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| Fedora 12 includes a number of improvements in the field of Virtualization. New tools enable system administrators to perform nearly impossible - until now - tasks easily. Imagine re-configuring a virtual machine off-line, add new hardware to VM with out restarting it, migrate to another host without restarting the VMs and many other exotic features. Let's hear what developers have to say about those wonderful new options. | | Fedora 12 includes a number of improvements in the field of Virtualization. New tools enable system administrators to perform nearly impossible - until now - tasks easily. Imagine re-configuring a virtual machine off-line, add new hardware to VM without restarting it, migrate to another host without restarting the VMs and many other exotic features. Let's hear what developers have to say about those wonderful new options. |
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| == Featured interviewees == | | == Highlights: Virtualization Improvements in Fedora 12 == |
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| * Chris Wright ([[Features/KVM_Huge_Page_Backed_Memory|KVM Huge Page Backed Memory]])
| | Mel Chua recently did a series of interviews on Fedora 12's virtualization improvements with members of the virtualization team. More detailed interviews are available below, but here are some of the highlights from those discussions. |
| * John Cooper ([[Features/KVM_Huge_Page_Backed_Memory|KVM Huge Page Backed Memory]])
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| * [[User:Markmc|Mark McLoughlin]] ([[Features/KVM_Stable_Guest_ABI|KVM Stable Guest ABI]] and [[Features/KVM NIC Hotplug|KVM NIC Hotplug]])
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| * Kevin Wolf ([[Features/KVM qcow2 Performance|KVM qcow2 Performance]])
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| * David Lutterkort ([[Features/Network Interface Management|Network Interface Management]])
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| * Daniel Berrange ([[Features/VirtPrivileges|VirtPrivileges]])
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| * [[User:Glommer|Glauber Costa]] ([[Features/VirtgPXE|VirtgPXE]])
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| * [[Dallan|Dave Allan]] ([[Features/VirtStorageManagement|VirtStorageManagement]])
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| * [[User:Rjones|Richard Jones]] ([[Features/libguestfs|libguestfs]])
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| == Raw transcript ==
| | '''''...Richard Jones, talking about libguestfs''''' |
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| http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-mktg/2009-10-22/fedora-mktg.2009-10-22-15.00.log.txt | | : I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf. |
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| === guestfish and friends (libguestds and libvirt) ===
| | ; How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools? |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: Why don't we start with everyone introducing themselves briefly, and giving a sentence or two about what they do, and what virt features they worked on for F12?
| | : We've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offer something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here. |
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| '''<Intro>''' rwmjones: I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf
| | ; Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit? |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: what would sysadmins have to do to fix that before libguestfs arrived?
| | : mchua, sure ... guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. [One can open] a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands! That's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html |
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| '''<A>''' rwmjones: that's really tricky ... it was sort of possible using tools like kpartx and loopback mounts, but it was dangerous stuff, hard and you had to be root. now there's no root commands needed, and it's organized as nice little command line tools for each task with proper manual pages. I'd point people to the home page -- http://libguestfs.org/ -- to see lots of examples, and documentation. | | '''''...Mark McLoughlin, on virtual upgrades to your Virtual Machine''''' |
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| | : I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days. |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools?
| | : Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it. |
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| '''<A>''' rwmjones: we've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offer something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here.
| | : That's much harder to do when the guest is already running. So, most of the work involved some scary UNIX voodoo to allow passing that file descriptor between two running processes. As for use cases, people often want to add and remove hardware from their guests without re-starting them. You might want to add a guest to a new network, for example. |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit?
