[geeks] the virtualization project

[Shannon]

On Sep 9, 2011, at 06:53 , vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:

> 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.

I would just like to see them pick a flavor, and also put everything in one
place. Maybe a Solaris based on pkgsrc would be nice. I think I picked up on
one I want to try and test this week or next.

> I don't use Linux packages but I do use Linux for my main desktop.
> Slackware! Try it, it's bloat free.

I used it for years, but had not gotten around to testing it again. Was
curious if it would make a good Xen host.

> 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.

Well, I've had ZFS running for 3-4 years on my Dell server, 24/7 with no
issues. However it does eat memory like crazy and I found two WD drives it
absolutely hated. The main reason for using it is the management features, and
catching hidden data corruption.

> 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.

Well technically the Dell T105 is on their list so maybe that's why I was OK.

However it seems more sensitive to certain drives and controllers rather than
the rest of the system. Some controllers and drives lie about things like
write cache flushing, and it seems to not like some of the "green" drives.

I think if you get just good hardware you'll be OK. A lot of the ZFS issues
happened early on before best practices were established and some drivers were
pretty horrible.

>> 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.

More reading overnight spooked me enough to let that one be until its been in
play longer.

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

I am now. I had forgotten about it until last night and will be installing it
this week for testing. Years ago when I was doing custom work on a FreeBSD
based OS for work, Matt Dillon helped me with something, I forget what. After
that I lost track of it, but reading last night it appears they have really
made progress.

Hammer really looks interesting, and it does have CRC error checking, and much
of the ZFS feature base but takes fewer resources and seems from what I am
reading to have less sensitivity to some issues.

I'll give it a try and drop notes here afterward.

> 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.

I need more server-ish virtualization, not something like VirtualBox or
VMWare. I find them very heavy compared to things like Xen. On the Mac I use
Fusion (VMWare), but again it is very heavy for what it does and cumbersome
for managing servers.

> 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.

A Dell T105 was a $350 server special deal, but its been rock solid for me
outside of its power supply. ZFS has never failed on it once I got drives it
was happy with and I have beat on it severely over the last 3+ years.

>> 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.

This is true.

However, maybe going forward we'll see more universal feature parity.

Certainly DragonFly has caught me off guard.


--
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."