Naturally, as a long-time Linux/Xen user, I''ve been rabidly awaiting the Xen port to Solaris. I''m looking for the long-term answer (meaning, in the next 1-2 years) to these questions: (a) Is there ever going to be support for un-modified guest OSes for the pre-AMD-V chips (e.g. the 100-, 200-, and 800-series Opterons). I suspect the answer is NO, but hope never dies... (b) For the above Opteron series, what guest OSes do we currently support, and which may show up sometime in the future? (c) Besides the AMD-V support in Opterons, is there any effort to support the Core2 and later generation Xeon virtualization extensions? (d) how well does Xen currently play with ZFS? Particularly for the guest OSes (both ZFS zvols as the partition for the guest OS, and for creating zpools inside the guest from raw volumes). (e) And, of course, for S10, are we looking at Update 5 for including Xen support, or really Update 6? -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca14-102 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
Erik Trimble wrote:> Naturally, as a long-time Linux/Xen user, I''ve been rabidly awaiting the > Xen port to Solaris. > > I''m looking for the long-term answer (meaning, in the next 1-2 years) to > these questions: > > (a) Is there ever going to be support for un-modified guest OSes for the > pre-AMD-V chips (e.g. the 100-, 200-, and 800-series Opterons). I > suspect the answer is NO, but hope never dies...Currently, there are no plans to do this.> (b) For the above Opteron series, what guest OSes do we currently > support, and which may show up sometime in the future?For non-HVM CPUs, Solaris Nevada, Fedora6, Fedora7, RHEL5, Centos5, OpenSUSE 10.1 all run on those processors in PV.> (c) Besides the AMD-V support in Opterons, is there any effort to > support the Core2 and later generation Xeon virtualization extensions?Those are currently supported as well. My development machine is a core 2 duo.> (d) how well does Xen currently play with ZFS? Particularly for the > guest OSes (both ZFS zvols as the partition for the guest OS, and for > creating zpools inside the guest from raw volumes).You can do all of the above. We do have a couple of performance bugs with ZFS on Xen which should be fixed shortly..> (e) And, of course, for S10, are we looking at Update 5 for including > Xen support, or really Update 6?This is still up in the air. MRJ -- Mark Johnson <mark.johnson@sun.com> Sun Microsystems, Inc. (781) 442-0869
>> (d) how well does Xen currently play with ZFS? Particularly for the >> guest OSes (both ZFS zvols as the partition for the guest OS, and for >> creating zpools inside the guest from raw volumes). >> > > You can do all of the above. We do have a couple of performance > bugs with ZFS on Xen which should be fixed shortly.. > >If you throw something like NFS into the mix, there are some very interesting options available for using ZFS directly, indirectly and via NFS. All with different possible advantages and disadvantages. I would be interested to hear what people think of the different performance and efficiency of the different options. For example, one idea I had was to place the domU''s on a mirrored zvol, but place the domU data on a ZFS pool either on the dom0 or on another machine, and mount the pool via NFS in the domU. This gets rid of what I call the "filesystem-in-a-filesystem" (for example UFS domU root partion in a dom0 ZFS zvol) but places higher demand on the networking interfaces. Another option would be to create a big ZFS pool in the dom0 which is then allocated to each domU as zvols for data, which would then be used to create UFS (or perhaps ZFS) filesystems. Would something like this perform better or worse than using NFS? --joe
Joseph Mocker wrote:> If you throw something like NFS into the mix, there are some very > interesting options available for using ZFS directly, indirectly and > via NFS. All with different possible advantages and disadvantages. I > would be interested to hear what people think of the different > performance and efficiency of the different options. > > For example, one idea I had was to place the domU''s on a mirrored > zvol, but place the domU data on a ZFS pool either on the dom0 or on > another machine, and mount the pool via NFS in the domU. > > This gets rid of what I call the "filesystem-in-a-filesystem" (for > example UFS domU root partion in a dom0 ZFS zvol) but places higher > demand on the networking interfaces. > > Another option would be to create a big ZFS pool in the dom0 which is > then allocated to each domU as zvols for data, which would then be > used to create UFS (or perhaps ZFS) filesystems. Would something like > this perform better or worse than using NFS? > > --joe >Good question. Right now, under linux/Xen 3.0, I use LVM2 to carve up my disks into volumes in dom0, then assign volumes to domU guests. I was planning on doing the same thing with ZFS. It gives me quite a bit of flexibility, which is the primary concern for me right now (performance is secondary, as disk I/O is not my bottleneck). I would certainly be interested in considering NFS over network loopback as a possibility. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA
Erik Trimble wrote:> Good question. > > Right now, under linux/Xen 3.0, I use LVM2 to carve up my disks into > volumes in dom0, then assign volumes to domU guests. I was planning > on doing the same thing with ZFS. It gives me quite a bit of > flexibility, which is the primary concern for me right now > (performance is secondary, as disk I/O is not my bottleneck). I would > certainly be interested in considering NFS over network loopback as a > possibility. >Can you explain your thoughts around ZFS a little further? I''m trying to get my head around the possibilities with Xen. Would it be possible to mount a zfs filesystem in a domU that was created and is managed by a zpool in dom0?
Joseph Mocker wrote:> Erik Trimble wrote: > >> Good question. >> >> Right now, under linux/Xen 3.0, I use LVM2 to carve up my disks into >> volumes in dom0, then assign volumes to domU guests. I was planning >> on doing the same thing with ZFS. It gives me quite a bit of >> flexibility, which is the primary concern for me right now >> (performance is secondary, as disk I/O is not my bottleneck). I would >> certainly be interested in considering NFS over network loopback as a >> possibility. >> >> > Can you explain your thoughts around ZFS a little further? I''m trying to > get my head around the possibilities with Xen. > > Would it be possible to mount a zfs filesystem in a domU that was > created and is managed by a zpool in dom0? > _______________________________________________ > xen-discuss mailing list > xen-discuss@opensolaris.org >One thing I often do is create a zvol on a pool in dom0 and give that as the root disk (or other disk) to a domU. One really neat thing about that is you can clone the disk to quickly deploy further copies of the installation. After the install a boot up the domU and sys-unconfig it in solaris to remove all network config. I shut it down and take a snapshot. Then whenever I want a new Solaris image I simply clone that snapshot and I have a freshly installed disk to boot up in my new domU. The other advantage of this is it uses very little space in the pool, just the changes between each domU take up real space as ZFS is copy on write Chris