| | : Now, the Stable Guest ABI feature is really quite boring, but is about preparing KVM so that we can maintain compatibility across new releases. The idea is that if you are running a Fedora 12 KVM host and you install a new host with Fedora 13, you might like to migrate your running guests from the Fedora 12 host to the Fedora 13 host, without re-starting them. |
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| '''<A>''' rwmjones: mchua, sure ... guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. The basic usage is to do: | | : Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest. |
| <br /><pre>guestfish -i yourguest # where yourguest is some guest name known by libvirt </pre><br />
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| and that gives you a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands! That's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: Wow. That documentation is gorgeous. | | : As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused. But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware. Windows, for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license. We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host. |
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| '''<A>''' rwmjones: and if you run out of ideas, we have some "recipes" you can try out with guestfish: http://libguestfs.org/recipes.html | | '''''...David Lutterkort, on reducing complexity in network scripts''''' |
| <br />markmc: mchua, we've certainly all been put to shame by rwmjones docs :)<br />
| | ; David Lutterkort is a software engineer at Red Hat, working on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Mgmt feature). In the past he worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools, as well as http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/. |
| lutter: the pwoer of OCaml ;)
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| === Virtual upgrades to your Virtual Machine ===
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| '''<Intro>''' markmc: I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days. | |
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| Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it.
| | : Network Interface Management lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API. In the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager). |
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| That's much harder to do when the guest is already running. So, most of the work involved some scary UNIX voodoo to allow passing that file descriptor between two running processes. As for use cases, people often want to add and remove hardware from their guests without re-starting them. You might want to add a guest to a new network, for example.
| | : libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier [than in the past]. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's. |
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| Now, the Stable Guest ABI feature is really quite boring, but is about preparing KVM so that we can maintain compatibility across new releases. The idea is that if you are running a Fedora 12 KVM host and you install a new host with Fedora 13, you might like to migrate your running guests from the Fedora 12 host to the Fedora 13 host, without re-starting them.
| | ; How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms? |
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| Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest.
| | : Right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click; there you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts. |
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| As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused.
| | '''''...David Lutterkort, talking about the typical user''''' |
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| | ; [Is] the user typically being a sysadmin? |
| | : virt-manager is definitely for end users, not just sysadmins; virt-install somewhere in the middle, the others get fairly technical. |
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| But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware.
| | ; What would be a use-case for an end-user using virt-manager? (I'm guessing there will be users reading this interview who may not have tried out virt stuff before, but who might read this and go "ooh, hey..." and try it out.) |
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| Windows for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license.
| | : Try out rawhide without the risk of breaking your current system of course, that goes for any $OS ... in general, virt-manager is a graphical user interface to most/all virt features. |
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| We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host.
| | '''''...Mark McLoughlin, discussing the gPXE and qcow2''''' |
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| | : The gPXE feature is about replacing the boot ROMs used by qemu for PXE booting with newer versions, basically etherboot was the name of the project previously, but it's now called gPXE. It's important that we made the switch to gPXE because all future upstream development (new features, bug fixes) will go into gPXE instead of etherboot. |
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| === Network scripts: complex no more ===
| | :The qcow2 performance feature was about taking a cold hard look at the qcow2 file format and fixing major bottlenecks. Basically, we see qcow2 as a very useful format for virtual machine images; e.g. the size of qcow2 files is determined by the amount of disk space used by the guest, not the entire size of the virtual disk we're presenting to the guest. The images should be smaller on disk, even if you copy them between hosts. Also, qcow2 supports a "copy on write" feature whereby you can base multiple guest images from the one base image so you can reduce disk space further by installing one guest image, creating multiple qcow2 images backed by the first image and yet, the guest can still write to their disks! So, in summary, we want more people to use qcow2, but they couldn't because the performance was poor. Kevin Wolf put serious effort in upstream to iron out those kinks and obtain a serious speedup. |
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| '''<Intro>''' lutter: David Lutterkort, software engineer at Red Hat, worked on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Mgmt feature), in the past worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools. besides that, work some on http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/ | | '''''...Richard Jones, David Lutterkort, and Mark McLoughlin on the history of virt-manager''''' |
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| Network Interface Mgmt lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API; in the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager)
| | : Richard Jones: I would say that in Fedora 6, which is where I really started off with Fedora, it was quite primitive and unfriendly, although we did have virt-manager which has always been a nice tool. [Going from F6 to F12]... it's a story of everything improving dramatically. It's not really that there are big new features; we had virt-manager back in F6, but modern virt-manager is just far better. |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: Awesome. If I'm understanding you right, this means that now sysadmins can automate complex custom network configurations for VMs?
