least in Scientific Linux 6 or the upstream vendor's toolkits, because the underlying libvirt toolkit is trying to do too many things at once and therefore getting each different virtualization technology wrong in different ways. If you think I'm kidding, go ahead and configure pair-bonding in the virtual appliances. Aside from the previous reply, I get that you think KVM is a steaming pile how does this relate to Yasha's question? More to the point, how do you feel about VirtualBox as an enterprise platform? It's not the KVM itself. It's libvirt and virt-manager the built-in management tools in Scientific Linux. Virt-manager has gotten noticeably better, but it's really not up to enterprise support. *Openstack* might be, I've not had the chance to use it myself yet. The Virtualbox free tool has its own issues, mostly the lack of commercial support for it. So definitely, on SL 6 servers and for SL 6 virtualized clients, the free VirtualBox is *really good* for lightweight use. For enterprise scale use, of over, say, 5 nodes and with ability to migrate VM's from one server to another I've not tried their commercial offering. I'd have to try it. I hope it would be as good as the free server.
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:10 AM, Steven Haigh net...@crc.id.au wrote: I'm a little biased - but check out: http://xen.crc.id.au/ Heh. I've not had a chance to play with Xen in about 6 years, when I published the first (freeware!) RPM's for it. How's it been since Citrix bought it?
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On 08/04/14 22:24, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:10 AM, Steven Haigh net...@crc.id.au wrote: I'm a little biased - but check out: http://xen.crc.id.au/ Heh. I've not had a chance to play with Xen in about 6 years, when I published the first (freeware!) RPM's for it. How's it been since Citrix bought it? I love it and stand by it. I run multiple hardware machines as Xen Dom0's with multiple guests and have *very* little trouble with it. -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: https://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 Fax: (03) 8338 0299 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
RE: VMs of EL and other environments
Without going OpenStack, does anyone know if there's ever going to be a snapshotting feature in KVM on SL like VMWare and VirtualBox have had forever? That's the biggest thing missing for me, I can't use the normal virtual environment easily for testing builds or application packaging, I have to run a VirtualBox on my laptop, which is a bit of a pain... -- James Pulver CLASSE Computer Group Cornell University -Original Message- From: owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov [mailto:owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov] On Behalf Of Nico Kadel-Garcia Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 8:22 AM To: zxq9 Cc: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov Subject: Re: VMs of EL and other environments On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:06 AM, zxq9 z...@zxq9.com wrote: On Monday 07 April 2014 22:52:57 Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: Name 2. Seriously. The KVM management tools are *not* good., at least in Scientific Linux 6 or the upstream vendor's toolkits, because the underlying libvirt toolkit is trying to do too many things at once and therefore getting each different virtualization technology wrong in different ways. If you think I'm kidding, go ahead and configure pair-bonding in the virtual appliances. Aside from the previous reply, I get that you think KVM is a steaming pile how does this relate to Yasha's question? More to the point, how do you feel about VirtualBox as an enterprise platform? It's not the KVM itself. It's libvirt and virt-manager the built-in management tools in Scientific Linux. Virt-manager has gotten noticeably better, but it's really not up to enterprise support. *Openstack* might be, I've not had the chance to use it myself yet. The Virtualbox free tool has its own issues, mostly the lack of commercial support for it. So definitely, on SL 6 servers and for SL 6 virtualized clients, the free VirtualBox is *really good* for lightweight use. For enterprise scale use, of over, say, 5 nodes and with ability to migrate VM's from one server to another I've not tried their commercial offering. I'd have to try it. I hope it would be as good as the free server.
