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| 11/23 |
| 2008/11/29-12/6 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/SW/OS/VM] UID:52129 Activity:moderate |
11/29 I'm experimenting with virtualization, and as a poor college student
I'm wondering what the best alternatives for virtualization are, and
how best to cut my teeth on messing with non-linux platforms (or I
guess interesting stuff on Linux would work too). Right now I've got
FreeBSD7 running on KVM on my home computer (on a Core 2 Quad), and am
somewhat at a loss as to how to use it. (More details: bridged
networking, disk is a 8GB partition software raid1'ed over 3 disks).
In any case, KVM seems to just 'work', but as the CSUA is planning to
offer VMs soon, I'd like to know if there are better alternatives,
particularly considering that when I put my computer to sleep without
shutting down the guest OS, the computer wouldn't start back up, I had
to cold-boot, and the disk image got corrupted. From what I hear,
VMWare's offering is solid, but the useful administration software is
thousands of dollars. Ideally, free software or something sustainable
without repeated donations of software, and easy to administrate would
be best. Does anyone have suggestions? --toulouse
\_ At my job, we use Vmware 2.0. it is free. i run vms. there
are graphical admin tools. I could buy Vmware ESX, which gets
me I guess better admin tools, better performance vmotion and fail
over.
\_ Someone here works at VMWare and was recruiting 2 years ago.
Calling the VMWare guy! We need a free educational license!
Oh well, he's probably not going to respond until Monday.
Us old farts have kids and family things to go on weekends.
Oh, try this. And yes we use VMWare in our company and it
is really great. You can get snapshots of the machine, run
multiple instances on a single machine (since most machines
are underutilized). Our production servers are also in
VMWare for superior bug isolation and debuggability:
http://www.vmware.com/partners/academic
\_ What, you mean CSUA alums have lives? Unthinkable! --toulouse
\_ Isn't VMWare Server free? That's what we use in our company.
--- !OP
\_ I don't recall the details, but while the server itself is
free, I think the administration interface is expensive.
Feel free to correct me on this. --toulouse
\_ Here's the deal. Vmware has two products. The Free Version
(Vmware 2.0) , and Vmware Server ESX ( not free. lots of $$$$ ).
ESX is a different codebase than Vmware 2.0 free. With ESX,
you get better performance, better GUI tools, failover capability,
and the ability to magically move your VMs from machine to machine.\
freely available Vmware 2.0 has a gui too.
and the ability to magically move your VMs from machine to machine.
freely available Vmware 2.0 has a gui too.
\_ VirtualBox?
\_ virtualbox is a sun thing. its not vmware. it
has its strengths and weaknesses
\_ ESXi, the hypervisor, is actually free, it seems, but the magical
admin tools are a part of ESX and not ESXi:
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi
Anyways. Paging VMWare employees...anyone here?
--Andy
Anyways. Paging VMWare employees...anyone here? --toulouse
\_ dude are you running a root name server? Vmware 2.0 is
just fine.
\_ doesn't mean ESX wouldn't be better ;). Ease of admin is a
real concern for us, and besides, if the software is
satisfactory, we might even virtualize soda itself. Given
time, if we got another server with virtualization
extensions, failover would be a large win. As you may have
noticed from recent downtime, Keg's been on the fritz
lately, so uptime's been on our minds. Without failover,
we're back to square one re: evaluating KVM vs VMWare vs
others, hence this thread. Besides, there's an argument to
be made that if we have experience managing the good stuff
here in college it'll be what we're qualified to manage once
we strike out in the real world, and/or the software that we
recommend to our superiors should we get relevant jobs
(which, arguably, a few of us will). --toulouse
here in college it'll be what we're qualified to manage
once we strike out in the real world, and/or the software
that we recommend to our superiors should we get relevant
jobs (which, arguably, a few of us will). --toulouse
\_ I guess. Really, I think Vmware 2.0 is adequate.
There are plenty of cheapass companies out there running
it.
\_ You know, when I was a poor college student, I
wasn't very picky. Seriously, the two may have
different features that you'd need in the enterprise
environment, but are you running an enterprise?
