[geeks] the virtualization project

[Shannon]

On Sep 9, 2011, at 11:24 , Bill Bradford wrote:

> ohno.mrbill.net is a Debian 6 quad-core (AMD Athlon II 640) system with 16
> of RAM, with ohno being the "native" host system.  I'm also running three
> different VMs under Qemu/KVM; two Debian 6 and one FreeBSD, paravirtualized
> (virtio) drivers being used when possible.  It's been "in production" for
> 9-10 months now and works *great*.

Nice.

Are you running them using hardware virtualization? I didn't see another way
under KVM, and that's one thing I wanted to avoid if I were going to run
several OS.

I ran systems under VMWare Fusion on my Mac Pro for years, and it was also
great... as long as great does not include light or efficient. Of course,
VMWare is heavier than KVM from what I understand.

I am looking at KVM but there were two issues that came up. One is its that it
seems to require HVM (hardware virtualizatin) even if you have paravirtual
drivers (virtio). I tried it on my AMD Opteron system and it just refused to
work, and from what I read it is the lack of HVM support on that CPU.

Seems silly since if you can run a guess OS that has all virtual drivers it
should not need HVM, but it seems KVM requires it no matter what.

Just for kicks, I ran two of the same guess OS on my Opteron 1200 series
system on Xen with a NetBSD host.

Guess OS running under hardware virtualization were slower than those running
under paravirtualization, sometimes notable under even light loads.

It wasn't show stopping, but since I do have limited hardware I wanted to make
best use of it I could, and my secondary server can't run KVM, unless I'm just
missing something obvious.

Anyway, I was hoping someone would share a success story about KVM besides the
Linux kiddie hype about it.

I've so far spent half the day playing with DragonFly and will report on it
later if I get time. Very interesting system.



--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com