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
Quoting from below: So what do you get with this commoditized distribution and especially kernel? You get hot kernel updates (which can be *very* useful to avoid downtime when updating a live, mission critical host), and guaranteed compatibility with Oracle software (which is not a fmall thing for a big iron Oracle server handling thousands of transactions a second). End quote. The above precisely addresses my query. I have been a long time user of VirtualBox after VMWare (originally from a Stanford group if memory serves) became a strictly for-profit commercial approach that only administrative (not academic research by Faculty) computing had sufficient budget to afford. I routinely run MS Windows (currently MS Win 7 pro) under VirtualBox on an EL workstation as a mechanism to use end-user applications that are not available under open systems without any necessity of dual-booting, etc. Because VirtualBox source and documentation are available, I also teach from it so that students have a better real-world understanding of a hypervisor and certain types of virtualization. However, I have not used VirtualBox in a mission-critical server environment. If anyone else has experience with the Oracle pre-packaged VMs under VirtualBox in a distributed server environment, I would appreciate additional observations. On a reasonably well provisioned workstation, VirtualBox running MS Win 7 (and previous MS Wins) displays no real end user experience degradation (long load or execute times, crashes, etc.). However, a mission critical server can experience a very different workload than a workstation, and it is important to be able to predict significant end user service degradation due to the virtualization overhead -- particularly in real-world use (not simulations or highly controlled environments). Yasha Karant On 04/05/2014 08:29 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: VirtualBox itself, I like. The authors seem to have actually read Eric Raymond's old essay on the Luxury of Ignorance, and made an effective user interface that does not *argue* with you, and works well with multiple types of server and client. I use it on a Windows box for best performance of games, and use VirtualBox for my Scientific Linux and similar environments. The use of the right Alt key rather than Ctrl-Alt combinations to switch away from the VM screen is one of my favorite bright moves from its designers. The Oracle virtual VM's are a freeware problem. Oracle has tried to proprietize someone Red Hat's free software and open source work, especially the kernel, and it would be quite difficult to bring their changes over to SL or other freeware rebuild environments. Oracle's own download pages point to their public yum server at http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/. Unfortunately, the repository is not browseable, probably to reduce the likelihood of people making mirrors of it. To review its contents without installing them, you have to set up a yum configuration and run something like reposync -n -u --repoid=ol6_latest, or mirror them locally with the reposync command. This is feasible, but it's a pain, and makes picking and choosing awkward. And that seems to be the point. The source packages seem to be avaialble at https://oss.oracle.com/ol6/SRPMS-updates/. So what do you get with this commoditized distribution and especially kernel? You get hot kernel updates (which can be *very* useful to avoid downtime when updating a live, mission critical host), and guaranteed compatibility with Oracle software (which is not a fmall thing for a big iron Oracle server handling thousands of transactions a second). Scientific Linux, and CentOS, have been *very* good about making their work genuinely open and accessible. They've also been very good about labeling their modified packages as modified, with an I'm not sure I want to cooperate with this sort of we'll make the files available, but we won't tell you their names sort of silliness. Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:04:22 -0700 From: ykar...@csusb.edu To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov Subject: VMs of EL and other environments I realize that VirtualBox is separate from SL. However, Oracle has a distro based upon the same TUV that SL uses and provides a set of pre-built VMs for specific purposes - title and URL appear below. Has anyone on this list used any of these, and if so, any comments on the efficacy of such use? A reply off-list is fine if this is not a list topic. VirtualBox is available as an EL6 binary RPM for both IA-32 and X86-64, and seems to run well with no missing dependencies or crashes. Thanks, Yasha Karant Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox) http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vm/index.html
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On Monday 07 April 2014 10:41:26 Yasha Karant wrote: However, I have not used VirtualBox in a mission-critical server environment. If anyone else has experience with the Oracle pre-packaged VMs under VirtualBox in a distributed server environment, I would appreciate additional observations. On a reasonably well provisioned workstation, VirtualBox running MS Win 7 (and previous MS Wins) displays no real end user experience degradation (long load or execute times, crashes, etc.). However, a mission critical server can experience a very different workload than a workstation, and it is important to be able to predict significant end user service degradation due to the virtualization overhead -- particularly in real-world use (not simulations or highly controlled environments). I doubt you would have serious problems, but it may be important to consider what the future of a VirtualBox setup might look like compared to, say, a KVM one. KVM is the most commonly applied solution in Linux clouds and server spaces, regardless the details of the guests. I've never seen a serious server farm running VirtualBox and I can't recall ever seeing anyone target infrastructure components toward it within OpenStack. KVM is still an adolescent and seems to be headed toward enterprise maturity as fast as people can code/shell out investment money, VirtualBox appears to have achieved its stable goal. Based on that, I would say VirtualBox is probably inappropriate, though perhaps serviceable in the short-term. Note that I haven't addressed basic features like live migration or scriptable interfaces -- I'm not sure where VirtualBox is in that regard -- but assuming its close to KVM in features, I would recommend KVM for farms, VirtualBox for the one-off alternative desktop experience. CAVEAT: If its even a single must-have datacenter feature shy of KVM, though, then its definitely a bad idea -- one of the critical differences between an enterprise load and a workstation load is that enterprise loads have a tendency to suddenly scale whenever the thing they are serving gets popular (and that could just mean popular on campus or within the company, etc.). Not being able to integrate smoothly into a managed infrastructure would be just as bad, imo. After dealing with OpenStack (or the VMWare cloud management stuff, if you like writing huge checks) a bit you'll never want to go back to babysitting servers. Automated management can be more important than system stability (though you really don't want to have to make a decision between the two!).
