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Linux VMs For Everyone
Over at Newsforge, Grant Gross has written an interesting overview of the options available for hosting multiple Linux installations on virtual machines; interestingly, it's not just for those with the big bucks for high-end IBM hardware, though that's surely nice.
Hey look, I'm not trolling!
RedHat fucking sucks! And, f.p.
1st post
In particular, VMware's "undoable disks" are great in this regard.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Then install linux, no need to buy a new machine.
how GROSS!
a Beowulf cluster of these things!
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
it's not just for those with the big bucks for high-end IBM hardware
This isn't really new. Slashdot had an article about it a month or two ago. Unfortunately the link escapes me.
After seeing that article, I presented it at work. We now use it to keep the logging facility and services separate from each other, so a break in to one service doesn't compromise the others or the logs.
It works pretty slick.
Pink Floyd - Time
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught of half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Please continue with your business.
autodot/0.4 (perl/5.006001)
Sugar magnolia, blossoms blooming, heads all empty and I don't care,
Saw my baby down by the river, knew she'd have to come up soon for air.
Sweet blossom come on, under the willow, we can have high times if you'll abide
We can discover the wonders of nature, rolling in the rushes down by the riverside.
She's got everything delightful, she's got everything I need,
Takes the wheel when I'm seeing double, pays my ticket when I speed
She comes skimmin' through rays of violet, she can wade in a drop of dew,
She don't come and I don't follow, waits backstage while I sing to you.
Well, she can dance a Cajun rhythm, jump like a willys in four wheel drive.
She's a summer love for spring, fall and winter. She can make happy any man alive.
Sugar magnolia, ringing that bluebell, caught up in sunlight, come on out singing
I'll walk you in the sunshine, come on honey, come along with me.
She's got everything delightful, she's got everything I need,
A breeze in the pines and the sun and bright moonlight, lazing in the sunshine yes
indeed.
Sometimes when the cuckoo's crying, when the moon is half way down,
Sometimes when the night is dying, I take me out and I wander around, I wander
'round.
Sunshine, daydream, walking in the tall trees, going where the wind goes
Blooming like a red rose, breathing more freely,
Ride our singin', I'll walk you in the morning sunshine
Sunshine, daydream. Sunshine, daydream. Walking in the sunshine.
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
Well you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I'm a woman's man; no time to talk.
Music loud and women warm,
I've been kicked around, since I was born.
chorus:
And now it's all right, it's okay
And you may look the other way
We can try to understand
The New York Time's effect on man
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother
You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'
And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
Ah ha ha ha stayin' alive, staying alive
Ah ha ha ha stayin' alive
Well now I get low and I get high
And if I can't get either, I really try
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I'm a dancin' man, and I just can't lose
chorus:
You know it's all right, it's okay
I'll live to see another day
..
Life goin' nowhere
Somebody help me
Somebody help me, yeah
Life goin' nowhere
Somebody help me, yeah
Stayin' alive
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
Cool! Not only are you allowed to run Linux on your computer for FREE but you are allowed to run 1000 copies of Linux on your computer for FREE!!
Now, 1000 copies of Windows on a machine would cost... $100,000? Nehehe. Linux rocks =P
I can't remember my windows days all that well, but doesn't the Microsoft Windows license apply to a single computer??? Wouldn't that mean you can run as many copies of windows, as long as they are on the same computer, as you want?
Who knows? Maybe Micro$$oft did shoot themselves in a foot?
I think the Winter Olympics are racist. They should be abolished.
No, I didn't have any reason for posting this. I just thought it was interesting.
Microsoft and Intel have been squabbling over this very issue recently.
Imagine what a beowulf of these could do
Slashdot editors try to silence criticism!
The new Northwood 2.2gHz 0.13-micron P4, as I mentioned earlier, seems made for Windows-XP. It's got special chipset drivers; it's got an 'application accelerator'; it's got Rambus working overtime.