| | ; So one area of improvement between F6 virt and F12 virt is that F12 virt is far more automatable and shell-script friendly; so you can do the same things, more or less, just much faster (in terms of sysadmin-headache-time needed)? |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: Complex network configs on the host, generally ... a common request is 'how do I share a physical NIC between various VM's'; in the past, you had to manually go and edit ifcfg-* files. libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's
| | : Richard Jones: Well there are a lot of big new features behind the scenes (KVM, KSM, virtio ...). It's not clear how apparent they'll be to end users, but it will just all work better and faster. |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: Ahhh, okay - thanks for the clarification. How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms? | | : Mark McLoughlin: The big change between F6 and F12 is that we've switched from Xen to KVM. But because all our work is based on the libvirt abstraction layer, the tools used in F6 for using Xen should be familiar to people using KVM in F12. We've also put a significant emphasis on improving security over the last number of releases. |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: Right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click; there you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts
| | : Richard Jones: ...someone on F6 who was using virt-manager or "virsh list", will be using exactly the same commands in F12, even though the hypervisor is completely different. |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, Is there a place where our readers can go to find out more about how to use the libvirt API? How do folks try these features out?
| | : Mark McLoughlin: David has a good point - we now have tools for e.g. managing networking and storage, [and] have much better support for remotely managing virtualization hosts - e.g., you can point virt-manager at a host, create a guest on that host, create storage for the guest, configure the network, etc. |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: There's a small amount of docs on the netcf site (I have to add more) and libvirt.org has API docs for the various virInterface* calls
| | : David Lutterkort: The tools are now a pretty solid basis for datacenter virt management software, like ovirt and RHEV-M. |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, I see instructions on how to test at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Network_Interface_Management#How_To_Test | | : Mark McLoughlin: We're also pushing very hard to adopt new virtualization hardware features introduced by vendors. So, for example, in F11 we introduced VT-d support, and in F12 we're introducing SR-IOV support. And KVM itself is based on Intel and AMD hardware virtualization. So yeah, we're definitely leading the field in terms of shipping support for new hardware features. As far as I know, no-one else (not even other hypervisor vendors) are yet shipping SR-IOV support. |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: There's also a blog post somebody else wrote on netcf http://linux-kvm.com/content/netcf-silver-bullet-network-configuration
| | : David Lutterkort: Yeah, Fedora is very likely the first place where you see a lot of new hardware virt features supported in OSS. |
| <br />besides bz ? ;)
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, Is there a place folks should be watching to see things go up as the F12 GA date approaches?
| | ; All while maintaining a consistent, familiar interface - as rwmjones pointed out, folks using virt-manager and virsh on F6 are still using the same commands. Though now they also have the option to use additional tools like guestfish to script the process (so, alternative-but-even-easier interface). |
| *grin* what components should we be keeping track of?
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| '''<A>''' lutter:I don't know of a good central place where this gets summarized, though FWN has been pretty good reporting about virt features. Besides that, watching the individual projects is everybody's best bet libvirt, libguestfs, virt-install, virt-manager are the most important ones from a user's POV
| | Many thanks go out to the members of the virt team for participating in this interview, including rwmjones (aka: rwmjones), David Lutterkort (aka: lutter), and Mark McLoughlin (aka: markmc), as well as Mel Chua (aka: mchua) for arranging the interview. The transcript of the full interview is available on [[Virtualization_improvements_in_Fedora_12|the Fedora Project wiki]]. |
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| === Is it all Sysadmin? ===
| | If you want to find more information about the projects discussed in this interview, there are a number of resources available. |
| | * [http://libguestfs.org/ libguestfs home page] |
| | * [http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html guestfish commands] |
| | * [http://libguestfs.org/recipes.html guestfish recipes] |
| | * [http://fedorahosted.org/netcf netcf] |
| | * [http://libvirt.org libvirt virtualization API home page] |
| | * [http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/ virt manager home page] |
| | * [[Virtualization/History|Virtualization History in Fedora]] |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, The user typically being a sysadmin?
