[geeks] the virtualization project

[vintagecoder at aol.com]

> 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 think it will ever happen on Solaris until Larry gets pissed off
enough about Stallman to get all the gnu stuff and gcc totally off the
system. If that happens things could be cleaned up considerably.

I can assure you pkgsrc on Solaris won't help. Pkgsrc *natively* works
because you build stuff where it belongs from the beginning. Once you have
an existing system, pkgsrc leads to confusion, complexity, and nightmares.
Don't do it!

> 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 really don't know. Check out linuxquestions.org's Slackware forum. That
is the unofficial Slackware forum.

> 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.

There have been discussions on WD drives and ZFS. Apparently it has
something to do with WD failure modes on their desktop vs. enterprise
drives. ZFS does not like anything getting in the way.

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

I would guess so. I believe it's not just like the HCL where somebody says
"yeah it worked on my system". I think Sun/Oracle knows exactly which
drives and which controllers present ZFS with access to the drives it
likes, and which don't.

> 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.

Yep, all known issues.

> 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.

>From what I have read and seen, good desktop hardware isn't enough. You
have to have known good enterprise hardware or eventually you're going to
get bit.

>> 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.

That sounds like a safe bet to me. The only people who should be using it
now are BTRFS and kernel devs.

>> 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.

Dillon seems like an interesting guy with smart and fresh approaches to
things. I've had the worst luck with DragonFly though, I can almost never
get it to even come up on anything I own. I've given up on it (also since
AMD64 support is still weak) but because of Hammer I thought it's worth
mentioning.

> 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'm sorry, I didn't see your original post. I guess I didn't answer your
main question and I don't have much to say since I don't work in this area.

> 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.

Excellent!

>> 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.

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

Hah, filesystems and parity ;-)

Actually I'm a little more pessimistic. I see things polarizing more than
ever as the camps develop less tolerance for each other. Time will tell.