For Linux it's got nothing special to offer -- no accelerators or drivers. Just 2.2 in clock speed and a memory controller that exploits RDRAM nicely, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at. But it's got that on Windows as well.
So imagine my surprise when I benchmarked it with the only test I know that crosses the great divide between Linux and Windows -- the Quake-3 FPS benchmark -- and found that the performance of this Windows-loving kit was considerably better on Linux, at least in that context.
A brief re-cap of the hardware:
One Intel D850MVSE mobo with Northwood P4; 512M PC800 RDRAM; two Maxtor D740X 20G ATA-133 drives on the mobo's onboard ATA-100 controller, one booting Win-XP Pro on FAT and one booting SuSE 7.3 Pro on ReiserFS and both installed clean and subsequently patched; and a 64M DDR GeForce AGP4.
The Windows drive is patched with whatever the MS auto-update cloak-and-dagger process does to it. The Linux drive is patched to kernel 2.4.17. The video and OpenGL drivers for both OS's were upgraded with the most recent files from Nvidia's Web site.
On the Windows drive I installed all the Intel chipset drivers and the Application Accelerator. The Linux kernel is reasonably optimized for the HDD and the P4, but with APIC disabled, as it just won't run on the 850 mobo otherwise.
But that's hardly a problem.
Both operating systems, obviously, had to be running at the same level of display detail, and the limitations of XFree86 pretty well determined that for me. Both desktops were set at 16-bit color depth, and in both cases Quake was set with the following display options for the first series of runs:
Mode: 1024x786
Color depth: 16-bit
Lighting: lightmap
Geometric detail: high
Texture Detail: maximum
Texture quality: 16-bit
Filter: trilinear
It seems a bit skimpy, but rich detail takes more from the graphics accelerator whereas less detail gives us a better look at the CPU, chipset and system memory.
Win-XP returned an average of 72.7 FPS, which is worse than I'd expect from a P3 800 on '98 with about 128M RAM, or a 486DX 100 on Win 3.1 with about 16M RAM. (You see the pattern here....)
Linux returned an average of 80.2 FPS, which is significantly better, though hardly brilliant. But let's keep in mind that the system I'm using here is virtually Linux-hostile. The next one won't be.
With even less detail, further reducing dependency on the graphics card, we got better numbers from the CPU. The breakdown was similar, though Windows narrowed the gap a bit.
Mode: 640x480
Color depth: 16-bit
Lighting: vertex
Geometric detail: low
Texture Detail: minimum
Texture quality: 16-bit
Filter: bilinear
This gave us averages of 272.2 FPS on Windows and 304.7 on Linux.
We can infer that Win-XP is so greedy for system resources that even the most potent (and most expensive) CPU on the market, coupled with a hefty chunk of very fast RDRAM (also very expensive), only suffices to make it work nicely.
Other considerations
It's quite difficult to compare the performance of a given system on both Linux and Windows. The Quake benchmark is a rare exception, but basically it's apples and oranges. For example, what can we learn from evaluating the performance of Photoshop on Windows and the Gimp on Linux? Damn little, I reckon.
For that matter, what can we learn from running Netscape, StarOffice and the Gimp on both? It's entirely possible that these applications could have performance issues on a given OS which would skew the results.
I'll certainly try a number of tests like that during the weekend. This way, I hope, a single performance oddity won't cause too much distortion.
It's also worthwhile trying to match a system with an OS. For insight we can look at some of the everyday tasks common to both OS's, and compare them on different systems. I've taken a few common-sense measurements on both SuSE and Win-XP with the Intel 850/Northwood combo, but these won't have meaning until I repeat them on a different system and see where they differ.
Which I'll do, early next week.
I hope they'll finish the job.
Gross? What'd he do, toss John Katz's salad?
e-genera has some neat dynamically reconfigurable computers that amount to a single-rack, virtualized server farm that can run a customized version of SMPed Linux or Win2k/XP.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Can anyone spare a few kilowatts?
