Hello, I remember checking the xVM on OpenSolaris one year ago, but for some reason decided it was not yet at a stable point to be used. So I have now some virtualbox running on solaris servers, not without any problem though... What is the state of xVM now? Should I switch to xVM for serious virtualization? Will I find all the full features announced on latest virtualbox? In these days of Sunset...are both solutions going to be developed? Thanks for any suggestion, Gabriele. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
I''ve same question! On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Gabriele Bulfon <gbulfon@sonicle.com> wrote:> Hello, I remember checking the xVM on OpenSolaris one year ago, but for some reason decided it was not yet at a stable point to be used. > So I have now some virtualbox running on solaris servers, not without any problem though... > What is the state of xVM now? Should I switch to xVM for serious virtualization? > Will I find all the full features announced on latest virtualbox? > In these days of Sunset...are both solutions going to be developed? > > Thanks for any suggestion, > Gabriele. > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > xen-discuss mailing list > xen-discuss@opensolaris.org >
Gabriele Bulfon wrote:> What is the state of xVM now? Should I switch to xVM for serious > virtualization? >What sort of workloads are you running ? I would think that should guide you down a Xen or VirtualBox path. I''m not quite sure what you mean about serious virtualization. There are a lot of difference between the two approaches and a lot of misconceptions as well. Not that I want to start a vbox thread on a Xen discussion list :-) but what sorts of issues were you having with your vbox setup ? As for what''s staying and what''s not - you might want to take a look at the webcasts at http://www.oracle.com/events/productstrategy/index.html. I found them very helpful. Bob
Thanks for replying ;) At the moment I had to stay with VBox 2.2.x, because 3.x was a panic at the time of deployment. Problem is, 2.2.x does not support multiprocessors, and my 12 cores cannot be allocated into the virtual machines. Second problem is windows 2003 machines are installed with single processor kernel, maybe bringing problems when I''ll switch to 3.x and multiprocessor. My typical situation is a Solaris host running base services like firewall, dns, gateway, dual network (lan and wan), network backup ecc. This Solaris host will run the VBox machines (or the xen hypervisor) I usually have 3 guests: 2 Solaris and 1 Windows. One Solaris is for all the internet stuff (cyrus, postfix, spamassassin, clamd, proxy, apache, tomcat ecc. ecc.). Second Solaris is for legacy applications (old style legacy). One windows is for LAN Windows Domain. The host takes care of all the network protection and stuff to direct traffic between LAN, WAN and Virtual Machines, via ipfilter. I''m having problems of performance on the Windows DC. Every time I dcpromo a virtualized machine, it slows down a lot, and DC tools are a pain (takes 1-5 mins to open DC users, freezing the machine until open). This happen always, with simple straightforward domain, never happened on bare metal. On Solaris guests, sharings with samba are very slow, sometimes producing error on high network traffic. Can''t say if 3.x would help me at the moment, as 3.0.x was a real pain (crashes everywhere), and I''m waiting to see people happy about new releases. I was hoping xVM would take me out of this hell... :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
> > I''m having problems of performance on the Windows DC. Every time I dcpromo a virtualized machine, it slows down a lot, and DC tools are a pain (takes 1-5 mins to open DC users, freezing the machine until open). > This happen always, with simple straightforward domain, never happened on bare metal. >This sounds like a server setup, so xvm(xen) seems to be a better fit. But windows2003 is bad for virtualisation, you would have a tons better experience when you use win2008R2, we have switched here on our xvm installation some times ago. It is a big difference, the only missing piece is the pv driver support, but it seems that James Harper may fill this gap soon (I have installed a test version of his gplpv yesterday on my win7 test guest, runs fine so far). May be some help from this side is possile (2008 x64 requires enabling testsigning, may be there is some version that could be stabilized and properly signed?). florian
I suspected my best choice to be xVM. Is it ready for production? Will I have any Solaris kernel difference by running the xvm kernel? I will need to run some parts of my softwares inside the host (ipfilter, bacula, named, etc). About w2k3: why does 2k8 runs better than 2k3 on virtual? I will check, surely. Thx agian ;) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On 02/20/10 09:29 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:> I suspected my best choice to be xVM. > Is it ready for production? > Will I have any Solaris kernel difference by running the xvm kernel? I will need to run some parts of my softwares inside the host (ipfilter, bacula, named, etc). > > About w2k3: why does 2k8 runs better than 2k3 on virtual? I will check, surely. > > Thx agian ;) >Hello, I''ve never checked VB but I run a home server with a setup looking like I think you want yours to be (but more as a test than real prod). My server is a quad core Q6600 with 8GB ram (non-ECC btw, :-( ). hich I have run xvm every new version of SXCE from b75 (I think) to b130, then migrated to b131. I just upgraded to b132. New times, because I also changed my upgrade way : I used to do fresh installs on my system pool (with the SXCE late text-installer) and I now upgraded via pkg-update, which seems ok. Now the hosts : they are run on zvols : I run a windows server 2008 R2 (on evaluation) acting as AD server for both virtual and real clients. Also is the name server. I have a virtual W7 client and a couple of real clients running W7 and XP (my laptop, wy wife''s, my sun''s desktop... I also run in a zone a cyrus-imap server. BTW you should try zones instead of xvm guests, if you have no specific reason to want a full blown guest host My setup works allright, I cannot advise you against VB, but I can try to answer your questions, though, as said, this is a non-prod oriented setup. Bruno