\_ Well, I'm not picky wrt/ using what works for me
(which, as I mentioned before, is KVM), but I
want the CSUA to be a bit more ambitious in its
endeavors, and as they say, shoot high, aim low
(is that the right saying?). Plus, there's the
fact that our vp is not paid, so minimizing the
addition to his workload while offering more
students to members is also a factor. In any
case, I think it'd be prudent for us to see if a
software donation is feasible, and if not, what
our other options are then. This is something
that can wait a bit, as we're waiting on those
core i7's. --toulouse
\- (80cols ... reformatted)
\_ well if this is about the CSUA rather than
personal edification, how about first dealing
with the frequent crashes/outages of soda ...
or is this an attempt to do so? [this seems
odd to me, but whatever]. second, to abuse
a quote a bit, "software is the continuation of
policy by other means" ... "what [csua] problem
are you trying to solve" [via this software, via
donation campaign/new hardware etc]. BTW, with
regard to giving csua people experience with
expensive tools, i actually think part of the
reason a lot of ex-csua people have been
successful systems people is they resorted
to hacking togethe things and thus understanding
how they work under the hood, rather than
throwing money at the problem [hardware and
softwarewise] ... i'm not saying you should say
solve all problems that way ... like if you need
disk space today, just go buy a cheap disk
rather than scrounging, but just the observation
in the past, some of this hacking to debug
something or getting it to work (and much of
this was pre-google) served people well.
\_ Yep, real learning comes as part of the
struggle. In some sense, it would be better
for students not to primarily have experience
with enterprise software packages since
these are made "easy to use" for the corporate
drones who wouldn't survive if they had to
have any real degree of understanding of how
the system actually works.
\_ Well, the learning I was looking for when
putting the idea forward (since I suggested
it) was geared towards people exposing
themselves to different OS'es and playing with
root in a sandbox. This is the problem I want
to solve, not training people in enterprise
applications. Also, soda hasn't been crashing
-- it's been keg, which serves our LDAP, that
(as I said before) has been on the fritz. If
keg goes down, then logging in does not work.
Politburo intends to buy a new server for
this; however since the Core i7 is coming out
we don't want a purchase now to be obsolete
upon arrival. We have the opportunity now to
solve two problems at once: allow interested
members access to their own personal VMs, and
increase stability of our servers. We can most
definitely do without failover, but then the
uptime problem isn't as completely solved.
The idea of getting students experienced in
adminning VMWare may be of low priority for
the CSUA as a whole; on the other hand, it is
(IMO) the strongest argument to be made to
VMWare.
In summary (and in my opinion) -- high
priorities are increasing uptime and developing
skills with adminning systems.
low priorities are developing VMWare admin
skills and...well, steven should be coming on
soon to offer his opinion. --toulouse
\_ Can't you request a free license for VI3 from VMware at
http://www.vmware.com/partners/academic
\_ You could try virtual box from Sun, it is free and runs many x86
OSes:
http://www.virtualbox.org
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes
Re VMWare - Fusion for OSX is very nice and quite affordable (I've
seen it on sale recently for as little as $30). It has GUI admin
tools and the unified mode makes using windows apps almost like
using native OSX apps.
I'm currently using Fusion to run WinXP and Ubuntu and have used
it in the past to run Solaris x86 and FreeBSD as well. I usually
run XP and OSX concurrently and haven't ever had any problems with
the XP VM getting corrupted when I sleep my iMac. If you have a Mac
I'd recommend getting it.
\_ I don't think you understand what he's trying to do.
\_ Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't part of what he is trying to
do is becoming more familiar with non-linux systems ("I'm
wondering ... how best to cut my teeth on messing with non-
linux platforms"). If he has a mac, Fusion is a good way to
accomplish this - it can run Solaris, Linux, *BSD, Windows,
&c. and will help him get a feel for those systems. Virtual
Box, while not as nice as Fusion (at least on Mac), is a
free way to accomplish the same.
\_ These are two different objectives. I'm talking about setting
up VMs as a service for CSUA so we can consolidate our machines
while maintaining some sort of security and OS diversity (linux
+ BSD at least) If toulouse wants to learn about
virtualization
of course Fusion is a good option (he does have a mac), but
that's a different aim. --Steven
up VMs as a service for CSUA so we can consolidate our
machines while maintaining some sort of security and OS
diversity (linux + BSD at least) If toulouse wants to learn
about virtualization of course Fusion is a good option (he
does have a mac), but that's a different aim. --Steven
\_ Hey guys - Steven here
Thought I'd weigh in on the situation. The recent outages have
indeed been because Keg has been crashing (as presumably toulosue
pointed out) and I'm fairly sure it's a hardware issue. We're
simply running too much IO through the (decently old) system
and parts of it have already failed (we've lost one of the
ethernet controllers already) so I'm willing to blame the system
instead of the software. That said, we're hoping to buy a massively
cool system when Core i7 Xeons come out (thinking 16+ cores). At
that point it seems reasonable to look at virtualization. I've
used Fusion and Virtualbox in the past, so I'm not new to it
by any means - but one of the requirements is that it's easy to
admin/use. The issue here is the host OS - I'd like to use ZFS for
the disk array we'd need to have to back all this. Linux doesn't
seem to have a very good filesystem for this sort of thing - ext4
isn't stable, btrfs is still even further off, ext3/LVM is pretty
hacky, JFS/XFS really really need battery backups to not lose data,
and reiserfs's future is very unstable.
