Anyone Actually Using Virtual Linux Servers?

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

On 9/9/07, Jarod Wilson <jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> My personal use cases are my web and mail server and my myth backend.
> RAID6 for me in both (well, the video store on my myth backend is
> actually raid5 w/a hot spare, since my 3ware card is a slightly older
> one that doesn't do raid6).

I have never used RAID6 before, but since you seem to be doing well
with it, and I trust your experience, I will put it to use it in the
future.  Thanks :-)

> I frequently use kvm on my workstation when I need to spin up a
> virtual machine. Its actually easier for me to deal with than vmware
> (workstation, in this case), since everything is already in-kernel
> and I tend to be running the latest and greatest upstream bits, so
> the vmware-any-any patches don't always work...

Yeah, kvm is great.  I use it occasionally, but I really need the
VMware API for when I automate things.  If kvm has a nice user-level
API, I am not aware of it (point me to docs?).  And kvm does of course
require a CPU with the virtualization extensions, which makes it out
of reach for many people's hardware.  My laptop, for instance, does
not have these extensions.

Oh, hehe, yeah I forgot about the any-any patches.  You only need to
use those if VMware is not packaged for your distro.  Luckily I run
Ubuntu :-P

> Oh, and trust me, I know all too well just how fragile xen can be
> without being very careful about what bits you're mixing -- a large
> part of my day job these days includes working on ia64 xen. :)

I think that Xen is fragile in many many ways, and that's why a lot of
people are spending so much time debugging the problems with it.  As I
said before, it is a very intrusive and non-ideal set of patches.
When you start changing that much code, things are bound to get
broken, especially when dealing with various architecture issues like
64-bits.  My personal opinion is that kvm will become the standard for
the future.  Red Hat (you!) has a lot of engineers working on Xen.
You might realize at some point in the future that kvm would free a
lot of allocated resources :-)

> Out of curiosity, does HH include xen and/or does the prior LTS release?

Yes, Ubuntu has included Xen since two releases ago.  I believe kvm
was added officially in the last release, but don't quote me on that.
I am running Ubuntu Gutsy at the moment.  I tend to run Ubuntu+1.
Maybe now I will run Ubuntu+2, just for fun.  You seem to do the same.
 Is there a Fedora 9 speclet yet, or will that happen after Fedora 8
is released?
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen

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