Sometimes, I think I need another instance of the OS running when I'm working on 3-4 desktops, with maybe 40-50 apps running concurrently. But then, I think, maybe I'm just working too hard.
Anyhow, We're here, & here, & here, for you, with more coming every day, if you need IT, or just somewhere to hang your hack. Talk about virtual instances/multiplication?, we're like rabbits. Almost everything's GNU now. Don't forget to look here for some really good stuff.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-Epicurus
superstition \Su`per*sti"tion\, n. An ignorant or irrational worship of the Supreme Deity; excessive exactness or rigor in religious opinions or practice; extreme and unnecessary scruples in the observance of religious rites not commanded, or of points of minor importance; also, a rite or practice proceeding from excess of sculptures in religion.
look at the source, IP-ban the people, ive been calling for the banning of klerck for awhile now, but bitchslapping every one with a -1 for posting in a thread, and you better go read that thread, even on topic to the article posts were bitchslapped with -1. This is causing quite a steam, over at kuro5hin, jamie had shit fit about what has happened. This and the Junis story made me decide to no longer post on this site, but then when I realized that if I don't post, they win. I'll only post on this controversy, because now I believe Malda and the editors are indeed lazy and hypocritical. Take a look at meta-mod. The reason why I have negative karma now is because I meta modded negatively and suffered for it. I just wonder when the next free speech article will come out, bc then the flames will begin.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
If youre hosting, you cant beat this solution
..)
Folks over at Solucorp
Have made kernel patch and utilites to make this almost painless, as well as some precompiled kernels, (I would laways roll my own but
This as I said kicks for hosting, its not just a chroot, and its not like the jail on BSD, its....well different.
This isnt somethign youre going to do on your desktop machine , its going to allow you to span resources, this is COMPLETLEY different from VMWare etc, for all the yahoos that are gonna say this has been around forveer.
After SEVERLY abusing our test server to hell an back starting 2-1 we are going to be offering hosting in this enviroment , we have clients that want their own playground but dont want the maintenece, some have semi-secure data theyre just no comfortable on a shared solution and cant quite justify a dedicated box, were already slated for 10 clients and with their current traffic and traffic times, they will all play very nicley on the same machine
P.S. LOAD up on the ram , and make sure to use SCSI , Low ram and Ide will work but start to bog under load, remeber you have 10 different Linux installations trying to access the disk at once.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Remeber the ad for this? It was hilious
..."
... "
A panicking manager type leads police detectives into what appears to be an empty server room. "It's the crime of the century!" the balding, middle-aged, middle manger exclaims over cheesy adventure-movie background music. "Everything's gone!"
"What was stolen?" asks one of the cops.
"Everything," the pointy-haired boss answers, "payroll, R&D, customer records
Of course, our hero, a scruffy-looking geek boy, saves the day. He points to a mainframe in the back of the room, and says, "We moved everything onto that one. It's going to save us a bundle. I sent out an email
plays by a different set of rules that you and I do not understand. I personally turned my back on any sort of organized religious activity. Yet I have read the bible in it entirety at least thrice. I enjoy wickedness. I do not love my fellow man, I do not love my neighbor as myself, I covet all the time (then I go shopping!), I swear like a fucking sailor (not an issue for some faiths, but it was in my former one). Screw it I say. If "God" wants to end the world then I am powerless anyway, I might as well be my own man.
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
...alguém aí fala português também? Esse slashdot deve ter bastante Brasileiros como eu... ou será que estou errado? Se algum brasileiro ler essa notícia por favor responda! ;-)
But how do you assure decent IO in a virtualized machine? I'd imagine it would be pretty poor with the disk head skipping all over the place. I'm also curious if the processor cache would hold up well.
The holy grail seems to me to be cheap processors and disks hooked up via infiniband.
