david at kineticode
Jun 28, 2008, 6:52 PM
Post #2 of 3
(261 views)
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On Jun 27, 2008, at 14:34, cdmiller wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> Short version:
> ASC is now leaning towards a Linux KVM virtual environment, rather
> than
> vmware or Xen. I have placed a Bricolage 1.11.0 Ubuntu Hardy qemu
> vm on
> our ftp site. I have only tested on Linux thus far but will be
> testing
> on the OSX and Windows flavors of QEMU when I get the chance. I also
> want to test a conversion of the image to vmware disk format and the
> creation of a suitable vmx definition. The disk image can be easily
> converted to raw format and thus to just about any virtual
> environment.
>
> New bricolage image: ftp://ftp.adams.edu/pub/bricolage
> QEMU: http://bellard.org/qemu/
That makes a lot of sense, since, I think, people are more likely to
have VMWare on hand for playing with images.
> After much study and testing we went with a roll our own redundant
> iSCSI
> SAN solution (Areca RAID, SATA drives, DRDB, linux-HA, open-iscsi) for
> shared storage and proceeded with study and testing of virtualization
> solutions.
>
> At first I thought we would realistically only consider Xen as a
> vmware
> alternative but that proved to be a non starter due to limitations in
> the Citrix Xen's guest vm support. After a token look at the state of
> Microsoft's virtual offering we did some testing of Linux KVM and
> found
> it has matured nicely. We are now in the final stages of testing
> Linux
> KVM 0.70 on stock Ubuntu Hardy servers (64 bit), using OCFS2 on the
> iSCSI SAN for storage of vm's. We have working SAN fail over, live
> migration of vm's between physical hosts in the cluster, all the qemu
> 0.9.1 monitor features, and paravirtual drivers (ludicrous speed) for
> linux guests. Thus far access to the SAN from our KVM hosts appears
> network rather than disk bound. We expect performance of our live
> bricolage instance to actually increase if we take it virtual in this
> fashion.
Sounds like it has been an interesting process. You should consider
writing it up (not for Bricolage specifically, just in general).
Best,
David
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