[geeks] the virtualization project

[Cody Swanson]

I have been using the virtualbox OSE FreeBSD port in headless mode 
(connect with VNC) on my 64Bit FreeBSD 8.2-Stable server with great 
success. The port used to only work on 32bit hosts but now it's working 
on 64bit hosts using 32bit emulation. I'm running a few VMs and haven't 
had an issue so far.

On 9/8/2011 10:17 PM, Shannon wrote:
> Awhile back I started on a project to convert my current server away
> from Solaris. My Solaris machine is still running, as things turned out
> more complicated and took longer than I expected. That and I got
> interrupted by a nor'easter, a hurricane, and a hurricane-induced
> shoulder injury.
>
> There were several things that bothered me about Solaris. I don't like
> the future with Oracle, I hate how programs, configuration, and data are
> scattered all over the place in Solaris, and its always harder to maintain.
>
> Linux packages are bloated, but at least they work and keeping updated
> is easy. The big winner here by far is NetBSD: it has to be the cleanest
> base and package system in existence.
>
> The following is just notes about what I tried and what I thought about
> them. Also a big goal was to convert to a virtual server setup to gain
> the benefits of that. However, that turned out to not be as easy a
> decision as I thought.
>
> * NetBSD *
>
> This is far and away the clear winner on package management, a clean
> UNIX tree and base package, and very easy maintenance. Its SMP is nice
> now and it just works. I'm tempted to just forget virtualization and go
> back to NetBSD, since it is relatively easy to save whole server
> configurations and deploy them fast. Unlike Solaris and to a lesser
> extend Linux, NetBSD puts everything in a limited set of sane places.
>
> One big issue with NetBSD is its filesystems are way behind the rest.
> Nothing like ZFS or BTFS exists for it, and as time goes on that is more
> and more important.
>
> * Xen on NetBSD *
>
> It took awhile to learn how to do this. The documentation is horrible.
> However once you learn its not bad, and it works very well. However its
> not perfect. Glaring showstoppers for me were no SMP support in either
> Dom0 or DomU NetBSD. Boo, hiss. Also there is pretty much no reasonable
> way to control CPU power, throttling on NetBSD Xen because the support
> is currently scattered too much.
>
> NetBSD 6 is supposed to fix this.
>
> * Xen on Linux (CentOS) *
>
> This works pretty well, and has more support and utilities than with
> NetBSD by far, and has better support for CPU power and throttling in
> the hypervisor. More filesystems to choose from as well.
>
> However, the Linux systems are clearly moving toward KVM, so not sure if
> Xen support will continue at the current pace or not.
>
> Also, I just rather not use Linux. Most of the distributions are very
> bloated, even for basic system administration utilities. Its not hard at
> all to innocently install a system utility and find it pulling in half
> of Gnome. I also hate the politics of GNU, and while you can mostly
> ignore it, it always makes me twitch.
>
> Still this does work well, and I've not had stability issues with the
> more well made and tested distributions.
>
> Not having ZFS is politically stupid of the Linux camp, but they do have
> BRTFS which has a lot of the same features.
>
> * ESX *
>
> I tried ESX. It installs easily, but at that point my impression rapidly
> dropped. You can't do much of anything on the actual ESX server console,
> and the only well supported tools for managing the VMs is their horribly
> ugly Windows only management console. They state emphatically they have
> been changing it heavily to move away from any kind of command line
> management.
>
> A good thing to learn for getting a job since it is popular in business,
> but I really hated how you manage it, and it seemed that in spite of the
> GUI front-end, it took me longer to get VMs up and running than NetBSD
> Xen's manual method.
>
> I tried a few other GUIs that were supposed to work with it, but it
> seemed like all of them were broken in some way, and what if I need to
> manage without a GUI?
>
> * Linux KVM *
>
> Didn't look at it much, but it does appear to work, and people report
> reliable use cases. It seems like it is not as well engineered as Xen
> since it doesn't really use a hypervisor which can isolate bits from one
> another, but it is a whole lot easier to work with. I guess there are
> pros and cons of both approaches. It also cannot run paravirtualized
> operating systems which can be a big negative.
>
> Hardware virtualization is neat, but its also rather heavy. You can make
> an OS faster and lighter if it is paravirtualized, while HVM requires
> emulating an entire machine. I think I'd rather have Xen.
>
> * Final thoughts *
>
> So in the end, I'm still running Solaris 10. Each solution I looked at
> for virtualization had some issues that made me stop and think about it.
> NetBSD Xen works nicely but has no SMP support yet, and no really nice
> filesystems.
>
> Linux Xen is very well supported, but I really, really didn't want to
> run Linux. However I might just yield on that so I can get work done.
>
> Linux KVM looks interesting, but I prefer to run paravirtual guests if I
> can so I'm learning toward Xen still.
>
> I guess what I want is: Solaris with ZFS, but without the ugly directory
> tree and packages... basically Solaris with ZFS, but with the neat
> layout and package system of NetBSD, and first-tier Xen support.
>
> That would be nice.
>
> I could just run a NetBSD server and be done with it. The main reason
> for using ZFS is for the data reliability on my server, and I just plain
> like it.
>
> In the end, I guess we should be happy there are so many good solutions,
> but at the same time I wish feature sets were more uniform, OS like
> Solaris would get modernized and cleaned up, and the politics that
> clutter and confuse the Linux situation didn't exist.
>
> Anyway... I'm done rambling. Truth is I was playing Ars Magica with a
> friend and she had to go to work, so I'm bored out of my mind.
>
> [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-keys which had a name of 0x5936BC24.asc]
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks