Is hypervisor based virtualisation the correct way?

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Is hypervisor based virtualisation the correct way?

Monday, April 14. 2008

I thought a little bit about virtualisation this weekend after some interesting comments of a customer about his experiences with virtualisation.

Are hypervisor based virtualisation mechanisms really the way to go? Think about the timing problems of VMware. The problems to virtualize dozens of timer ticks,eating away a good amount of the capacity of your system. Or the problems with I/O intensive tasks. You can throw more CPUs to the problem.But: I´m tempted to think, that solutions like branded zones are a more viable solution to virtualize for unix systems. You stay with a single kernel infrastructure mapped to different target operating systems by special mechanisms ... like the branded zones, perhaps in conjunction with resource management. Looks more efficient to me than simulating the complete system.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, The IT Business at 18:08 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)
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The killer-feature of hypervisors is live migration ... and maybe running different OS patchlevels.

Otherwise hypervisors waste too much resources (at least for I/O)

#1 Mika on 2008-04-14 19:29 (Reply)

I don´t think about Live Migration as a killer feature. Live Migration creates his own class of problems like uncontinious time and on really loaded systems live migration isn´t an easy nor short task.

#2 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-04-14 19:35 (Reply)

hypervisors like vmware and virtual box are cool for testing and such, but for production? no way. zones, jails and such is what i use.
things that require live migration should be clustered anyways. hardware and firmware level support needs to evolve for useful virtualization.

#3 Jonas Lerch (Homepage) on 2008-04-14 22:14 (Reply)

Are you referering to zones, of which best practice of patching is to delete and recreate them?

#4 Andreas on 2008-04-15 08:09 (Reply)

Yeah, it´s one of the best practices. Better than patching every vm on it´s own... and as the patching problem is solvable (or will disappear as such a problem, when the patchin process speeds up), the problem of having to patch each VM on it´s own isn´t solvable by the nature of this virtualisation.

The problem: Most people think of zones, as they are a static thing, but unlike VMs you can create a zones within seconds. You do not install a OS, you install an application execution environment. As soon you´ve seperated the os and application it is more efficient to simply throw away a zone and installing a new one.

#4.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 09:05 (Reply)

yes, that sucks. but if you look at nexenta, you see that it is possible to patch them easy and fast. i dont know if ips is the solution for solaris or if the patching issue will be fixed without it. from the technical view, it should not be that big problem to speed up patching with the current system.
what i did is isolating app data from the os and scripting the setup of the zones.

#4.2 Jonas+Lerch (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 12:29 (Reply)

Pretty much both is happening. But we can´t change much of the old patching because of the compatibility guarantees for Solaris 10 and later.

IPS will solve that nicely for the Opensolaris reference distribution from sun.

And by the way: Since the last version of Solaris you can liveupgrade Solaris 10 with non-global zones. The tip with deleting/creating zones is pretty much from the time when this feature wasn´t available.

#4.2.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 12:45 (Reply)

lu on zfs zones? did i miss something?

#4.2.1.1 Jonas+Lerch (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 13:08 (Reply)

not on zfs ... sorry ... but on ufs ...

#5 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-04-15 13:50 (Reply)

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