ZFS offers ZVOLs which seem to be perfect for giving out virtual
partitions. Right now we have Soda mounting off of Keg via NFS
which as you may have noticed is a serious performance and stability
problem, so I'd prefer not to go with NFS again. The network FSes
out there all seem to suck in one way or another, so local storage
(especially for something like this) seems to be a must.
Since that limits us to using FreeBSD or OpenSolaris as a host OS
\_ or OSX, see:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5zo987
[developer.apple.com - zfs(8)]
\_ We're not rich enough to buy a
Mac Pro/XServe :(
(unless Linux ends up having a decent fs by the time we actually
get this running). Virtualbox doesn't seem to work well on FreeBSD
(as in not at all) and Xen seems to not play nicely with either
BSD or Solaris as a dom0. VMWare won't run on BSD either - not
sure about Solaris, which is why I was looking at ESX. The problem
with ESX is that it runs on only about 3 supported hardware
configurations which are pretty hard to build on our budget.
Discuss?
I'll hang around and maybe get into this whole motd thing ;)
\_ Virtual Box on OpenSolaris w/ ZFS sounds like it would probably
work. I used to know some OpenSolaris people when I was at sun,
and could probably put you in touch with them if you run into
problems. -ex-Sun
\_ That'd be neat, I'll do so if we go that route and have
troubles |
| 11/23 |
|
| www.vmware.com/partners/academic -> www.vmware.com/partners/academic/ alternate VMware VMware Academic Program (VMAP) VMware Academic Program Overview The VMware Academic Program (VMAP) is a comprehensive program designed specifically for the academic community. The program enables qualifying academic institutions worldwide to gain easy access to cutting-edge virtualization technology and resources at no charge. VMAP accelerates instruction and research in the rapidly expanding area of virtualized infrastructure by providing faculty and students with access to the virtualization technologies most widely used in commercial production environments. In addition to free licenses for instruction and research, VMware also provides academic institutions and affiliated organizations special discounts on VMware software and support when deployed as a part of their IT infrastructure. FAQs Eligibility: General Eligibility * Accredited, degree-granting higher education institutions worldwide offering 2- or 4- year college programs are eligible to participate in the program * Technical schools offering accredited degrees through distance education programs are also eligible to participate in the program Free Academic Licenses * Free licenses are available for academic instruction and research use only * Membership in the VMware Academic Program and acceptance of the academic EULA are required. Register here * Technology-focused departments such as Computer Science, Engineering, and Information Systems can participate in the program * Multiple academic groups such as departments, labs, research groups or clusters within member institutions can participate in the program Discounted Academic Licenses Organizations directly related to the academic institution (eg teaching hospitals) are eligible for the educational discount. If you're a university or college student, prospective student, or member of the faculty you can receive an academic discount on certain desktop products. To top Program Scope: Qualified members of the academic community can utilize the VMware Academic Program in the following areas: Instruction - Faculty within member institutions gain access to VMware software licenses free of cost for the purpose of classroom instruction. Faculty can obtain and install program software on computers within shared lab environments for use by students as part of the courses offered. Students taking qualified courses can also install program software on their personal computers. Research - Faculty within member institutions gain access to VMware software licenses free of cost as a part of their research projects. Program software can be installed in research labs as well on the personal computers of faculty and students involved in research projects. Infrastructure - Member Institutions and affiliated organizations can gain access to VMware software licenses at a discounted price for use within their institutional IT and administrative infrastructure. Use of VMware software for instruction and research is governed by specific program guidelines and the conditions described within the VMware Academic Program EULA (End-User License Agreement). The use of software for infrastructure purposes is governed by the VMware Commercial EULA. To top Products Included: The departments at member institutions qualifying for free licenses will gain access to a powerful suite of VMware products, upgrades and a host of technical resources. The free products are ideal for instructional and research use within academic institutions. Included products are: * VMware Infrastructure 3 - Standard Edition * VMware Fusion * VMware SDK * VMware Converter * VMware Workstation * VMware Server For IT and other infrastructure use, eligible institutions can access the entire suite of VMware software, at a special discounted price, through standard VMware commercial sales channels. |
