Hi All,
Okay. Now I am confused.
I have a bunch of virtual machines running under Virtual Box 3.2.12. I want to run them under KVM and drop Virtual Box from these systems.
Supposedly "qemu-img convert" now supports direct conversion from vdi to whatever KVM uses. So I fired up the man page and got really confused. Then I fired up Google and got worse confused.
Might I impose on some kind individual to write down a sample run string that would show me how to do this?
Many thanks, -T
On 4/22/11 10:18 PM, MargoAndTodd wrote:
I have a bunch of virtual machines running under Virtual Box 3.2.12. I want to run them under KVM and drop Virtual Box from these systems.
Hi. I am curious why you are making the switch out of VirtualBox. We are beginning to test it with the new VirtBox 4.0.x series now that it has been open sourced.
We currently run Xen, VMWare (both Server and ESX) and a test KVM box and are always looking for others experiences.
Sincerely,
William "Bill" Kern
hehe, not as offlist as I would of liked <grin> but the question remains.
-bill
On 4/23/2011 6:09 PM, William Kern wrote:
On 4/22/11 10:18 PM, MargoAndTodd wrote:
I have a bunch of virtual machines running under Virtual Box 3.2.12. I want to run them under KVM and drop Virtual Box from these systems.
Hi. I am curious why you are making the switch out of VirtualBox. We are beginning to test it with the new VirtBox 4.0.x series now that it has been open sourced.
We currently run Xen, VMWare (both Server and ESX) and a test KVM box and are always looking for others experiences.
Sincerely,
William "Bill" Kern
CentOS-virt mailing list CentOS-virt@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
On 04/23/2011 06:09 PM, William Kern wrote:
On 4/22/11 10:18 PM, MargoAndTodd wrote:
I have a bunch of virtual machines running under Virtual Box 3.2.12. I want to run them under KVM and drop Virtual Box from these systems.
Hi. I am curious why you are making the switch out of VirtualBox. We are beginning to test it with the new VirtBox 4.0.x series now that it has been open sourced.
We currently run Xen, VMWare (both Server and ESX) and a test KVM box and are always looking for others experiences.
Sincerely,
William "Bill" Kern
Offlist?
Hi Bill,
Sure. Love to carry on about it. Virtual Box was always open sourced, to an extent.
VBox 4.x is slower than 3.2.12. I can not take any more performance hits. I am still on 3.2.12 for the same reason you are using old-out-of-date Enterprise Linux.
I also almost got fired over Virtual Box and still may. Fortunately, as a private contractor, I do not have all my eggs in one basket.
A collection of some of my "recent" bug reports.
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7628 http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7643 http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7607 http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7948 http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7957 http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7772
And, the one I almost got and still may get fired over: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8478
8478 corrupted the hell out of a Visual Fox Pro and and M$SQL 2008 database.
And you *can not* purchase a support contract with Oracle for Virtual Box. I wasted about 10 hours trying. I have completely lost confidence in Oracle.
Red Hat, on the other hand, I love. I snooped on the KVM developers list and Holy Cow! are they ever developing like crazy. I no longer want to trust a Virtual Machine where the developers have to be pushed kicking and screaming into fixing anything.
HTH, -T
Anyone have a chance to look over my qemu-ing run string?
VBox 4.x is slower than 3.2.12. I can not take any
more performance hits. I am still on 3.2.12 for the same reason you are using old-out-of-date Enterprise Linux.
8478 corrupted the hell out of a Visual Fox Pro and and M$SQL 2008 database.
hmm. interesting experience you had. Sorry you had to deal with that.
We've seen some disk issues on VB on EXT4 Ubuntu Guests. None of those resulted in lost data because the filesystem went read-only when it had an issue, but that rendered the image unusable, until resolved. We were NOT running host I/O caching and turning that back on seems to have solved the problem (though thats an entirely different issue since thats a lot of data to be sitting around waiting for a write). Ext4 issues identical to what we experienced were widely reported on the Ubuntu lists on non-VM machines as well so we aren't yet prepared to blame VB.
We are still investigating performance. In most test cases, such as some LAMP stack projects VB seems quite speedy and "feels" on par with other VM solutions, though we haven't directly measured yet.
OTOH, we recently ran into an application where the MySQL performance was orders of magnitude slower than the prior VM solution where it resided. The app involved repeated executions of a very complex SQL query and the speed hit was there irregardless of the RAM and number of CPU's presented to the VB image, we traced and saw some sort of lock contention and assume disk i/o was part of the problem.
We've been impressed with VB's teleportation, the ability to use RDP to see whats going on, and the Xwin interface, which is more cross platform (for us) than the VMware solution. We are disappointed in the lack of readily available enterprise deployment tools.
Thanks for your feedback.
-bill
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MargoAndTodd -
William Kern