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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Kris Buytaert

The End of Paravirtualization?

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Alok Kataria , a Systems Programmer & Linux Kernel hacker at VMWare posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List last month about his experiences benchmarking VMware’s paravirtualization technique (VMI) and hardware MMU technologies (HWMMU) on VMware’s hypervisor.

Their test platform was a Dual Quad Core AMD Opteron 2384 2.7GHz (Shanghai C2), RVI capable running a development build of ESX.

They ran different real world test on a SLES 10 SP2 with a 2.6.16.60-0.37_f594963d-vmipae Kernel and they concluded that in most of their benchmarks the EPT/NPT (hwmmu) setup provides equal or provide better performance compared to VMI.

Below is a short summary of performance results between HWMMU and VMI.
These results are averaged over 9 runs. The memory was sized at 512MB
per VCPU in all experiments.
For the ratio results comparing hwmmu technologies to vmi, higher than 1
means hwmmu is better than vmi.

compile workloads – 4-way : 1.02, i.e. about 2% better.
compile workloads – 8-way : 1.14, i,e. 14% better.
oracle swingbench – 4-way (small pages) : 1.34, i.e. 34% better.
oracle swingbench – 4-way (large pages) : 1.03, i.e. 3% better.
specjbb (large pages) : 0.99, i.e. 1% degradation.

In his post Alok tells us that VMware expects that these hardware virtualization features will be generally available in all hardware by 2011. Other reasons for VMWare Paravirtualization’s VMI , such as timekeeping have also left the building therefore VMWare decided that they plan to stop supporting VMI

In short … VMWare has prepared a patch to remove all VMI related code from the Linux Kernel.

The thread on LKML went on noting that current users still might want to have the patches present so immediate removal of the feature wasn’t really the best way to proceed. But some day soon the code will be removed from the standard Linux kernel.

So what does this say about the future of Paravirtualization ?

KVM News In Short

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Over the past couple of weeks different new releases of KVM and related software saw the light . Virt-manager 0.8.0 was officially announced the most interesting new feature probably being the the Clone VM wizard but also a bunch of system tray icons for smooth desktop integration and CPU pinning support are very interesting.

Daniel Berrange noticed that Redhat has released windows kvm virtio drivers under GPLv2 This means that apart from the paravirtual network drivers that were already available now also the paravirtual block device drivers are available

It shows that RedHat is working towards a much more featureful KVM management framework into their upcoming RHEL release as they also updated their virtualization management layer libvirt 0.7.0. Most interesting new features include initial VMWare ESX driver support, added support for VBox 3 , QEmu hotplug network card support , and improved storage management .

If you have a recent Fedora 11 box and you want to test all these new features, you might want to be enable the fedora-virt-preview repository

[virt-preview]
name=Virtualization Rawhide for Fedora 11
baseurl=http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview/f11/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Oracle Dumps Virtual Iron

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When early march this year we talked about Oracle eying Virtual Iron we noted that Oracle needed to fill the VM Management gap that RedHat was leaving on Xen level by moving to KVM.

Turns out that that indeed was their main target, late last month Oracle announced their key virtualization strategy to their old Virtual Iron customers,
Oracle is clear that they want too provide a Xen based next generation Virtualization architecture has zero license cost and zero key management.

They will be providing official application certification , they were already providing their customers with different OracleVM templates which gave them different Oracle based Appliances and earlier this month they announced they will be providing the community with their own Open Source Virtual Appliance builder, based on yet another JeOS, (Just Enough OS) platform, this time one based on Oracle Linux.

But more importantly was their message to the old Virtual Iron customers, Virtual Iron Products sales has been stopped, software download availability will be discontinued , also replacement media won’t be available anymore. there won’t be any more upgrades , support for the different Virtual Iron products will end in February 2010 at last (that’s for the last 4.5.16 release)

Oracle is giving the old Virtual Iron Customers 3 options ..

– When they continue to run Virtual Iron’s existing platform they will get support from Oracle they then can migrate at their own pace with migration tools provided by Oracle, Oracle realizes there will be some effort involved but they will do their best to make it easier.

– Another option is to already start running OracleVM today side by side with Virtual Iron, that way users can gain experience with the platform quickly. Oracle will be providing V2V conversion tools that can convert VHD virtual disks to Oracle VM disk images.

– And the third option is to move to OracleVM today, at no additional license cost, customers only need to pay for OracleVM

Looking at the time Oracle still wants to support the Virtual Iron platform to us that translates to .. you have 12 months to migrate, better do it fast. off course there’s already plenty of VM management frameworks that support Xen around , so Virtual Iron customers can choose to migrate to another platform if they want to.

