Morning Everyone,
I'm busy doing a rebuild of my home server and am tossing between VMware and KVM for this build. I already have experience with ESX, we use it at work, but I'm debating trying out KVM for a while. The server itself is a budget build using a Supermicro X8SAX board w/ i7-950 & 12GB RAM, LSI 3081 SAS RAID (1068e based), rolled into a NorcoTek 16 Bay SAS case. Not fancy but also decent enough for home use. I don't expect high performance out of this unit so unless the gear is hopelessly outclassed, I'm not in a position to entertain upgrading. Right now forking over $1000-$1500 on a $2000 system for a pair of higher end LSI/3ware/Acreca controller just isn't in the budget. ;-)
My question to everyone are these:
-How well does KVM support Windows Guests? I'm already running a Server 2008r2 and WHS 2011 (based on 08r2) machines at home which I want to consolidate into this box.
-Does KVM have a concept of virtual switches and and are they tied to physical NICs? ESXi allows me to create a vSwitch that isn't tied to a physical NIC so I can create a DMZ that exists solely within the host system. I'd like to replicate that if possible.
I know these are probably questions that I could answer on my own by RTFM but I have already, and never really got the answers I needed. Pretty much every how-to assumed I'd be doing basic stuff and not dabbling with advanced stuff. I also know that what's written doesn't always match what's in the field and you folks are the field. And with CentOS 6 just around the corner (no flame wars please, my nomex pants are at the cleaners :-P ) I'm wanting to know if it's worth holding off another month or so on finalizing my build.
Thanks,
On 18.5.2011 14:58, Drew wrote:
-Does KVM have a concept of virtual switches and and are they tied to physical NICs? ESXi allows me to create a vSwitch that isn't tied to a physical NIC so I can create a DMZ that exists solely within the host system. I'd like to replicate that if possible.
A switch is basically a bridge built in hardware, isn't it ?
Configure /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-brX and in the kvm config for the virtual machine do
<interface type='bridge'> ... <source bridge='brX'/> ... </interface>
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Drew wrote:
My question to everyone are these:
-How well does KVM support Windows Guests? I'm already running a Server 2008r2 and WHS 2011 (based on 08r2) machines at home which I want to consolidate into this box.
They run well enough for me. Don't have any benchmarks as I am not using any other full virt solutions, but don't see much difference between VMs and bare metal. On the other hand I try not to use windows servers for anything serious so they're hardly ever stressed.
-Does KVM have a concept of virtual switches and and are they tied to physical NICs? ESXi allows me to create a vSwitch that isn't tied to a physical NIC so I can create a DMZ that exists solely within the host system. I'd like to replicate that if possible.
No and I don't think it's the hypervisor's job to do that. Even in ESXi I don't think it's the "hypervisor" itself that does that. You could try however to mess with Openvswitch if you insist on such features, at least until someone decides to package all this in one fancy solution (rhev?).
Lucian
On 19 May 2011 05:39, Lucian lucian@lastdot.org wrote:
No and I don't think it's the hypervisor's job to do that. Even in ESXi I don't think it's the "hypervisor" itself that does that. You could try however to mess with Openvswitch if you insist on such features, at least until someone decides to package all this in one fancy solution (rhev?).
thank you for pointing out openvswitch very interesting
wrt the OP
KVM is meant to be much closer to bare metal performance but doesn't have (at the moment) the all inclusive, easily managed from one console, turnkey solution to massive virtual installs at the datacentre level. If you need to be able to remotely provision VMs and move them whilst live from one centre to another whilst upscaling them then you will probably need to go with vmware. If you have got the flattened layer2 setup and have got to the stage of using vSwitch or the full cisco stack including provisioned nexus1000v then you might find kvm is a bit of a step backwards.
However i would recommend having a KVM based test suite as judging by the latest PaaS and IaaS news coming from TUV then a full solution will be appearing real soon and may be a contender.
If you are just looking to footer about and are after a provisioned host in a dmz then libvirt can achieve this.
mike
KVM is meant to be much closer to bare metal performance but doesn't have (at the moment) the all inclusive, easily managed from one console, turnkey solution to massive virtual installs at the datacentre level. If you need to be able to remotely provision VMs and move them whilst live from one centre to another whilst upscaling them then you will probably need to go with vmware. If you have got the
Mike,
Are you familiar with any of the tools listed here
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools
e.g. Proxmox, ConVirt, OpenNebula, Ganeti, openQRM? Comments?
Le 19/05/2011 13:27, Lars Hecking a écrit :
KVM is meant to be much closer to bare metal performance but doesn't have (at the moment) the all inclusive, easily managed from one console, turnkey solution to massive virtual installs at the datacentre level. If you need to be able to remotely provision VMs and move them whilst live from one centre to another whilst upscaling them then you will probably need to go with vmware. If you have got the
Mike,
Are you familiar with any of the tools listed here
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools
e.g. Proxmox, ConVirt, OpenNebula, Ganeti, openQRM? Comments?
Hi Lars,
I am using Proxmox. It is based on Debian. It is a bare metal installer, like ESX. You manage your VMs from a web interface. You can live migrate your VMs from one node to another if you use a central storage or DRDB. The bare metal installer takes care of all the initial configuration (bridge, LVM for snapshot...).
I wait to see what will do RHEVM, but at this time, I am not aware of such a convenient solution under RHEL/CentOS...
Alain
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Drew drew.kay@gmail.com wrote:
My question to everyone are these:
-Does KVM have a concept of virtual switches and and are they tied to physical NICs? ESXi allows me to create a vSwitch that isn't tied to a physical NIC so I can create a DMZ that exists solely within the host system. I'd like to replicate that if possible.
http://bitbud.com/2008/08/20/how-to-setup-a-private-network-for-virtual-gues...
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Alain Péan -
Drew -
Fajar Priyanto -
Lars Hecking -
Lucian -
Markus Falb -
Michael Simpson