[geeks] the virtualization project

[vintagecoder at aol.com]

> Awhile back I started on a project to convert my current server away from
> Solaris. My Solaris machine is still running, as things turned out more
> complicated and took longer than I expected. That and I got interrupted
> by a nor'easter, a hurricane, and a hurricane-induced shoulder injury. 

Get well soon!

> There were several things that bothered me about Solaris. I don't like
> the future with Oracle,

I'm not sure anybody likes the future with Oracle, maybe not even Oracle.

> I hate how programs, configuration, and data are scattered all over the
> place in Solaris, and its always harder to maintain.

Solaris does have path hell but if you don't use anybody else's packages
and avoid gnu stuff you can control it to some extent.

> Linux packages are bloated, but at least they work and keeping updated is
> easy. The big winner here by far is NetBSD: it has to be the cleanest
> base and package system in existence.

I don't use Linux packages but I do use Linux for my main desktop.
Slackware! Try it, it's bloat free. You control everything that goes on
your system because it's one of the few Linux distros with no dependency
management. It has package management but no dependency management, if that
makes sense. I make my own packages with available tools.

NetBSD's pkgsrc is the best package management system of the 3 major BSD
OS, no question about it.

> One big issue with NetBSD is its filesystems are way behind the rest.
> Nothing like ZFS or BTFS exists for it, and as time goes on that is more
> and more important.

I used NetBSD and liked it a lot, pkgsrc was once of the main reasons. ZFS
and BTRFS have potential but using either on a non-server grade box is a
recipe for disaster. BTRFS is still very experimental and many people are
losing data. ZFS seems very hardware sensitive. Stuff you can do without
thinking about on other OS with other filesystems and drives will cause ZFS
to do very bad things to you.

Seems like for once the policy of only using it on "certified" systems is
not just marketing. Personally I have no intention of ever using ZFS on
anything but SPARC or an Intel (ugh) server on Oracle's list. I've been
burned badly. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

> Also, I just rather not use Linux. Most of the distributions are very
> bloated, even for basic system administration utilities. Its not hard at
> all to innocently install a system utility and find it pulling in half of
> Gnome. I also hate the politics of GNU, and while you can mostly ignore
> it, it always makes me twitch.

Agreed and agreed but the first part is not limited to Linux. FreeBSD
although it makes a great desktop or server is also very bloated. Anything
that anybody could ever want as an option causes the package tree to be
full of dependencies that aren't. There's no way around this if you use a
package managed OS or distro. Again, Slackware. Maybe Gentoo too, or Arch.
I don't know.

I don't like the gnu/fsf circus either but that's the way it is. I ignore
the fanboys. I already have a religion, I'm looking for reliable software
to run. For the most part the Slackware community doesn't get involved in
the gnu circus. Some of the new guys still go on about it, but mostly it
doesn't come up in Slackware threads.

> Still this does work well, and I've not had stability issues with the
> more well made and tested distributions.

The best distro I ever used was Slamd64. It actually out-Slackwared
Slackware, if such a thing is possible. Since Slackware went pure 64 the
guy responsible for Slamd64 is working with Pat on Slackware.

> Not having ZFS is politically stupid of the Linux camp, but they do have
> BRTFS which has a lot of the same features.

Both are from Sun/Oracle and both have problems for people not running on
server grade hardware. Especially BTRFS, it is not ready and nobody says
it's ready. Don't use it unless you don't mind kernel upgrading and
patching all the time and losing data.

What about hammer on DragonFly? Have you looked at it? Not sure what
virtualization options they have.

> So in the end, I'm still running Solaris 10. Each solution I looked at
> for virtualization had some issues that made me stop and think about it.
> NetBSD Xen works nicely but has no SMP support yet, and no really nice
> filesystems.

Aside from Oracle, I don't see anything wrong with Solaris. It's a nice OS
with actual documentation. If you can pay for support, even better. On
server grade hardware, even better.

But I have quite a few VMs running under my Slackware box with Intel
virtualization extensions and I have no complaints. I tried most of the
major filesystems and settled on JFS a few years ago and have been using it
steadily since. Slackware does a lot of testing and makes sure the kernel
works with the userland tools and apps and I have never had any problems.
VirtualBox seems pretty good, about the only thing it should run and doesn't
is DOS.

None of the Linux filesystems have the management capabilities of ZFS or
BTRFS, but none of them have the stability, integrity, or reliability
problems either, at least on commodity hardware.

> I guess what I want is: Solaris with ZFS, but without the ugly directory
> tree and packages... basically Solaris with ZFS, but with the neat layout
> and package system of NetBSD, and first-tier Xen support.

What about Nexenta? I think it's Solaris kernel and ZFS with Linux
userland...

> I could just run a NetBSD server and be done with it. The main reason
> for using ZFS is for the data reliability on my server, and I just plain
> like it.

I have read too many horror stories about ZFS and had one of my own so I
don't consider it a reliable filesystem on a PC. So far I haven't had
problems with ZFS on my SPARC boxes. For me the benefit of ZFS is
management, but management without reliability underneath it is a false
promise. Don't know what hardware you're using, but if it's non server
grade Intel stuff then take good backups and don't move your drives around. 

> In the end, I guess we should be happy there are so many good solutions,
> but at the same time I wish feature sets were more uniform, OS like
> Solaris would get modernized and cleaned up, and the politics that
> clutter and confuse the Linux situation didn't exist.

There are probably *some* good solutions on *some* hardware platforms. What
there doesn't seem to be is one perfect Solution for you or me or most
people. So we run a few (or many) different systems.

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