Guest Posts

Back in the early days Monitoring your Xen platforms was pretty simple xm top was pretty much all there was available. The folks over at xnCORE have release their management framework for Xen that is supposed to make administrating and monitoring Xen servers much easier.

Their xnCORE software suite for Open Source Xen server is a modular software which is available most common Linux distributions.

It has different modules :

• Their xn-manage module combined with xn-web provide you a facility for managing your vserver online.
• The xn-mem module is a memory distributor to your Xen vservers. Using xn-mem you can to overcommit the memory of your physical server
• The xn-mon module creates graphical statistics on a virtual server’s usage, in these statistics you can see
  Vserver runtime, Current memory assignment, amount of assigned processors , processor usage, load averages, disk io opertions etc all in different intervals

• The xn-traff module will as you might already expect monitor the network traffic of your virtual network servers

It is all tied together in their PHP based web application xn-web

If you want to take a look, the software is availble for download from their download center

Estonia’s latest Virtualization product is called OpenNode

OpenNode is a CentOS based opensource server virtualization solution , providing the users an easy method to do bare-metal installations supporting both OpenVZ container based virtualization and KVM full virtualization technologies on the same physical host.

The first public preview of their OpenNode technology is available from sourceforge , and a central management framework for multiple OpenNode servers is under development. In the planning are an AJAX based web management framework and a CLI management interface based on func. (Fedora Unifeid Network Controller)

OpenNode is a respin of CentOS, providing a customized CentOS installer which has a couple of special features.OpenNode provides the end user with an easyh to use automated LVM setup, it installs a minimal number of packages that are needed for out of the boxox openvz and KVM support. OpenNode is based on a stable RHEL5 2.6.18 series kernel provided by the OpenVZ project on which they added also support for KVM .
It has automated bridge networking setup for both KVM and OpenVZ veth interfaces.

Their plan is to bridge the gap that Fedora / Redhat leaves because they aren’t supporting openvz while following CentOS as close as possible upstream apart from applying the OpenVZ patches.

OpenNode has been developed by Active Systems from Estonia, who will provide paid support and development for OpenNode.

Late 2009 the nice folks over at Packt Publishing sent me the book on Oracle VM Manager by Tarry Singh. Some people say that a technology only becomes relevant when there are books being published about it, so for Oracle VM Manager Tarry’s book marked that milestone.

Tarry did a very nice job writing an introductory book on Oracle VM Manager , He splits the book in 2 big parts, Deploying Oracle VM Manager , and using it. After a good introduction on Virtualization he uses the bigger part of the first 100 pages of the book details the concepts behind Oracle VM Manager and it’s different setups, he clearly documents the different components , Oracle VM Manager, VM Server and VM Agent.
The first three chapters cover the installation of both the Oracle VM Manager and Oracle VM server, all pretty straight forward with a lot of scree
nshots.

The second part of the book is more interresting , it document the deployment of Virtual machines based on the different available options Oracle V
M server has available , how to manage VM server pools and how to create and manage HA setups with this framework.

Tarry saves the best for last ,the last chapter on troubleshooting and gotchas is where the reader will turn to when he runs into problems with his setup , together with the Command Line Tools appendix this is probably the part of the book that will be reused after you have read it once .

Oracle DBA’s that are new to Oracle VM and Xen in general might want to have this book on their shelve.

Yesterday I got a new Twitter follower, OpenECP , given the open in it’s title … I had a look and I saw an Open Source Elastic Cloud Computing platform. (A virtual Machine Management platform if you don’t want to use the “Cloud” hype terminology.

The attentive reader might remember us announcing Enomaly ECP releases before..

However this was something different

Sam Johnston announces on his blog that he is pleased to announce
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Open Elastic Computing Platform (OpenECP) Version 4.0 Alpha (openecp-4.0alpha.tar.gz), provisionally tested on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (screenshots). This is an open source fork of the Enomaly ECP product following its abrupt commercialisation in November 2009, which resolves a number of serious security vulnerabilities. For more information refer to:

http://www.openecp.org/
OpenECP is a web-based management platform for Linux-based hypervisors including KVM and Xen which can be used to create “public” and “private” cloud computing environments.

He goes on to say
It will always be freely available under the Affero General Public License v3 or similar.

Sam apparently forked the platform after he noticed that Enomaly had closed the upcoming versions of their platform and didn’t look like it was planning on providing fixes for security issue he found within the platform.

Reuven Cohen stated on twitter that they made the changes in license because
“ECP 3.0 is a significantly different product than 2.0 servicing different market needs. Enabling Service providers to generate IaaS revenue.

ECP 2.0 doesn’t include the thousands of hours we’ve put into ECP 3.0, no cloning, no vlan, no metering / billing, no customer dashboard.

Re: Open Vs Proprietary, as a self funded company. Monetizing Free was very difficult. Proprietary gives us revenue to increase dev & supprt”

Fact is that @ruv and @samj aren’t really best friends there has been some more namecalling on Twitter before.

Apart from having the source code available, another important part of Open Source is community …so the question that time will answer, will OpenECP gain tracktion and community

The Qemu-KVM 0.12 release includes a very interesting new feature based on patches provides back in november 2009 by IBM.
This KVM version has a new feature called block migration which allows you to do block migration during the live migration of a VM.

The concept is pretty similar to RAM migration. First the full disk is being copied , then the dirty blocks are being copie. Having this feature means that you can do live migration without having shared storage available.
Obviously performance will be lower and you might end up with a bigger hickup at the final phase of the migration than in a regular live migration.

On the Windows side of KVM the biggest news is that the Balloon Drive code has been GPL repository of the KVM windows guest driver. Up till now Linux was the only operating system that supported ballooning … now work is under way to have windows supported too. The block drivers for windows XP have also been updated in that repository. The iso with the new drivers can be found here

In other KVM news Chris Wright, a Principal Engineer at RedHat announced to the KVM Mailing list last month that the annual KVM forum is planned next to the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon 2010 which will be held in Boston this August. The KVM summit is scheduled for August 9th and 10th

Good news for openQRM.

Matt Rechenburg, the openQRM team lead just wrote in that he founded openQRM Enterprise GmbH, together with some core members of the openQRM Team, openQRM Enterprise is now the new main sponsor and support company behind the openQRM Open Source Data Center Management and Cloud Computing Platform.

Based in Cologne, Germany, the company is providing world-wide professional services and long-term support for openQRM with “first hand” competence.

“openQRM Enterprise consolidates the technical competence of the core
members and developers of the openQRM Project, experienced with every
detail of this Open Source solution, to supply expert knowledge for
custom, sustainable Data Center setups in best-practice. Our focus is to
lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for IT departments using a
proven Open Source framework. ” say the founders of openQRM Enterprise GmbH:

openQRM is one of the most important Open Source Datacenter, Virtualization and Cloud management frameworks, with support to manage different virtualization platforms including VMWare, Xen and KVM, easy migration paths including both P-to-V, V-to-P and also V-to-V migrations.

After going from proprietary to Open Source product, Qlusters shutting down shop, openQRM now gets a bright new future, openQRM Enterprise GMBH could well become the RedHat of the Open Source Enterrpise Management tools, or Open Source Entrprise Virtualization tools, or Open Source Cloud tools ..

More here.