On 06/17/2011 05:22 PM, Steve Campbell wrote:
I'm new to running VMs, so I'm hoping this hasn't been a problem question asked before. I've only glazed over the emails from this list since I've joined due to not really needing all of the great information if provides.
Eric suggested I wait for Centos 6 to start loading my new VM host, and so I grabbed the RH Virtualization PDF and started digging in.
Firstly, it occurred to me that Centos 6 might not provide the virtualization rpms like it did with Centos 5. RH makes this an add-on to their license. Does anyone know if the upcoming Centos 6 will provide the virtualization packages (right away or in the future)?
As far as I understand it these add-ons are all open-source and the RH packaging deals more with product support on the RHEL side rather than trying to "hide" something. So all these add-ons should be available in some form in Centos although I haven't checked the details. KVM is available definitely though.
Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the CPU allocation stuff. If I have 6 cores, it appears I can only create VMs that use 6 cores total. Using the GUI for creating a new VM will provide me with a max number I can allocate. Does this mean that I can allocate, for example, 3 VMs that use 2 cores each and never be able to create any other new VMs or does this mean I can create as many VMs as I want but only start VMs that use the max total cores or less?
If you have 6 cores available in the machine that means you can only allocate a maximum of 6 cores for one individual VM but you can have as many VMs as you like. That means you can create 10 VMs with 6 cores each but you have to keep in mind that this means the VMs will be fighting over the 6 physical cores in the machine. Basically every time a VM schedules a process to run the host needs to find a physical core to run it on or wait until one gets freed up.
In other words: You can over-commit cores but you have to take care that in terms of actual work load you don't exceed the actual phyical capacity of the system.
I should get my shiny new machine next week, the one with real virtualization capability, so some of this may be answered on my own by playing around, but until then, thought I'd get a head start on rectifying my stupidity.
There's nothing stupid about it. The virtualization space is developing rapidly right now and what might have been true yesterday in terms of features might no longer be true today. Since Centos uses libvirt for virtualization you can pay attention to the libvirt mailing list to stay up to date with what's going on: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/
Regards, Dennis