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Red Hat Pledges 'Integrated Virtualization'
OSS_ilation writes "Red Hat was all about virtualization in a recent announcement for an 'integrated virtualization' initiative with XenSource and chipmakers AMD and Intel. The move was seen as a way for Red Hat to bring its commitment to virtualization technology into 'sharper focus [...] with the release of a product roadmap that includes virtualization technology built into its enterprise version of Linux.' Red Hat's CTO, Brian Stevens, said the move would remove the complex 'rocket science' aspect of virtualization, and drive the technology into more enterprises as a result."
No matter what the haters say, Red Hat is one of the main distributions I go to when building a new server (CentOS if no support needed). Things like integrated SELinux, easy to use yum (or rpm apt-get), and now virtualization make it very impressive.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I'm sorry, obviously I don't need it, because I don't have a clue what it is. What is this "virtualization"? Linky, please?
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From what I gathered from the article, it looks like Red Hat is porting their distro to the Xen virtual machines and then packaging that with the natively-compiled OS as a virtual machine manager. It's nice to see a distro pick up Xen officially and package it an easy-to-use way, since Xen has very impressive performance. The article or the summary probably should have included a link to the Xen web site, so if you want to know more: the Xen site.
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I'm wondering if they aren't just going to Include Xen, this would explain the sudden push on Xen's part to get a working FC4 installer out the door.
:) Either way you go this is going to be a good thing.
.. people are going to need help with this for years to come. I think it will help us do what we like doing (plan networks) instead of worrying so much about the semantics of getting (x software) installed and working. This means easier work, quicker turnover and more clients.
/dev/shm allowing execution, and other (seemingly) little quirks that allow so much spam to wind its way throughout the internet. They're catching up, it seems with just how people are using their product, hosting web sites (broadly). I hope they also make it safer in the process so that whatever layer they use for virtualization doesn't also get a rep for being insecure.
I'm not the world's biggest RH fan as far as using it, however I do respect that RH basically made Linux the household word that it is.
The end result, regardless of the politics is going to be web sites and databases remaining available to visitors a larger percent of the time, and end users getting a firmer grasp on how their OS works
For consultants specializing in helping to bring virtualization to the table for their clients, fear not
My concern is RH distributes (stock) very insecurely. My hope is they also address issues like
I'm not a huge Fedora fan, but I do respect them enough to withold judgement until I see what they put out. I guess you could count me as 'cautious, but anxious' to see it.
Probably RTFA, trying to figure out WTF 'Integrated Virtualization' means.
A blog about stuff.
This is great news. I'm currently involved in a rollout of Red Hat Enterprise for a large Govt Department in Western Australia and we have had to make extensive use of VMWare's ESX. Having Xen in RH would streamline our development process and make a Red Hat ES development environment more attractive for large enterprise use.
It can take a couple of forms. In one form, it would be hooks for a VMM requiring a host OS.
In another form (which I know that Xen supports) it provides ways for the VMM to have control over the host OS, though Xen supposedly supports a number of these methods though ways not requiring modification to the source code.
There are others too (IE, replicating an image of a running OS, snapshotting the OS).
The article doesn't really tell you what they mean at all. I've seen all of these discussed in the context of Linux and Xen before. In fact, I thought that most of those were implemented.
A couple of months ago I was faced with the problem of needing to host multiple domains on one system. I initially considered Xen for my virtual servers need. However when I learned that this solution would not share the memory (each Vserver would have to have its dedicated memory) I decided to try out Linux Vserver. I have been a happy user of Linux Vserver since then.
With Linux Vserver you only run one kernel on your system where with Xen each virtual server runs its own kernel. This presents some limitations for Linux Vserver. For example the guest virtual servers cannot have the network loopback interface lo. But almost all of these I could live without.
Now if I want to start adding more virtual servers I can, without having to worry about running out of memory.
To put it simply (I don't know the more in-depth stuff off the top of my head) Xen won't run an unmodified x86 OS as a guest (DomU). Instead of actually emulating the physical devices it provides ways for the guest OSes to request services from it through specialized "drivers", for one thing. Once the kernel/driver work is done, however, the fact that you're running under Xen does not affect your userspace apps.
So you can only run operating systems that have been modified to run under Xen. So far Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Plan9 have undergone modification, at least according to http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/OSCompatibility
Yes, they do.
You sound like a bitter, bitter Slashdotter.
This "Fedora's a beta testbed for suckers" stuff is utter crap. Fedora is a testbed not for stability, but for cutting edge technologies that may filter down into Enterprise many months later. And from what I hear, FC5 will introduce some exciting new things. The stuff that goes in isn't generally any more unstable or poorly-built that the pristine sources from which it derives, plus you've got the support of the community and the Bugzilla.
The Fedoras are nice, powerful distributions. Far nicer (and to be honest, I think more polised) than Enterprise. For me, they've got the right balance of modern usability and technical accessibility. Yes, I like cutting edge.
Only the technology is named User Mode Linux (UML) instead of Xen. Xen still requires you to jump trough quite a number of hoops before you have a virtual machine running. With UML it is so simple you can start, stop & create new ones on demand like is done at linuxzoo.net
With xen you need a modified host kernel and do some tricky stuff with LVM to use Copy on write disks. With lvm it is the default, you can just point to a base image and have the users modifications in a separate file. The downside is the speed penalty: UML is 40-50% slower than Xen.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
This is no longer true with the use of Intel's VT or AMD's Pacifica CPU features. Xen originally had to have this OS-level hack because of limitations of the x86 architecture making it impossible to completely virtualize. Intel and AMD have solved this. You can buy Pentium 4's with VT *right now* and run un-modified windows guest's on Xen. The AMD M2 and the next set of Intel chips (the core/core-duo's desktop and server cousins) will all support this.
Xen works with any OS as long as either the kernel has been modified to fit virtualization, or the processor has extensions that support it directly. So either way, Xen allow just any old system, though it isn't tied to a particular platform.
Just a word of caution though: Xen is "new technology," which basically means it isn't the most stable product right now, especially given its level of technical sophistication. Similarly, the new processors from AMD and Intel are, well, new; they will require some time in the market before they are used adequately.
All in all though, the technology is pretty exciting. Some researchers I work with are looking into using Xen on SMPs with multiple Ethernet ports. Since vanilla Ethernet requires the kernel for TCP, multiprocessors tend to have trouble adequately using the multiple communication links. With virtualization though, there can be one instance of the OS per processor, which means one TCP stack per processor, which means one Ethernet port per processor.
I've been using the FC5RC3 on a test system which uses Xen for a wacky combo of MySQL, and PHP that some groupware requires which conflicted with the standard Core packages.
From what I've seen in going from "Rolling Your Own" to the FC5 distro, is that Fedora got it RIGHT on this one. "It Just Works" for me.
When the host machine gets rebooted, it doesn't even reboot the Guests. They just get suspended, and resumed when the machine comes back up.
Two Thumbs Up.
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I haven't really been able to find much information on this, so maybe you know: with Xen 3 and the VT extentions does the guest OS still need special drivers? It seems to me that there would still be a performance advantage to having special drivers rather than having to virtualize devices. But maybe there's some clever trick in the VT extensions that I'm not taking into account.