Am 21.02.2010 07:58, schrieb Bruno Damour:> On 02/20/10 09:29 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote: >> I suspected my best choice to be xVM. >> Is it ready for production? >> Will I have any Solaris kernel difference by running the xvm kernel? I >> will need to run some parts of my softwares inside the host (ipfilter, >> bacula, named, etc). >> >> About w2k3: why does 2k8 runs better than 2k3 on virtual? I will >> check, surely.... It''s the kernel, ask microsoft for the real why, they usually don''t publish so much details.> Hello,...> > Now the hosts : they are run on zvols : > I run a windows server 2008 R2 (on evaluation) acting as AD server for > both virtual and real clients. > Also is the name server. > I have a virtual W7 client and a couple of real clients running W7 and... Maybe you like to have a test ride with James Harpers work (GPLPV), currently I think you would have to send him a Mail to get a nice usable version for W7/2008R2 (x64, I guess?). He always looks for guys running half the way serious systems as "fun productive", to have them testing the drivers in normal days business. This link may be of some use if you want to try: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd419910.aspx Florian
Gabriele Bulfon wrote:> I suspected my best choice to be xVM. >If you are spending a lot of time in the kernel, perhaps. Don''t underestimate VirtualBox though - it''s a pretty tough little creature :-) You mentioned earlier that you were running an older version of vbox. You might give 3.1.4 a try. I''ve been running it successfully since it was released a couple of weeks ago, and it''s predecessor 3.1.2 for as long as it''s been available. Except for SMP Solaris guests, I''m pretty happy with the results. For the best performance, make sure and install the guest additions. If your hardware supports VT-x/AMD-V then make sure they are on in the BIOS and tell vbox to use them. If you have hardware support for nested page tables, make sure and turn that on too. My test systems are core i7 920s and they also support VPIDs. I also make sure they are on. For your Windows guests, you might consider using virt-io net for your networking configuration and install the KVM pv drivers. I am using a bridged network configuration and my guests are getting pretty good network performance (near wire speed and no detectable latencies). I also make heavy use of internal-only network for machine to machine communications, like sharing NFS file systems.> Is it ready for production? > Will I have any Solaris kernel difference by running the xvm kernel? I will need to run some parts of my softwares inside the host (ipfilter, bacula, named, etc). >Are you asking for dom0 or a domU ? For the domU, Solaris (meaning Solaris 10 here) is run as an HVM guest, so there are no kernel differences. If you are running a fairly recent Solaris 10 update, it will detect that you are running as an HVM machine and use the PV disk and network drivers, making it a PV/HVM hybrid - sort of the best of both worlds. It runs pretty well in this configuration. As for the dom0, you are running a pv OpenSolaris kernel (there is no PV Solaris). For the items you listed, there shouldn''t be any noticeable differences. Your differences here will be OpenSolaris vs Solaris and where a few things have moved around and modernized (quite a bit).> About w2k3: why does 2k8 runs better than 2k3 on virtual? I will check, surely. >PV disk and network drivers maybe ? Can''t help you there - don''t spend much time in the Windows side of things, other than setting up test machines for various purposes. Bob
Thanks for all your valuable suggestions on vbox ;) I upgraded my test machine to latest vbox, though I can''t test all the features because hw is a v20z with amd not hw-virtex enabled... I''m testing to see if it stays up working safely, so I''ll try a working Sun X series machine to check all the virtex flags. Anyway, on the v20z I did not notice any improvement in performance. I thought I could work with "virtio" on my solaris guest, but it does not..... When will we have virtio in opensolaris? Or...is there anything I could do to make this network faster on solaris guest? (at the moment, throughput of the guest is halved with respect to the host, and tests run on a 100Mb switch, so...host runs at full 100Mb...guest runs 50Mb...) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Am 22.02.2010 14:50, schrieb Gabriele Bulfon:> Thanks for all your valuable suggestions on vbox ;) > > I upgraded my test machine to latest vbox, though I can''t test all the features > because hw is a v20z with amd not hw-virtex enabled... > I''m testing to see if it stays up working safely, so I''ll try a working Sun X series machine to check all the virtex flags. > > Anyway, on the v20z I did not notice any improvement in performance. > I thought I could work with "virtio" on my solaris guest, but it does not..... > When will we have virtio in opensolaris? > Or...is there anything I could do to make this network faster on solaris guest? > (at the moment, throughput of the guest is halved with respect to the host, and tests run on a 100Mb switch, so...host runs at full 100Mb...guest runs 50Mb...)Oh ok when your hardware does not support hw-virt at all, then you could drop xvm at all (may be pure pv should work, but for sure no windows or solaris 10). Florian
Just my test machine is non-hw-virt. I have 2 hard-working machines that do support it. I will shortly change my test machine to be able to test everything. Anyway, should I forget SMP on Solaris Guest? Should I do it on W2K3 guest? Will ioapic slow down my machine if I want more cpus? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Gabriele Bulfon wrote:> Anyway, should I forget SMP on Solaris Guest? >For VirtualBox, yes - for now. There is a Solaris/OpenSolaris forum at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewforum.php?f=20 that might be of help for you. There is also a mailing list where you can ask the question. I don''t recall any particular problems with Solaris 10 SMP guests on Xen, as long as you have hardware virtualization since Solaris 10 is not paravirutalized.> Should I do it on W2K3 guest? Will ioapic slow down my machine if I want more cpus? >I''ve been running Fedora SMP guests on VirtualBox 3.1.2 and 3.1.4 for quite a few computational workloads with no problems. I don''t have any experience running Win2k3 guests for anything other than a smoke test. IOAPIC is required for more than one CPU. I think the warning was for a single CPU guest, not an SMP guest. Bob