| | And of course, if you want to find out more about the Fedora Project and give it a whirl, everything you need to get started is available at [http://www.fedoraproject.org/ www.fedoraproject.org]. |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: virt-manager is definitely for end users, not just sysadmins; virt-install somewhere in the middle, the others get fairly technical
| | == Featured interviewees == |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, What would be a use-case for an end-user using virt-manager? (I'm guessing there will be users reading this interview who may not have tried out virt stuff before, but who might read this and go "ooh, hey..." and try it out.)
| | * Chris Wright ([[Features/KVM_Huge_Page_Backed_Memory|KVM Huge Page Backed Memory]]) |
| | * John Cooper ([[Features/KVM_Huge_Page_Backed_Memory|KVM Huge Page Backed Memory]]) |
| | * [[User:Markmc|Mark McLoughlin]] ([[Features/KVM_Stable_Guest_ABI|KVM Stable Guest ABI]] and [[Features/KVM NIC Hotplug|KVM NIC Hotplug]]) |
| | * Kevin Wolf ([[Features/KVM qcow2 Performance|KVM qcow2 Performance]]) |
| | * David Lutterkort ([[Features/Network Interface Management|Network Interface Management]]) |
| | * Daniel Berrange ([[Features/VirtPrivileges|VirtPrivileges]]) |
| | * [[User:Glommer|Glauber Costa]] ([[Features/VirtgPXE|VirtgPXE]]) |
| | * [[Dallan|Dave Allan]] ([[Features/VirtStorageManagement|VirtStorageManagement]]) |
| | * [[User:Rjones|Richard Jones]] ([[Features/libguestfs|libguestfs]]) |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: try out rawhide w/o the risk of breaking your current system of course, that goes for any $OS ... in general, virt-manager is a graphical user interface to most/all virt features
| | == Interviews == |
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| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, Ok - imagine I'm a new Fedora user, I've just installed F12, love it, want to get a preview of rawhide so I can see what's coming for F13. What do I need to install/run to get rawhide running in a VM? If that process is quick and painless enough to put in a few "try this!" lines mid-interview. I realize this is a pretty basic question, but I'd like to get virt used by as many folks as possible so that hopefully we'll have some of those folks going deeper and trying out the tools you've made
| | Interviews were conducted online on October 22, 2009. The full IRC transcript from which this interview series was extracted is available [http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-mktg/2009-10-22/fedora-mktg.2009-10-22-15.00.log.txt here]. |
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| '''<A>''' lutter: lemme dig around<br />
| | === Richard Jones on guestfish and friends (libguestfs and libvirt) === |
| rwmjones: lvcreate -n F13Rawhide -L 10G vg_yourhost; virt-install -v -n F13Rawhide --accelerate -r 512 -f /dev/vg_yourhost/F13Rawhide -c /tmp/Fedora-13-netinst.iso<br />
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| markmc: rwmjones, hmm, no - I'd point people at virt-manager.<br />mchua, go to Applications -> System Tools -> Virtual Machine Manager<br />
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| rwmjones: yeah virt-manager will be easier ...<br />
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| markmc: mchua, (well, first install the 'Virtualization' group in Add/Remove Software), then click on New VM, choose a name for the guest, choose network install<br />
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| mchua: lutter, ^^ (I think we've got it, no worries)<br />
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| markmc: mchua, and then add a URL like http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/x86_64/os/<br/>, after that, the instructions in the wizard should be fairly self explanatory.
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| lutter: mchua, yeah, what markmc said
| | '''Mel Chua''': Why don't we start with everyone introducing themselves briefly, and giving a sentence or two about what they do, and what virt features they worked on for F12? |
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| markmc: mchua, was that interview you did for f11 published anywhere? would be good to link to it from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization/History , found it : http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2009/05/fedora-11-virtualization-reality.html
| | '''Richard Jones''': I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf |
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| | '''Mel Chua''': What would sysadmins have to do to fix that before libguestfs arrived? |
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| | '''Richard Jones''': that's really tricky ... it was sort of possible using tools like kpartx and loopback mounts, but it was dangerous stuff, hard and you had to be root. now there's no root commands needed, and it's organized as nice little command line tools for each task with proper manual pages. I'd point people to the home page -- http://libguestfs.org/ -- to see lots of examples, and documentation. |
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| | '''Mel Chua''': How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools? |
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| | '''Richard Jones''': we've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offers something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here. |
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| | '''Mel Chua''': Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit? |
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| | '''Richard Jones''': Sure. guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. The basic usage is to do: |
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| === Some history about PXE===
| | <pre>guestfish -i yourguest</pre> |
| '''<Q>''' mchua: lutter, rwmjones, markmc, in a moment, I'd like to pull back and have the three of you talk with each other about how virt in Fedora has progressed in the past few releases.
