— Virtualization (@cfisk & @ramareth) —

Co-led by @cfisk (who's working with KVM on Ubuntu 9.04 wants to know more) and @ramereth (OSU Open Source Labs, who knows more and wants to understand the questions).

Basic questions:
- What are the options?
- What should I do?

Reasons to use virtualization

• Sandbox testing: I want to try something new without trashing my existing system setup
• Separate staging environment
• Datacenter resource management

@ramareth:

• OSL uses Xen mostly, but has tried KVM (can't use it everywhere due to Vt req't)
• Uses Virtualization mostly to help clients scale without requiring new hardware
• IBM Bladecenter with 14 blades, running 55 VMs; iSCSI backend makes it easy to migrate between nodes; LVM partition for each VM.
• (Hitting weird limits on iSCSI, but most of the iSCSI alternatives suck as much as NFS does)
• Lots of RAM is key: 4G each (6-7 VMs in each box). Xen grabs RAM at startup, KVM can swap

What are the options?

• Xen
  • pro: more mature; lot of stable features
  • con: requires special (dangerously old?) kernel on Dom0 (may be fixed soon?)

• KVM
  • pro: RedHat & Ubuntu are focusing support on KVM
  • con: requires AMD or Intel paravirtualization extensions (VTi); may not perform as well as Xen (@znmeb's interested in this)
  • virtIO for disk/network/console is useful
  • supports multicore guests

• VMWare
  • easy if you just want a sandbox
  • Takes advantage of CPU virtualization if it's there
  • Workstation edition ($$) can clone.

• VirtualBox (There are two versions: an open-source edition, & Sun's proprietary version)
  • easy if you just want a sandbox
  • Takes advantage of CPU virtualization if it's there
  • has easy snapshot support

• QEMU / Bochs
  • supports emulation of other architectures (eg, MIPS on x86) for cross-development

• HyperV - Microsoft's server virtualization

• VirtualPC - Microsoft's desktop virtualization suite
  • supports cloning with a little work
  • hardware support is questionable
  • Windows 7 supports running Windows XP in a virtualization sandbox (using this?)

• Parallels - Mac only
  • people use this or VMWare Fusion

• then there's the cloud…
  • Amazon EC2
  • Eucalyptus in Ubuntu 9.10, matches Amazon EC2 API
  • CloudKick - put EC2 instances on SliceHost

Other Resources

• libvirt (abstraction layer for managing VM environment; gui, cmdline, & API)
• Ganeti (google management tool)
• Conga (RedHat's cloud virtualization suite)