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g g o / \ \ / \ o a \ a t `. : t s` \ s e \ / / \\\ -- \\ : e x \ \/ --~~ ~-- \ x * \ \-~ ~-\ * g \ \ .--------.___\ g
o \ \// ((> \ o
a \ . C ) ((> / a
t /\ C )/ \ (> / t
s / /\ C) RLiegh (> / \ s
e ( C__)\___/ // _/ / \ e
x \ \\// (/ x
* \ \) `---- --' *
g \ \ / / g
o / \ o
a / \ \ a
t / / \ t
s / / \/\/ s
e / e
x x
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
Hahaha. Fuck.
The article talks about how hundreds, even thousands of OSes can run on one machine. Well, what if the underlying VM architecture, or even the hardware itself crashes?
Now you have hundreds, even thousands of customers mad at you... and all their stuff is on just one machine. Yikes!
This incident happened in 1980, when I was 15 years old. My sister rented an
apartment that had a finished basement. In the 1960's, a couple lived on the
2nd. floor of this building. One day, the husband went crazy and strangled
his wife, and then hung himself. At first, I really liked this apartment. It
was like my second home, until a couple moved into the apartment upstairs.
They were cool. We hung out on weekends and even though I was only 15, I
would drink beer with them. Strange things began to happen gradually over
time. Small things began to disapear, windows shaking on windless days, cold
spots in different places. My sisters kitten vanished one day and we never
found it, although we could here it mewing for weeks!!!!! We were sitting
around partying one day,and a noise came from the kitchen. ( my sister had
beads in the doorway that you moved in order to get into or out of the
kitchen.) When we looked over, the beads seperated as if someone was walking
through them!!!!! Ther was nobody there!!!!! I was sitting in a chair in the
corner of the room, middle of summer, no air conditioning. I was all of a
sudden, frezing cold!!!!! My brother ( Thank god he's changed his ways!) had
a gun hidden in the basement. He went to get it one day and a voice from out
of nowhere, demanded him to " PUT THAT GUN DOWN"!!!!! Needless to say, he
did. He never went back into that basement again. For that matter, not even
into the apartment. I should have taken his advice, not to go into the
basement. I was drinking a bit to much one night, and I got sick. My sister
got upset ( rightly so.) She told me to go down the basement to sleep it off.
Now, I know what you are probably thinking. " This guy's drunk and imagining
things". NOWAY!!!!! I staggered down into that basement not really knowing
where I was. I passed out almost instantly. I woke up with a slap to my face
and a voice yelling at me to quote; " GET THE F--K OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU
DRUNKEN BASTARD"!!!!! I was instantly sober!!!!! I never went back to that
house again, until-------- Years later, in 1996, I was driving a taxi cab. I
did'nt recognize the address at first, but for some reason, I felt uneasy
about the job. I saw the address on the house when I pulled up, and my first
thought was, "OH S--T"!!!!! I rang the bell ( reluctantly) and a man came to
the window, looking very angry. I thought, " Great, another happy customer".
A woman answered the door and got into my cab. She seamed to be upbeat and
happy. I told her I was sorry for making her wait so long for a cab, and she
said it was ok. I told her that the guy in the window did'nt look very happy.
She said, " What guy? I live alone"! I did'nt have the heart to tell her my
story.
just for da sake of journalism
isn't this just user-mode linux?
Did Intel fix the x86 self-virtualization problem with the Pentium and laters? I know that the '386 and '486 couldn't fully virtualize themselves, because it was possible for non-supervisor code to look at certain flags.
A 680x0 (x >= 1) could fully virtualize itself, because the condition codes could be accessed separately from the status register (MOV.B D0, CCR as opposed to MOV.W, D0, SR).
Just curious. Oh, and I think the article got it wrong. They said VM has been around for 20+ years, I believe it's closer to 30+. Any old JCL'ers out there?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Somebody set us up the dot bomb.