| www.vmware.com/products/esxi -> www.vmware.com/products/esxi/ Upgrade Get Production-Ready Virtualization that is Easy-to-Use Deliver unmatched levels of performance, reliability and security with VMware ESXi when you launch your first virtual machine minutes after installation. Create Virtual Machines Quickly and Easily Using VMware ESXi, you can create virtual machines quickly and easily. A menu-driven startup and automatic configurations and enable you to get virtual machines set up and running in minutes. You can also deploy servers that have VMware ESXi embedded to experience true "plug and play" virtualization. Reliably Run Multiple Operating Systems on a Single Server Deploy mature hypervisor technology that is proven in tens of thousands of customer environments. VMware ESXi helps you to minimize risk by deploying the only operating system independent hypervisor and avoid the security hardening, user access control and anti-virus tasks associated with a typical operating system. fault-tolerant features such as storage multipathing and NIC teaming. Get Higher Consolidation Ratios for the Most Resource Intensive Applications Run email, databases, ERP and other resource-intensive applications on VMware ESXi's bare-metal architecture offering advanced memory management and support for scaled-up physical and virtual machines. twice the consolidation ratio possible with other first-generation hypervisors and minimize your hardware costs. Manage Virtual Machines Remotely and Save Time, Money and Resources In addition to consolidation, ESXi saves you money with remote management features, such as configuration, maintenance, patches and updates. Get point-and-click management for your ESXi host and its virtual machines using the intuitive graphical interface of VMware Infrastructure Client. Take snapshots of your virtual machines and roll back changes when testing patches or updates, monitor performance and resource utilization, and perform basic hardware component monitoring. VMware Infrastructure 3, the most widely deployed virtual infrastructure suite in the market, is as simple as adding a license file. VMware Infrastructure delivers improved service levels and operational efficiency by enabling centralized management, automatic load balancing, business continuity, power management and the ability to live migrate a virtual machine across physical machines to minimize service interruption. |
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| www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes Last Change Status: Guest OSes The following table gives an overview of how well VirtualBox supports various operating systems in its virtual machines. Rows marked with an asterisk contain information reported by users and not verified by the VirtualBox team. User FAQ Windows 2000 Works, with Additions Windows XP Works, with Additions Windows Server 2003 Work, with Additions Windows NT Works, with Additions Some issues with old service packs. Unices FreeBSD Works partially FreeBSD 62 is known to cause problems. Others DOS Works, no Additions available Only limited testing as part of system installation processes has been performed. OS/2 Works, with Additions Requires VT-x hardware virtualization support. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/5zo987 -> developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/zfs.8.html A dataset is identified by a unique path within the ZFS namespace. For example: pool/{filesystem,volume,snapshot} where the maximum length of a dataset name is MAXNAMELEN (256 bytes). A dataset can be one of the following: file system A standard POSIX file system. ZFS file systems can be mounted within the standard file system namespace and behave like any other file system. volume A logical volume exported as a raw or block device. This type of dataset should only be used under special circumstances. snapshot A read-only version of a file system or volume at a given point in time. It is speci-fied specified fied as filesystem@name or volume@name. ZFS Read-only Implementation ZFS on OSX is implemented as a readonly filesystem by default. This means that only the ZFS subcom-mands subcommands mands that do non write operations are permitted. Permitted subcommands are list, get, mount, unmount, and send. ZFS File System Hierarchy A ZFS storage pool is a logical collection of devices that provide space for datasets. A storage pool is also the root of the ZFS file system hierarchy. The root of the pool can be accessed as a file system, such as mounting and unmounting, taking snap- shots, and setting properties. zpool for more information on creating and administering pools. Snapshots A snapshot is a read-only copy of a file system or volume. Snapshots can be created extremely quickly, and initially consume no additional space within the pool. As data within the active dataset changes, the snapshot consumes more data than would otherwise be sharedwith the active dataset. Snapshots of volumes can be clonedor rolled back, but cannot be accessed independently. Snapshots are automatically mounted on demand and may be unmounted at regular intervals. zfs" directory can be controlled by the "snapdir" property. Clones A clone is a writable volume or file system whose initial contents are the same as another dataset. As with snapshots, creating a clone is nearly instantaneous, and initially consumes no additional space. When a snapshot is cloned, it creates an implicit depen- dency between the parent and child. Even though the clone is createdsomewhere else in the dataset hierarchy, the original snapshot cannot be destroyed as long as a cloneexists. The "origin" property exposes this dependency, and the destroy command lists any such dependencies, if they exist. The clone parent-child dependency relationship can be reversed by using the "promote" subcommand. This causes the "origin" file system to become a clone of the specifiedfile system, which makes it