Somewhere out there!

Exclusive: Virtual enlightenment through Xen

Moreover, Virtual Iron extends Xen by enhancing memory management to allow 32-bit and 64-bit guests to run side-by-side, full virtualization to allow guest OSes to run completely unmodified (the current Xen release requires the guest OSes to be modified to run in a Xen environment), and significant work to increase I/O performance of guest OSes. These features will be present in the forthcoming Xen 3.1 release, but Virtual Iron is offering them now, with the GUI management tools.

On the downside, there’s no iSCSI SAN or NFS support, so if you’re lacking a Fiber Channel SAN, you’re forced to use local disk, and this precludes the use of the LiveMigration, LiveRecovery, and LiveMaintenance features.

So what’s lacking? Polish, performance, and the little bits around the edges. The console interaction provided by Virtual Iron 3.1 is fair for Windows guests, but quite sloppy for Linux guests running X11. This is rather surprising, but mouse tracking under Windows is far superior. Of course, most Linux guests won’t be running X11, which mitigates this problem somewhat.

Also missing is VM snapshot support, as well as basic backup tools. Coupled with the lack of iSCSI and NFS support, very basic network configurations, questionable I/O performance, and the obvious wet-behind-the-ears feel of the package, it may be a bit of a hard sell for production use.

Also looks like Virtual Iron lacks vlan support at the moment. Lack of this and iSCSI/NFS restricting shared storage to Fibre is going to cut out a lot of potential users. Especially in the SMB market. Its strange as there storage subsystem seems like its layered on top of LVM with Microsoft based VHD files in logical volumes (LV). You would think that it was easy enough to engineer iSCSI by replacing the Fibre device blocks with iSCSI device blocks on the processing nodes.

Without the LiveMigration support Virtual Iron isn’t really that much better than Xen. They will also have to increase their systems supported coverage for Linux to Debian/Ubuntu for both there management and vmtools.

Technorati Tags: virtual iron, review

Check this webcast hosted by PlateSpin and Virtual Iron: Reducing Costs and Increasing Agility with Virtualization, and this interface demo. Unfortunately you have to sign up to see it, however it shows some similar stuff to the VI3 demo further down this blog. Virtual Iron is Xen based with some of their own additions, they have Live Migration and DR Migration working now, plus there management interface is very nice.

The one feature I think is perfect and I’ve thought about doing myself is PXE booting the computing nodes and having them join the computing cluster as a resource automagically. This is exactly the right idea. The hardware platform you are running on reduces down to just a software management system. No doubt within a few years server systems will start being designed with the option of a hypervisor as part of the bios. Some one clever could probably do it now with LinuxBios.

The Virtual Iron price structure is very similar to Xen, and beats VMware’s by a huge margin. 500USD plus 125USD per year vs 2875USD per socket plus 700USD per year.

Some other useful info on Virtual Iron:

• Virtualization Wars
• Does VMware Need to Nip/Tuck Its Prices?
• Virtual Iron’s LiveCapacity Explained
• Virtual Iron
• VMware for the common man: Virtual Iron offers enterprise-class virtualization suite for less
• XenSource, Virtual Iron Gun for VMware with Features, Low Prices

I’ve been deciding between VMWare and Xen recently for a server upgrade, but I think that Virtual Iron might be the right choice. Xen flexibility with VMWare’s features.

Technorati Tags: virtual iron, xen, vmware

Setting up and Running Amazon EC2 from Windows. Check it out, very cool.

Especially when you can do this sort of stuff: Mux – Video Transcoding Powered by EC2.

Technorati Tags: ec2, aws

HA Migration (not live) Howto for an Active/Active Xen system using DRBD:

So what does all this produce? Node 1 has N DomUs and so does Node 2. Each set of DomUs is on its own drbd device and each node is primary for one of these devices. When a node fails, heartbeat sets the other node as primary for the affected drbd device, activates the LVM VG and LVs and starts the affected set of DomUs via their custom xendomains script (xd1 or xd2). It works great. I’ve rebooted, pulled the plug, and hit the power button and everything fails over OK. There’s a slight delay of about 90 seconds since it isn’t live migration but my environment can tolerate this.

Technorati Tags: xen, ha, drbd

Quick howto with screen-shots for the setup of a iSCSI initiator in VI3.

Up to this point I have not done extensive testing on the overall performance of my setup. What I do know is it performs more than well enough to run an IIS Web Server, an average load SQL Server, and AD Server, an Exchange Server and a File Server without breaking a sweat on the Linux iSCSI Server resources. In addition, the applications respond incredibly well considering the fact that my “Enterprise SAN” cost me less than $500 total. For development purposes to test VMotion, DRS, and HA, this is DEFINITELY a good solution to take a look at. Some brave people, like myself, may even consider using it for production data. I make sure I have a good solid backup every night.

