Anyone using KVM Virtualization?

[Alzhy]

Redhat has it officially in RHEL 5.4 and RHEV with the ool RHEM Manager released just a few ago...

My tests show it is ready for primetime.

[Rob Leadbeater · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Not using it yet, but had Red Hat in a couple of weeks ago, and they were telling us how good it was...

The proof will be if they manage to take any sales away from VMware. On paper they should be able to !

Cheers,

Rob

[Alzhy]

I know Redhat was uber conservative - only officially incorporating and "supporting" KVM with RHEL 5.4. But it's been GA with Ubuntu for quite some time now.

And with an abundance of KVM managers and GUIs including Cloud Integration (Ubbuntu 9.10) and Redhat now officially releasing RHEV with the kool RHEV Manager - I think it will fly.

I have been using KVM with the plain Virt Manager and it already is acceptably kool.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I have used it. I plan to use it for the following reasons:
1) It has good command line utiltiies. Bill Hassel says real sysadmins don't use GUI. I want to be able to manage virtual systems without using a gui.

2) Red Hat is solid behind it.

I agree it is ready for prime time. Its almost as easy to use as vpars from HP-UX.

SEP

[Alzhy]

Shalom SEP,

KVM actually was hatched there in Israel man. Company called Qumranet (reason why we have qemu?)

I don't think for large KVM installations (aka Cloud) one can't do away with Redhat's kool RHEV Manager (or Ubuntu's UEC) as it incorporates a number of vSPhere like feautres enterprises want - like automatic load balancing, preovisioning, maintenance mode.. But I do agree for small installations - libvirt and virt manager will just do very fine.

I've tested Live Migration successfully with my OS images on NFS and iSCSI btw.

One advantage KVM has is it is full virtualization -- so all ntive drivers are in use -- no vMware ToolZ required.

And tests by some other vendor who has the biggest X86 machine right now (96 way) show one can pack more Virtual Machines comapred to vSphere. And the current default limits of 16 vCPU per VM can actually be tweaked for even bigger SMP virtual machines.

There is also nested VMs-- where a Linux VM already virtualized - can further host a KVM hypervisor can further host VMs on its own.

[Ugo Bellavance (ATQ)]

We're planning on testing RHEV and KVM in 2010. The standalone hypervisor looks cool, but it relies on the RHEV console for management.

[Alzhy]

Ugo...
Have you tested KVM yet?

[wobbe]

How about CentOS?
Will I be able to evaluate all those nice KVM features using CentOS 5.4?

[Alzhy]

Absolutely Sir... in fact CENTOS 5.4 is practically a clone of RHEL 5.4 and the process for establishing KVM and Virt-Manager, etc is exactly the same.

Ditto with Ubuntu Server (8.0.4 to 9.10) which embraced KVM pretty much ahead of the pack and is very very mature and stable.

AM now on my final stages of testing it (not with RHEV though which is a nice management suite to KVM) -- with the only issue remaining being the ability to add physical devices (i.e. - dedicated NIC or FC-HBAs) to a KVM guest (RHEL as well) seemingly not working.

[Alzhy]

A year after my foray into KVM and I am practically an Evangelist, encouraging people specially SMBs and fledgling IT pros to take a serious look at it.

It works and it is avalable for FREE with most Linux Distributions.

And I am not EVEN talking about RHEV here whih require's $$$. I am simply talking about using the VirtManager GUI or CLI virtsh tool to manage your Virtual Machines.

And HIGH AVAILABILITY? It is there too... I used to have all my virtualisation done on vMware Server or ESXi but once you slap HA features on it -- you are thinking of spending $$$.

The beauty with HA under KVM is you have a number of choices and options for your failover and DataStore choices (Folks at Vcritical simply are not aware of the myriad of choices for Datastores and instaed riducules the geeky LVM based Data Store Names in play with RHEV..)

So amigos and techies -- if ye have spare circa 2005++ PCs, KVM away...

My Usual Recipe for the Initiatee:

Build an OpenFiler Box. Enable iSCSI - that will be yer SAN/Datastore for HA

Install Centos or Ubuntu

COnfig KVM.. create thine Data Stores and play away with Linux/Windows OSes and prebuilt appliances and HA away!

[wobbe]

Can openfiler do replication?
Because whats the point of HA when your datastore is a single point of failure!

[Alzhy]

Well - one can also make their Openfiler highly available too sir -- even set it up for whatever flavour of replication ehy wish. I cite OpenFiler as just one amongst a plethora of recipes out there for BUILDING one's own Virtual Environment storage specially if buying pre-built ones with restrictive licensing is beyond an SMB's or an organisation's reach.

Gigabit infrastructure has reached earthly prices and one can make good use aggregating/trunking this pipe for both HA (live migration) and Storage. Sure the ideal is 10GBe BUT it is still heavenly priced.

These days, there are LOTs of Clustered and HA Storage out there and with commodity components (disks, motherboards, cpus, memory, NICs, Enclosures) becoming very affordable - many out there are embarking in building their own.

Lots of these clustered and HA storage schemes are becoming sophesticated though I expect most will remain Open SOurce and GPL'd even after they're gobbled up by Venture Capitalists or the Big 3.

One clustred storage technology I am closely following and baking in my Lab is DRBD - http://www.drbd.org/ - it is very very promising.