Richard W.M. Jones
2007-Nov-13 11:50 UTC
Re: [Fedora-xen] Fedora''s Xen Compared to XenExpress
thewird wrote:> --- "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com> wrote: >> Mathew Brown wrote: >>> Hi, >>> I was wondering what the differences between Fedora 8''s Xen and >>> XenExpress v4 are (besides the limits of 4GB or RAM and four >> virtual >>> hosts). Is the functionality and stability the same or is >> Fedora''s >>> Xen more cutting-edge? Thank you for your help. >> I''m not very familiar with XenExpress, but I''m fairly sure that the >> management software used by XE is some proprietary code. Fedora uses >> >> libvirt and virt-manager for management, has no artificial >> limitations >> on memory, CPUs, guests etc., and is completely open source. > > Does Fedora 8 have any way to limit the network speed on the guests?I assume, though I''ve not tried it, that you should be able to use ordinary Linux mechanisms such as the ''tc(8)'' command to enforce a traffic control and shaping on the vifX.0 devices. To be honest, it''s a bit of an unusual request: mostly people complain about not getting enough network performance :-) Rich. -- Emerging Technologies, Red Hat - http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/ Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No. 03798903
--- "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:> thewird wrote: > > --- "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com> wrote: > >> Mathew Brown wrote: > >>> Hi, > >>> I was wondering what the differences between Fedora 8''s Xen and > >>> XenExpress v4 are (besides the limits of 4GB or RAM and four > >> virtual > >>> hosts). Is the functionality and stability the same or is > >> Fedora''s > >>> Xen more cutting-edge? Thank you for your help. > >> I''m not very familiar with XenExpress, but I''m fairly sure that > the > >> management software used by XE is some proprietary code. Fedora > uses > >> > >> libvirt and virt-manager for management, has no artificial > >> limitations > >> on memory, CPUs, guests etc., and is completely open source. > > Does Fedora 8 have any way to limit the network speed on the > > guests? > > I assume, though I''ve not tried it, that you should be able to use > ordinary Linux mechanisms such as the ''tc(8)'' command to enforce a > traffic control and shaping on the vifX.0 devices. > > To be honest, it''s a bit of an unusual request: mostly people > complain > about not getting enough network performance :-)Reason being the only reason I''m still using XenEnterprise for my VPS''s is because of the network limiter and the nice graphs which (which I could live without). With XenSource being bought out by Citrix and the price tripling for a license, I''m looking for alternatives. I asked the datacenter already to ship me one of my dual-core''s so I could test Fedora 8 at home. Marco Jorge
Richard W.M. Jones
2007-Nov-13 12:21 UTC
Re: [Fedora-xen] Fedora''s Xen Compared to XenExpress
thewird wrote:> Reason being the only reason I''m still using XenEnterprise for my VPS''s > is because of the network limiter and the nice graphs which (which I > could live without). With XenSource being bought out by Citrix and the > price tripling for a license, I''m looking for alternatives. I asked the > datacenter already to ship me one of my dual-core''s so I could test > Fedora 8 at home.If you want to make nice graphs, then I''ve recently contributed a patch to collectd which collects stats through libvirt: http://mailman.verplant.org/pipermail/collectd/2007-November/001297.html (I think the patch is in the latest released tarball). http://collectd.org/ Rich. -- Emerging Technologies, Red Hat - http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/ Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No. 03798903
Daniel P. Berrange
2007-Nov-13 13:57 UTC
Re: [Fedora-xen] Fedora''s Xen Compared to XenExpress
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 11:50:32AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:> thewird wrote: > >--- "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com> wrote: > >>Mathew Brown wrote: > >>>Hi, > >>> I was wondering what the differences between Fedora 8''s Xen and > >>> XenExpress v4 are (besides the limits of 4GB or RAM and four > >>virtual > >>> hosts). Is the functionality and stability the same or is > >>Fedora''s > >>> Xen more cutting-edge? Thank you for your help. > >>I''m not very familiar with XenExpress, but I''m fairly sure that the > >>management software used by XE is some proprietary code. Fedora uses > >> > >>libvirt and virt-manager for management, has no artificial > >>limitations > >>on memory, CPUs, guests etc., and is completely open source. > > > >Does Fedora 8 have any way to limit the network speed on the guests? > > I assume, though I''ve not tried it, that you should be able to use > ordinary Linux mechanisms such as the ''tc(8)'' command to enforce a > traffic control and shaping on the vifX.0 devices.Yes, if you modified the ''/etc/xen/scripts/vif-bridge'' script you could make it run ''tc'' against the vifX.0 devices when bringing up a guest to give it a fixed data limit. Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|
If you''re thinking of using Fedora Xen in production, my advice is to use RHEL or CentOS instead. Maybe things have gotten better, but in the FC5 and FC6 days, I was burned many times by "upgrading" only to find that the new xen had a bug with the new kernel, and that there was no good way to roll back upgrades to Xen, just the kernel. It may be that you need features not available in RHEL or CentOS, but I didn''t, and I''ve been a much happier camper on something where I don''t have to fear updates quite as much. On Nov 13, 2007, at 4:02 AM, thewird wrote:> Reason being the only reason I''m still using XenEnterprise for my > VPS''s > is because of the network limiter and the nice graphs which (which I > could live without). With XenSource being bought out by Citrix and the > price tripling for a license, I''m looking for alternatives. I asked > the > datacenter already to ship me one of my dual-core''s so I could test > Fedora 8 at home.