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Fedora

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

Release: Fedora 10, Including Virtualization Improvements

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The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 10 features numerous technologies and continues to lay the groundwork for derivative open source distributions throughout the enterprise.

Since its inception, Fedora has adopted a leadership role in the development of open source software and continuously demonstrates its potential across the enterprise. This community of users and developers have blazed the trail in key feature development and actively forms the roadmap for open source technologies found in many platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora 10, the tenth release in five years, features substantial virtualization improvements for remote installation and management of storage provisioning. These features will make system administration of virtual machine hosts and guests easier and more capable of automation, especially as they are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Additionally, Fedora 10 includes NetworkManager connection sharing, allowing laptop users with an Ethernet or mobile broadband connection to provide Internet routing to others through the laptop wireless interface, for instant collaboration anywhere, anytime.

The Future of Xen At Red Hat

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As you might know, most of the development for the upcoming Red Hat releases is happening in the Fedora project, so if you want to keep an eye on what’s going to happen in future RedHat releases Fedora is a good place to look.

Reuven pointed out that the next Fedora release (Fedora 10) won’t have Dom0 support.

This however is not yet the strategic decision from Redhat after buying Qumranet and thus KVM. But merely a lack of time before the release has to ship.

Xen typically is being developed with an older 2.6.18 Linux kernel release and forward porting of these features is a time consuming effort. The typical kernel-xen package in Fedora has always been a bit behind on the kernel package
So the slow introduction of paravirt_ops, is keeping Dom0 support out of Fedora 10.

The idea behind paravirt_ops is to build a kernel structure that gives an interface to a virtualization layer, any virtualization layer, it allows the kernel to run on both a hypervisor and the actual hardware. Initial support for Xen, VMware and KVM is available.

Today running Fedora 10 as a host for your virtual machines will give you KVM as your only option. However Fedora 11 should solve that problem again. But then again, you probably don’t want to be running Fedora in a production environment, RedHat Enterprise or CentOS 5 are a much more viable alternative

Thoughtpolice And Its Library Of VMware Images

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We just stumbled upon Thoughtpolice, a sys-admin’s effort to aggregate all VMware images for Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS) and FreeBSD, as well as a number of Fedora packages.

“Thoughtpolice was born because I kept needing to use the same VMware images over and over again. A Google search later, and I had found no place which provided a variety of VMware images. Thinking others would find these images useful, I made them public. Over the months, more and more VMware images were added, and the range expanded to include FreeBSD, evolving into the current day website.

Less than one year since launch, the website has led to more than 250 terabytes of downloads, the majority through BitTorrent, without which we would be unable to handle the bandwidth requirements.

The website is aimed both at sys admins like myself who need to get an operating system up and running very quickly, and people who just want to try Linux or FreeBSD out.”

Go check it out!