possible to destroy the file system that the clone was created from. Mount Points Creating a ZFS file system is a simple operation, so the number of file systems per system will likely be numerous. To cope with this, ZFS automatically manages mounting and unmounting file sys- tems. All automatically managed file systems are mounted by ZFS at boot time. By default, file systems are mounted under /Volumes/fs, where fs is the name of the file system in the ZFS namespace. A file system can also have a mount point set in the "mountpoint" property. This directory is created as needed, and ZFS automatically mounts the file system when the "zfs mount -a" command is invoked. The mountpoint property can be inherited, so if Volumes/pool/home has amount point of /export/stuff, then pool/home/user automatically inherits a mount point of /export/stuff/user. A file system mountpoint property of "none" prevents the file system from being mounted. If needed, ZFS file systems can also be managed with traditional tools (mount, umount). If a file system's mount point is set to "legacy", ZFS makes no attempt to manage the file system, and the administrator is responsible for mounting and unmounting the file system. Native Properties Properties are divided into two types, native properties and user defined properties. Native proper- ties either export internal statistics or control ZFS behavior. In addition, native properties are either editable or read-only. User properties have no effect on ZFS behavior, but you can use them to annotate datasets in a way that is meaningful in your environment. For more information about user properties, see the "User Properties" section. Every dataset has a set of properties that export statistics about the dataset as well as control various behavior. Properties are inherited from the parent unless overridden by the child. Properties that are not applicable to snapshots are not displayed. The values of numeric properties can be specified using the following human-readable suffixes (for example, "k", "KB", "M", "Gb", etc, up to Z for zettabyte). The values of non-numeric properties are case sensitive and must be lowercase, except for "mount- point" and "sharenfs". The first set of properties consist of read-only statistics about the dataset. These properties can- not be set, nor are they inherited. Native properties apply to all dataset types unless otherwise noted. type The type of dataset: "filesystem", "volume", "snapshot", or "clone". used The amount of space consumed by this dataset and all its descendants. This is the value that is checked against this dataset's quota andreservation. The space used does not include this dataset's reservation, but does take into account the reserva- tions of any descendant datasets. The amount of spacethat a dataset consumes from its parent, as well as the amount of space that will be freed if this dataset is recursively destroyed, is the greater of its space used and its reservation. When snapshots (see the "Snapshots" section) are created, their space is initially shared between the snapshot and the file system, and possibly with previous snap- shots. As the file system changes, space that was previously shared becomes unique to the snapshot, and counted in the snapshot's space used. Additionally, deleting snapshots can increase the amount of space unique to (and used by) other snapshots. The amount of space used, available, or referenced does not take into account pend- ing changes. Pending changes are generally accounted for within a few seconds. Com- mitting a change to a disk using fsync(3c) or O_SYNC does not necessarily guarantee that the space usage information is updated immediately. available The amount of space available to the dataset and all its children, assuming that there is no other activity in the pool. Because space is shared within a pool, availability can be limited by any number of factors, including physical pool size, quotas, reservations, or other datasets within the pool. This property can also be referred to by its shortenedcolumn name, "avail". referenced The amount of data that is accessible by this dataset, which may or may not be shared with other datasets in the pool. When a snapshot or clone is created, it ini- tially references the same amount of space as the file system or snapshot it was created from, since its contents are identical. This property can also be referred to by its shortenedcolumn name, "refer". compressratio The compression ratio achieved for this dataset, expressed as a multiplier. Compres- sion can be turned on by running "zfs set compression=on dataset". mounted For file systems, indicates whether the file system iscurrently mounted. origin For cloned file systems or volumes, the snapshot from which the clone was created. The origin cannot be destroyed (even with the -r or -foptions) so long as a clone exists. The following two properties can be set to control the way space is allocated between datasets. These properties are not inherited, but do affect their descendants. quota=size | none Limits the amount of space a dataset and its descendants can consume. This property enforces a hard limit on the amount of space used. This includes all space consumed by descendants, includ- ing file systems and snapshots. Setting a quota on a descendant of a dataset that already has a quota does not override the ancestor's quota, but rather imposes anadditional limit. Quotas cannot be set on volumes, as the "volsize" property acts as an implicit quota. reservation=size | none The minimum amount of space g... |
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