That could never happen. We use only the best programmers to write the VMs and then test them thoroughly for two, maybe three minutes, sometimes. Talk about bullet proof.
Not a bad start, you can expect a lot of useless (as in not helpful) criticism from some 'special people'. Good luck to you.
You were too slow, jew. I claim this attempted fp in the name of the Waffen SS.
iSeries. (Formerly known as the AS/400).
Up to 31 Linux partitions using the 32 or 64 bit PowerPC kernel, concurrently. Run it on anything from a $20000 model 270 up to the biggest 24 processor machine IBM sells. Available from SuSE, TurboLinux, and RedHat.
I plan to provide "Virtual colocation" based on
UML and (alternatively for people who don't want Linux) VMware for 30$/mo in February.
Physical hardware will be dual 1.6Ghz Athlon MP.
If you are interested in being a beta customer, please contact me.
-alex
I just attended a VMware training session at work (a place very fond of "VM" since they invented it about 35 years ago ;-), and it was made very clear that we must have a valid Windows license for every guest vm running M$ Windows of any sort.
--
A former VM "sysprog"
Can someone explain the practical difference between this and *BSD's jail() environment? On a side note, why *doesn't* Linux support jail()?
The first time I knowingly and deliberately used VM was at NCAR, on the front-end machines to the Cray-1 in 1983.
Each user had a VM, with a specific amount of disk, CPU, and memory allocated. Your copy and even choice of operating system -- MVS, CMS -- ran on that virtual machine. So, like they say, it's been around 20 years or more. I say "knowingly and deliberately" because from 76-82, I'd used VM/CMS on our university's IBM 360, which also used VM -- but student users were barred from actually interacting with VM, so it was just there, use it. (CMS stands for "Conversation Monitoring System" -- scary!)
Back then, when I had a choice (i.e. had an application that didn't require the Cray!), I preferred the far less structured environment of our 4.2 BSD Vax 11/750.
For a mainframe, multiuser or server environment where you need control over everything, and records of everything -- VM the ticket. For your desktop, it's a bit much, really. To turn your desktop into a server, hmmm. Not a bad idea to run VM on it, and run various services in their own virtual machines. A bit more secure than a chroot, since even a buffer overflow bug wouldn't be able to get at the other processes -- they're running in a completely different address space and controlled by, well, a different operating system --or at least an entirely different instance of the same operating system configured differently.
But VM itself is hardly news. Plus ca change, plus ca change pas.
Where can we get that hosting? How much does it cost? What is included (IP, bandwidth, etc)?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Apparently the email didn't get delivered.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The article a little bit skimps on details, bunching VMware and other things in same category.
;)
VMware, plex86 and bochs are in one category: Real virtualization solutions, allowing you to run any operating system. The level of security these tools provide is very high (guest OS shares nothing with host OS. All access is controlled by virtualization software).
Vmware works (surprisingly) pretty damn good, I haven't had an issue with it behaving any differently from a real OS running on same hardware. Of course, its a commercial solution with associated problems (no source, can't embed, pricey, etc). Its very fast, and reasonable on resources.
Plex86 is same idea as vmware, only Free.
Right now, though, plex86 is in state of disrepair, because lead developer has been laid off from Mandrake, and codebase is in flux. You'll have much more luck with Jan-1-2001 snapshots if you want to actually boot up any OS. Don't know how fast it is, never got it to boot up enough to run tests stably.
Bochs is even lower-level approach to virtualization: it can emulate x86 on any processor. Of course, its dog slow and eats lots of memory (Expect 100x hit on performance).
Other solutions (swsoft, ensim, linux virtual server(LVS)) are a lot closer to jail() system call of FreeBSD. With these, you are running one kernel for all "environments". Security is provided by other means ("root" in the jail has a lot of restrictions on it, such as use of IP addresses, etc).