This is running the following setup:

Virtual Machines Running

• Windows 2003 Domain Controller – 384MB Memory
• Windows 2003 SQL Server – 512MB Memory (Scripts running consistent read/write/update load on server)
• Windows 2003 Exchange 2003 Server – 512MB Memory (10 Mailboxes, 5 with a TON of spam being sent for load)
• Windows 2003 File Server – 384MB Memory

From the looks of some of the comments this is not totally production ready, although this probably has improved in the last six months. It does point to the way things are going though.

Diskless Processing Units, net (PXE, ISCSI, or ?) booting to a hypervisor and running Software Appliances back-ended to Storage Appliance (brandware or software) Units holding the data.

Some hints here for this right with Netapp equipment.

Technorati Tags: vmware, iscsi, howto

Bit cheesy but pulling a power plug and watching a machine fail over automatically is always going to be a good demo.

Technorati Tags: vmware, vmotion

Xenoppix=Xen+Knoppix with Xen3.0.2+KNOPPIX5.0.1. It can book Knoppix on HVM, and they have some screenshots of doing this on an iMac. Very clever.

Technorati Tags: xen, hvm, knoppix, shiznit

Very clear article on Virtualization in Xen 3.0, including a good basic introduction on how Xen works.

Technorati Tags: hvm, xen

I’m doing some research on the current state of play for virtualisation hardware, as I need to build a basic VT or Pacifica system. This system is so I can do some testing between Xen and VMWare for hosting Windows 2003 TS. The Xen wiki has a list of the HVM capable CPUs and since I’d prefer something basic, I’ve been looking mainly at the desktop Intel and AMD solutions. Which are the Intel Core Duo and Core Duo 2, and AMD AM2 socket CPUs.

Given that the Core Duo is no longer available as a retail CPU in NZ, the only VT based Core Duo systems are laptops or Apple Macs. Since I want a lab system this choice is not as effective, lacking the option for additional HDDs or NICs. For the Core Duo 2 option according the Intel motherboard list and this review, the only Intel chipset that supports VT is the Q965/963. I’m still trying to confirm this, but if so it complicates matters as there are no Q965 based motherboards available in NZ at the moment.

There maybe non-Intel chipsets for the Core Duo 2 which support VT, but this is something I need further information on.

Conversely with AMD it seems that all AM2 socket systems support AMD-V (Pacifica) and these systems are readily available in NZ. That said, I’m not sure how good the AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU is at supporting HVM. There are no reviews or howtos on AM2 motherboards which discuss AMD-V on the net.

With the lack of basic options, I’ve also considered server grade CPUs. The new Woodcrest 5100 Xeon and a simple Intel Server SC5400 chassis is at least twice the price of any potential Core Duo 2 system.

AMD have also recently released their new series of Opterons, the Opteron 1000, 2000 and 8000 series. Based this info from AMD and wikipedia, these are the only Opteron’s with AMD-V. Sun have also released this month two new x86 servers based on these chips: the x2100 M2 and the x2200. Both are SATA based and a x2100 M2 with a 1210 is pretty close to the price of a desktop white box solution, but a noisy rack system on my desk
as a lab machine is not very appealing.

A first up review of the Opterons vs Xeon, shows that Xeon 5100 series has really jumped forward with at least a 15% advantage for the same clock speed over the Opterons. It would be interesting to see if this improvement held out against the Opteron’s better 64bit mode. However, obviously the Opterons have lost their clear advantage.

So it seems right at the moment I have two options, an expensive Xeon 5100 or an unknown AMD Athlon 64 X2 system at half the price.

Update: The Sun Ultra 20 M2 might be worth considering as well. Although it gets a mixed review.

Update 2: Only the older single core Orleans and newer dual-core Windsor AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPUs support AMD-V.  Windsor Athlons are the only AM2 socket Athlons at present, but it might be possible to confuse them with the older models if you are not careful.

Technorati Tags: vmware, xen, hardware, hvm, vt, pacifica, review

I have an interest in picking up cfengine at some point in order to manage a cluster of Xen hosts more effectively. I am aware however of it’s complexity. So this blog post stuck me as quite interesting. Even more so since it seems Puppet is ruby based. Like cfengine:

Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.

In a comment on the linked post, I also noted another system to investigate: bcfg2.

Technorati Tags: puppet, cfengine, bcfg2