On 1/23/10 6:16 PM, "Patrick Spinler" <[email protected]> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > David Boyes wrote: >> KVM is pretty immature in terms of actual usable management tools. > Even in the commercial space? Yes. You'll find that most of the Linux management tools (even the Intel-only ones) don't understand what to do with KVM, and the few that do recognize an active KVM infrastructure have only minimal function. The idea of collecting console information for KVM virtual machines for later analysis, for example, is missing from all the ones I'm aware of. Basic stuff that you would expect to exist, not even the advanced stuff like cloning or copy-on-write or shared R/O disk, or even multiple network interfaces (example: IBM Director's automated deployment gadget chokes if you need to define more than one network interface, even if you aren't using KVM). They also scale VERY poorly -- a few dozen instances tend to tax most of them -- a few hundred and you're looking at multiple copies of the tools. A few thousand -- they run in fear. Automation infrastructure is weak (if it exists at all), and any abilities to manage by exception take a lot of human thought to implement. There are some interesting system management tools developing in Europe as part of the CERN ELF management infrastructure, but they're pretty immature too. At least they're designing for a realistic number of machines, though -- I keep telling HP and Tivoli that 500 systems per copy is a ludicrous design point for "enterprise" systems -- come talk to me when one instance can serve 15,000 systems reliably and then we'll talk manageability and integration problems across administrative domains and role-based access to subsets of the infrastructure. CERN's design target is 30,000 machines per instance, which is affordable and something that a real enterprise might consider deploying. > I note there's lots and lots of people calling me with commercial > products wanting to manage my linux (tivoli, director, satellite, ECM, > ...) Surely some of them have to be decent. Optimist. 8-) I was specifically referring to KVM support, but in general, they're decent if you don't try to force them to scale or to manage configurations more complex than one box, one network, one disk. KVM support is also so new that what's there is mostly check-box (do we choke when KVM is active? No. Check.) support that doesn't actually DO anything. Maybe I'm an extreme case, but I get to touch a lot of these systems. I'd love to sit the designers of some of these tools down in front of a Netview/390 deployment in an active sysplex and watch their heads explode at the message rates that software is capable of. Or ATT's G3 switch management infrastructure. Or just ONE of CERN's 15-20 large computational cluster environments. As this cloud computing thing develops, these aren't going to be outliers -- that's what we can expect in general deployment, and virtualization aside, the current generation of management tools are going to need serious reengineering to cope. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