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| '''<A>''' markmc: one sec - I'll cover gpxe and qcow2 features<br />
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| the feature owners aren't here (in this case), okay. The gPXE feature is about replacing the boot ROMs used by qemu for PXE booting with newer versions, basically etherboot was the name of the project previously, but it's now called gPXE.<br />
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| It's important that we made the switch to gPXE because all future upstream development (new features, bug fixes) will go into gPXE instead of etherboot.<br />
| |
| The qcow2 performance feature was about taking a cold hard look at the qcow2 file format and fixing an major bottlenecks basically, we see qcow2 as a very useful format for virtual machine images e.g. the size of qcow2 files is determined by the amount of disk space used by the guest; not the entire size of the virtual disk we're presenting to the guest. The images should be smaller on disk, even if you copy them between hosts. Also, qcow2 supports a "copy on write" feature whereby you can base multiple guest images from the one base image so you can reduce disk space further by installing one guest image, creating multiple qcow2 images backed by the first image and yet, the guest can still write to their disks! So, in summary, we want more people to use qcow2, but they couldn't because the performance was poor. Kevin Wolf put serious effort in upstream to iron out those kinks and obtain a serious speedup. Figures are in a table on the feature page.
| |
|
| |
|
| '''<Q>''' mchua: markmc, to backtrack a bit, why the switch from etherboot? - From what I've read, it sounds like the switch was actually requested by the etherboot upstream, in part.
| | ...where yourguest is some guest name known by libvirt, and that gives you a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands. That's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html |
|
| |
|
| '''<A>''' markmc: Yes, the etherboot project is no more; it is deprecated in favor of gPXE, but they're not completely identical, so there was some significant work involved ... done by Glauber Costa (our Brazilian joker) and Matt Domsch from Dell (AFAIR) | | '''Mel Chua''': Wow. That documentation is gorgeous. |
|
| |
|
| '''<Q>''' mchua: markmc, is gPXE being used by other OSes and distros too? | | '''Richard Jones''': and if you run out of ideas, we have some "recipes" you can try out with guestfish: http://libguestfs.org/recipes.html |
| '''<A>''' markmc: yeah, it was Matt Domsch. It may be used by other distros, I'm not 100% sure about that. I'd imagine we're slightly ahead of the curve on this - upstream qemu is still using etherboot images
| |
|
| |
|
| === Some history about virt-manager ===
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: We've certainly all been put to shame by Richard's docs. :) |
| 15:25:24 <rwmjones> mchua, I would say that in Fedora 6 which is where I really started off with Fedora, it was quite primitive and unfriendly, although we did have virt-manager which has always been a nice tool
| |
| 15:26:53 <mchua> rwmjones: What was the F6 virt experience like?
| |
| 15:27:22 <rwmjones> mchua, here's a guestfish example ... making a backup of /home from a Debian guest:
| |
| <pre>
| |
| # guestfish -i --ro Debian5x64
| |
| Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for editing virtual machine filesystems.
| |
| Type: 'help' for help with commands
| |
| 'quit' to quit the shell | |
| <fs> cat /etc/debian_version
| |
| squeeze/sid
| |
| <fs> tgz-out /home home.tar.gz
| |
| </pre>
| |
| 15:29:40 <rwmjones> mchua, Fedora 6 -> 12 .. it's a story of everything improving dramatically. It's not really that there are big new features eg. we have virt-manager back in 6, but modern virt-manager is just far better.
| |
| 15:30:27 <rwmjones> and I've been trying to work on making it better for sysadmins who want to automate things, hence libguestfs is very shell-script / automation-friendly
| |
| 15:33:57 <mchua> rwmjones: So one area of improvement between F6 virt and F12 virt is "F12 virt is far more automatable and shell-script friendly."