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:23 PM, zxq9 z...@zxq9.com wrote: On Monday 07 April 2014 10:41:26 Yasha Karant wrote: However, I have not used VirtualBox in a mission-critical server environment. If anyone else has experience with the Oracle pre-packaged VMs under VirtualBox in a distributed server environment, I would appreciate additional observations. On a reasonably well provisioned workstation, VirtualBox running MS Win 7 (and previous MS Wins) displays no real end user experience degradation (long load or execute times, crashes, etc.). However, a mission critical server can experience a very different workload than a workstation, and it is important to be able to predict significant end user service degradation due to the virtualization overhead -- particularly in real-world use (not simulations or highly controlled environments). I doubt you would have serious problems, but it may be important to consider what the future of a VirtualBox setup might look like compared to, say, a KVM one. KVM is the most commonly applied solution in Linux clouds and server spaces, regardless the details of the guests. I've never seen a serious server Name 2. Seriously. The KVM management tools are *not* good., at least in Scientific Linux 6 or the upstream vendor's toolkits, because the underlying libvirt toolkit is trying to do too many things at once and therefore getting each different virtualization technology wrong in different ways. If you think I'm kidding, go ahead and configure pair-bonding in the virtual appliances.
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On Monday 07 April 2014 22:52:57 Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: Name 2. Seriously. Rackspace, Cloudera, IBM, Amazon, Google, RagingWire, RedHat, HP, etc. and anyone else on the OpenStack list is deploying it with KVM somewhere that makes money for them. KVM is by no means the *only* thing they use (far from it, and in Google's case only some of the KVM they run is vanilla KVM). That doesn't mean that everything is perfect in libvirt land, of course, but you make it sound like KVM is a dead-end virtualization stack, and its not. Without a decent environment manager (OpenStack/Puppet, for example) its not very scalable on its own. Of course, the price war in cloud provisioning got 60% rougher as of a week ago, so I expect the list of cloud providers running *any* stack will shrink down to two or three in the coming months (Google bleeding Amazon is bleeding everyone else, too, but nobody has as much blood as those two). As for pair-bonding, I can't say I've needed to do that within guests (hosts, sure). I haven't run into a lot of corner cases with KVM. We did with VMWare, but that was before changing our service architecture to degrade gracefully and balance loads better (and, critically, most of the services are now stateless, so bad things are a lot less difficult to deal with), moving to KVM was after this so I can't pin blame on VMWare. We've likely never cooked up a KVM perfect storm -- but I'm curious if you have any insights of what a perfectly awful KVM situation looks like.
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On Monday 07 April 2014 22:52:57 Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: Name 2. Seriously. The KVM management tools are *not* good., at least in Scientific Linux 6 or the upstream vendor's toolkits, because the underlying libvirt toolkit is trying to do too many things at once and therefore getting each different virtualization technology wrong in different ways. If you think I'm kidding, go ahead and configure pair-bonding in the virtual appliances. Aside from the previous reply, I get that you think KVM is a steaming pile how does this relate to Yasha's question? More to the point, how do you feel about VirtualBox as an enterprise platform?