With many of these solutions, you will run in certain incompatibility problems (root not able to things which it should be able to do, but restricted in jail). Transparency is an issue: for example, even though you don't see other jail's processes, there's still a single PID space, and you can tell which PIDs are running by forking 60000 times and recording which PIDS you get and which ones you don't. Also, user doesn't have full control over its environment, for ex, you can't have your own inittab, etc.
However, these solutions don't have any overhead, very resource-nonintensive (you can run 50 jails on one host with almost no performance impact).
Level of security these solutions provide is very questionable: if there's a jail check missing _anywhere_ in kernel where root access is verified, it will lead to a host compromise.
Note: Of the above mentioned solutions, I only worked with LVS (www.linuxvirtualserver.org), and its the only one that is GPL'd.
User-mode-linux (UML) occupies space in between: It doesn't virtualize the processor, but it has a separate kernel running for each VM, for excellent transparency, and reduced risk: As UML itself runs as non-root, even if a bug in UML implementation is found that would allow to make system call to host kernel, it would still at worst result in single-user compromise on the host. (Unlike LVS/jail where it would lead to root host compromise).
The way it works is following: UML is essentially a "port" of linux to linux. (I.E. linux that doesn't run on bare metal, but uses host's services to implement linux). It traps system calls by application and executes them itself.
Currently performance of UML is spotty (each syscall by application results in 3 context switches on host), but its being worked on at amazing pace. (Thanks Jeff)
Summary:
a) if you need to be able to run 10+ 'guest' environments on a host, look at LVS or jail.
b) if you need to run non-windows guest environments, vmware is your answer.
c) If you need to run 1-10 guest environments, with good security and you have memory to spare, look at UML. Its performance is likely to improve soon.
I plan on providing a "virtual colo" service based on UML for linux-oriented people and vmware for people who want to run Windows on their 'machine'. The idea is to provide service to people who outgrew traditional virtual hosting environments, but not quite ready yet (or don't want to pay) to have their own dedicated server. Pricing will be around 30$/mo.
This is not really new info is it ?! There are multiple companiesd out there how have done this and who are making money out of this in the web-hosting market.
This is not even limited to Linux, there are also Sun VMs arround (I've got a SUN VM hosted by NTT/Verio - which works great).
The thing is that this does not always get what you need, if you need direct root access, you won't get it (if it is hosted). I've not really run into these issues, even though I do development on these systems.
cheers.
brrrrrr.
brrrrrr it's cold
on this discussion a lot has been said about VMWARE. i just wish to quickly poit out that VMWARE new licence is redicolously restrictive basically prohibiting any VMware machine to act as a SERVER for any service. Read it yourself if you dont believe it.
The basica idea behind it was to prevent peopel from buying the ""cheap"" 300 USD version and doing virtual hosting but in reality that licence states more than that.
SIncerely
Giovanni Tummarello
www.Wup.it
We dont do commodity hosting, we only host existing clients, or clients we have done development for.
:) , RH 7.2 all current with 2.4.17 (probably rmap-11c tool, ill see)For now this is a limit of the vserver utilities, Backups of your VM root are done from the Root, server that has NO net access. Hosting like this is as I said expensive, but our clients pay for my administration, 300 a month email me if interested.
I am considering putting up another box, for people, a sort of develoment enviroment that we would maintain for these existing clients that want a sandbox aside from their production enviroment, I could possibly hast you there.
Bandwith is limited on that line, it is quite expensive in our area. 10 gigs a month transffer and 5 gigs HD space, on a 1.7 ghz box with 1 gig ram. You get one IP address, all yours
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I've got one of these accounts at webpipe.net. $35/month. 1 static IP. 20GB/month.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
>main(){for(;;)fork();}
Canonical form is:main(){fork();main();}
--
All people seem to need data processing
From the time Business people had a laptop and a desktop. They were running the same Licence on both, saying
"this was a running session that is the same user as the desktop one, so laptop is considered as a "Backup Copy" that doesn't run at the same time as desktop one"
Now M$ just added a line in EULA.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker