We're currently investigating the use of some of the open-source hypervisors out there. We're still with VirtualCenter ESX3.5 and with vSphere 5.0 just around the corner, it's time to think futures.
We use our virtualization environment in order to eek out parallelism from tasks that don't parallelize well inside a many-core system. Because of what we do, process various office documents for use in legal processes, we have a pretty large and unavoidable use of MS Office. We have found that we get better overall document throughput by running umpty small Windows VMs than by running fewer, bigger instances.
The two hypervisors that I'm investigating now are probably obvious
- Xen
- KVM
Both use QEMU for the actual virtualization environment, but their features do diverge. My reading of the tea leaves tells me that Xen is out of favor with the Linux ecosystem and that KVM is the way of the future, so I'm leaning that way. Unfortunately, a hypervisor is only as useful as its management framework, and that's where I'm running into a wall.
Both offer enough API to roll our own, but that would add development time to our next gen product and we're already dealing with enough delays there for me to add to them. So I need something already built that gets us close enough to what we need that we can fake the rest; or better yet, be already there. Free is always nice, but paying for something that'll save a lot of dev-time is not out of the question either.
The key features we're looking for are:
- Able to handle heterogeneous CPU stepping levels (KVM can do this I think, not so sure about Xen)
- A DRS-equivalent functionality (our ops people were overjoyed when I got it working in vCenter)
- A DRS-equivalent functionality (our ops people were overjoyed when I got it working in vCenter)
- Handle live migration (I think everything does this, but it is a key feature)
- Doesn't require exclusive CLI use to function
I'm looking for experiences using what's out there. ConVirt looks to do most of what we're looking for, but I'm sure there are others out there (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools).
Greg Riedesel
--
Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