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
On 08/04/14 14:06, zxq9 wrote: On Monday 07 April 2014 22:52:57 Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: Name 2. Seriously. The KVM management tools are *not* good., at least in Scientific Linux 6 or the upstream vendor's toolkits, because the underlying libvirt toolkit is trying to do too many things at once and therefore getting each different virtualization technology wrong in different ways. If you think I'm kidding, go ahead and configure pair-bonding in the virtual appliances. Aside from the previous reply, I get that you think KVM is a steaming pile how does this relate to Yasha's question? More to the point, how do you feel about VirtualBox as an enterprise platform? I'm a little biased - but check out: http://xen.crc.id.au/ -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: http://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 Fax: (03) 8338 0299 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: VMs of EL and other environments
VirtualBox itself, I like. The authors seem to have actually read Eric Raymond's old essay on the Luxury of Ignorance, and made an effective user interface that does not *argue* with you, and works well with multiple types of server and client. I use it on a Windows box for best performance of games, and use VirtualBox for my Scientific Linux and similar environments. The use of the right Alt key rather than Ctrl-Alt combinations to switch away from the VM screen is one of my favorite bright moves from its designers. The Oracle virtual VM's are a freeware problem. Oracle has tried to proprietize someone Red Hat's free software and open source work, especially the kernel, and it would be quite difficult to bring their changes over to SL or other freeware rebuild environments. Oracle's own download pages point to their public yum server at http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/. Unfortunately, the repository is not browseable, probably to reduce the likelihood of people making mirrors of it. To review its contents without installing them, you have to set up a yum configuration and run something like reposync -n -u --repoid=ol6_latest, or mirror them locally with the reposync command. This is feasible, but it's a pain, and makes picking and choosing awkward. And that seems to be the point. The source packages seem to be avaialble at https://oss.oracle.com/ol6/SRPMS-updates/. So what do you get with this commoditized distribution and especially kernel? You get hot kernel updates (which can be *very* useful to avoid downtime when updating a live, mission critical host), and guaranteed compatibility with Oracle software (which is not a fmall thing for a big iron Oracle server handling thousands of transactions a second). Scientific Linux, and CentOS, have been *very* good about making their work genuinely open and accessible. They've also been very good about labeling their modified packages as modified, with an I'm not sure I want to cooperate with this sort of we'll make the files available, but we won't tell you their names sort of silliness. Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:04:22 -0700 From: ykar...@csusb.edu To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov Subject: VMs of EL and other environments I realize that VirtualBox is separate from SL. However, Oracle has a distro based upon the same TUV that SL uses and provides a set of pre-built VMs for specific purposes - title and URL appear below. Has anyone on this list used any of these, and if so, any comments on the efficacy of such use? A reply off-list is fine if this is not a list topic. VirtualBox is available as an EL6 binary RPM for both IA-32 and X86-64, and seems to run well with no missing dependencies or crashes. Thanks, Yasha Karant Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox) http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vm/index.html
RE: VMs of EL and other environments
I've used VirtualBox for years (back to when it was a Sun product, before the Oracle thing happened). Personally, I prefer it over the other commercial alternatives because it's easy to create a VM on any platform and move it to any other platform. Are you asking specifically about the VMs that Oracle offers or about Virtual Box itself? Thanks,--- A Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:04:22 -0700 From: ykar...@csusb.edu To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov Subject: VMs of EL and other environments I realize that VirtualBox is separate from SL. However, Oracle has a distro based upon the same TUV that SL uses and provides a set of pre-built VMs for specific purposes - title and URL appear below. Has anyone on this list used any of these, and if so, any comments on the efficacy of such use? A reply off-list is fine if this is not a list topic. VirtualBox is available as an EL6 binary RPM for both IA-32 and X86-64, and seems to run well with no missing dependencies or crashes. Thanks, Yasha Karant Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox) http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vm/index.html
