libvirt users - Apr 2017 - Re: libvirt-lxc: good for production?

Dear all,

I'm a happy lxc (lxd) user with a need to add a bunch of KVM images to the
mix. More importantly I need to have some simple frontend to give users the
ability to quickly run some VMs for testing.

Researching the topic brought me to virt-manager and from there libvirt.
I've had however a hard time to answer a few questions that I hope this
list can help me with:

1) is the libvirt-lxc driver actively developed? there's been a lot of
upgrades to lxc and there seems to be relatively little activity on the lxc
driver
2) is libvirt-lxc to be used in production to begin with? every single
guide I found about libvirt pretty much points to KVM usage, with simple
/bin/sh examples with lxc.  Furthermore stuff like virt-install seems to be
exclusively catered to full os/KVM images creation, with no obvious way to
create a container image.

thanks for any input, even just docs I missed that explain the avove would
be most helpful.

Spike
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On 04/03/2017 04:02 AM, Spike wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I'm a happy lxc (lxd) user with a need to add a bunch of KVM images to
the
> mix. More importantly I need to have some simple frontend to give users the
> ability to quickly run some VMs for testing.
>
> Researching the topic brought me to virt-manager and from there libvirt.
> I've had however a hard time to answer a few questions that I hope this
> list can help me with:
>
> 1) is the libvirt-lxc driver actively developed? there's been a lot of
> upgrades to lxc and there seems to be relatively little activity on the lxc
> driver
Yes it is. I don't know what are the features that lxc-tools introduced 
and looking into their news files it seems like they are mostly fixing 
bugs rather than introducing new functionality. Moreover, lxc-tools come 
with some infrastructure (e.g. prepared images for containers). Libvirt 
doesn't have those.
> 2) is libvirt-lxc to be used in production to begin with? every single
> guide I found about libvirt pretty much points to KVM usage, with simple
> /bin/sh examples with lxc.  Furthermore stuff like virt-install seems to be
> exclusively catered to full os/KVM images creation, with no obvious way to
> create a container image.
That's because KVM (well, qemu) is our most intense developed driver. 
But LXC gets some attention too. I think it is production ready and if 
you give it some testing you'll find the same.

Michal

thank you Michal, appreciate your input, I'll invest some more time and set
up a full test system mirroring our prod and see how it works out. I'm
gonna start another thread on images/templates because that's another area
where I've found a lack of information and could do with some input. thanks.

Spike

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 2:11 AM Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
wrote:
> On 04/03/2017 04:02 AM, Spike wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I'm a happy lxc (lxd) user with a need to add a bunch of KVM
images to
> the
> > mix. More importantly I need to have some simple frontend to give
users
> the
> > ability to quickly run some VMs for testing.
> >
> > Researching the topic brought me to virt-manager and from there
libvirt.
> > I've had however a hard time to answer a few questions that I hope
this
> > list can help me with:
> >
> > 1) is the libvirt-lxc driver actively developed? there's been a
lot of
> > upgrades to lxc and there seems to be relatively little activity on
the
> lxc
> > driver
>
> Yes it is. I don't know what are the features that lxc-tools introduced
> and looking into their news files it seems like they are mostly fixing
> bugs rather than introducing new functionality. Moreover, lxc-tools come
> with some infrastructure (e.g. prepared images for containers). Libvirt
> doesn't have those.
>
> > 2) is libvirt-lxc to be used in production to begin with? every single
> > guide I found about libvirt pretty much points to KVM usage, with
simple
> > /bin/sh examples with lxc.  Furthermore stuff like virt-install seems
to
> be
> > exclusively catered to full os/KVM images creation, with no obvious
way
> to
> > create a container image.
>
> That's because KVM (well, qemu) is our most intense developed driver.
> But LXC gets some attention too. I think it is production ready and if
> you give it some testing you'll find the same.
>
> Michal
>