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,
Hi.... Answer your questions:
-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.
Yes... In fact, I have some server running KVM with Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise. This VM's work together in a Cluster Enviroment... So, this work well!
-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.
Yes... You can use VirtManager to work with this feature...
2011/5/18 Drew drew.kay@gmail.com:
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,
-- Drew
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." --Marie Curie _______________________________________________ CentOS-virt mailing list CentOS-virt@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 6:46 AM, Gilberto Nunes gilberto.nunes32@gmail.com 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.
Yes... You can use VirtManager to work with this feature...
And in fact I'd say it's "concept" is *better*. KVM/libvirt just leverages the built-in virtual switching (bridging) support in Linux accessible through brctl. So you can create virtual bridges, tie ethernet devices to them, and have visibility into what's going on using standard tools like brctl and iproute2 tools if you'd like (instead of VirtManager). You can also use stuff like iptables to filter traffic going across bridges...
Sad to admit it, but I have a Linux box functioning as a router which also runs KVM domains ... eth0 is a bridge port (so no IP address), the virtual switch br0 has both the router internal IP (.1) and the "service-providing" IP of the box (still the IP I used to manage the KVM host from before I was using it as the router), eth1 has multiple VLANs with IPs on our Fiber WAN and the local out-of-band network. The NICs of the guests are also attached to br0, naturally. And of course iptables is able to securely filter traffic across all that. It's a stopgap measure, but works flawlessly.
If you want a NAT subnet, behind the scenes it's real Linux routing with iptables snat module (or masquerade). Your host-only network is a bridge without any hardware NICs attached as ports, only KVM NICs. And so on. Sublime!
Eric
PS, all the above is also true for running Xen on CentOS, though it comes with its own scripts for setting up the bridging instead of leveraging libvirt to do it
-
Drew -
Eric Searcy -
Gilberto Nunes