Have a look at Convirture

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The guys over at Convirture have a mission .. “Enterprise-grade management for OSS hypervisor & cloud platforms.”. They want to close the gap between the Command Line based Linux Admins and the CIO’s that want to have nice administration interface

Late june they released a Convirt 1.1 version which apart from some bug fixes and some new features such as support for Virtual Network Management, a preview of a commandline interface that can be used to automate a lot work , and the ability to add disks to a running VM (Xen) They also added a number of fresh Linux distros to their list of supported distributions namely the latest RHEL and Centos 5.3 and Ubuntu 9.04

Their first major release 1.0 targeted to have Virtual Center alike features for Open Source software such as Xen and KVM, with their software being availably in only as GPLv2 , so as of Version 2 they plan on having a Dual License model offering both a Community Edition fully Open Source and an Enterprise Edition. Their biggest eye cathcher was the drag and drop support for KVM Live Migration

I ran into Convirture already ages ago, back when it was still called XenMan and they have progressed a lot so I decided to have a chat with Arsalan Farooq, currently CEO at Conviture joining them in 2006 from Oracle where he served as Director of Development for over a decade.

When asking Arsalan about how he felth about competing tools such as openQRM he replied that “openQRM was different from their approach but very strong in provisioning” , “other tools focus on just on single platform that needs to be managed” and others are absolutely not Open Source …

Today they are talking directly to the Xen API and to KVM. The future might bring more API’s to that list probably some of them in the cloud.

Convirture obviously is one of the platforms you should look at when your manager wants a nice an easy GUI for your virtualization platform ! But it does much more for you , it manages your storage pools , does intelligent VM placement provides you template based provisioning and much more.

RHEL 5.4 will feature KVM

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July 1st marked the availability of the first Beta version of what will eventually become Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL) , for Virtualization.com readers the most important part of this upcoming release is with no doubt the full shift from Xen to KVM. When late last year RedHat picked up Qumranet it was clear that they weren’t going to gamble on 2 horses (Xen and KVM) and that for RedHat KVM was their platform of choice

Where initially KVM was considered for a lot of people as the Desktop Virtualization platform of the future , RedHat is now placing it in the center of their Enterprise Linux distribution.

But they aren’t ready yet .. when RedHat travels around the globe demoing it’s Virtualization platform it got from Qumranet is often critized for not having fully opened the code yet and and that their management platform still requires people to use a windows only management interface (much like Xensource had with one 3.X release) But with RedHat’s promise to open source Qumranet’s code that is probably only a matter of time.

The bigger question however is that of the migration from Xen to KVM. Different people have already build their toolchain, methods and procedures around working with Xen, some of them have based it on LibVirt, others on the Xen tools themselves, they are really happy about the Xen framework but they are really happy about a RHEL based platform also. Given it’s long term commitments RedHat has to provide Xen for a long time to come.

CentOS and Unbreakable, being Rebuilds of RHEL will have automatically KVM support included , but Oracle already showed the world it is aiming it’s arrows at Xen.

So how does the RedHat userbase feel about this .. are they going to follow RedHat to KVM or are they going to stay with their trusted and familiar Xen platform ?

AbiCloud from Abiquo

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Last month Abiquo announced the release of their “abiCloud”, an open source cloud computing platform for allowing companies to create and manage large, complex IT infrastructures (virtual servers, networks, applications, storage…) in a quick, simple and scalable way.

We had a chat with Diego Mariño, Co-founder & CEO of Abiquo , he told us that
one of the key differences of AbiCloud is the the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. He told us “You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a virtual machine. This version allows to deploy instances over VirtualBox, but we support VMware, KVM and Xen too.”

As their first tester had its infrastructure on Virtualbox and because its very simple to have it up and running in different architectures that’s where their first focus is at.

Today they support Xen & KVM through libvirt, and the connectors for these hypervisors will be offered during Q2. Support for VMware, is offered to hosting providers with closed modules.

Basically, Abiquo allows to companies to convert their infrastructure into a service. Other competitors in the field include the recently founded Eucalyptus, Enomaly, and sun via it’s Qlayer acquisition.

Abiquo says it has a different focus and approach , what they are offering is the ability to create private clouds for more complex infrastructures.

The have their own open API which will be released in Q3 , with no plans to support the Amazon’s API

AbiCloud is available for Download from SF.net