| |
| 15:34:19 <rwmjones> mchua, yeah I'd say that's true
| |
| 15:34:35 <mchua> rwmjones: "It's not really that there are big new features... but [features are] just far better" - so you can do the same things, more or less, just much faster (in terms of sysadmin-headache-time needed)?
| |
| 15:36:10 <rwmjones> mchua, well there are a lot of big new features behind the scenes (KVM, KSM, virtio ...). It's not clear how apparent they'll be to end users, but it will just all work better and faster.
| |
| 15:37:43 <rwmjones> mchua, there's a story behind virt-df (http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html). When I used to manage a bunch of virtual machines at my previous job, it was the tool that I wanted. It didn't exist, so at Red Hat, I wrote it.
| |
| 15:37:57 <markmc> mchua, the big change between F6 and F12 is that we've switched from Xen to KVM
| |
| 15:38:34 <markmc> mchua, but because all our work is based on the libvirt abstraction layer, the tools used in F6 for using Xen should be familiar to people using KVM in F-12
| |
| 15:38:58 <markmc> mchua, we've also put a significant emphasis on improving security over the last number of releases
| |
| 15:39:13 <markmc> mchua, danpb has more details on the security efforts in his F-11 interview
| |
| 15:39:13 <rwmjones> mchua, yeah ... someone on F6 who was using virt-manager or "virsh list", will be using exactly the same commands in F12, even though the hypervisor is completely different
| |
| 15:39:23 * mchua nods
| |
| 15:39:27 <markmc> mchua, and he'll also have more details wrt. the VirtPrivileges feature
| |
| 15:40:19 <lutter> mchua: libvirt, and therefore the whole virt tool stack now manages a much broader area of virt related aspects, not just VM lifecycles
| |
| 15:41:08 <markmc> mchua, lutter has a good point - we now have tools for e.g. managing networking and storage
| |
| 15:41:14 <markmc> mchua, we also have much better support for remotely managing virtualization hosts
| |
| 15:41:41 <markmc> mchua, e.g. you can point virt-manager at a host, create a guest on that host, create storage for the guest, configure the network etc.
| |
| 15:42:12 <lutter> mchua: the tools are now a prety solid basis for datacenter virt management software like ovirt and RHEV-M
| |
| 15:42:18 <markmc> mchua, wrt. fedora virt changing over the years, we're also pushing very hard to adopt new virtualization hardware features introduced by vendors
| |
| 15:42:40 <markmc> mchua, so, for example, in F-11 we introduced VT-d support and in F-12 we're introducing SR-IOV support
| |
| 15:43:01 <markmc> mchua, and KVM itself is based on Intel and AMD hardware virtualization
| |
| 15:43:09 <markmc> mchua, also EPT/NPT support
| |
| 15:43:38 <markmc> mchua, so yeah, we're definitely leading the field in terms of shipping support for new hardware features
| |
| 15:44:00 <markmc> mchua, e.g. AFAIK no-one else (not even other hypervisor vendors) are yet shipping SR-IOV support
| |
| 15:44:06 <markmc> ...
| |
| 15:44:34 <lutter> yeah, Fedora is very likely the first place where you see a lot of new hardware virt features supported in OSS, mostly since so many upstream maintainers/developers for virt-related stuff work at RH and generally push their work to Fedora 'by default' .. spin that any way you want to avoid a distro war ;)
| |
| 15:45:13 <mchua> All while maintaining a consistent, familiar interface - as rwmjones pointed out, folks using virt-manager and virsh on F6 are still using the same commands. Though now they also have the option to use additional tools like guestfish to script the process (so, alternative-but-even-easier interface).
| |
| 15:45:40 <lutter> mchua: we also added the capability to deploy and build appliances (through virt-install/virt-image and the thincrust project)
| |
|
| |
|
| | '''David Lutterkort''': The power of OCaml. ;) |
|
| |
|
| | === Mark McLoughlin on virtual upgrades to your virtual machine === |
|
| |
|
| | | '''Mark McLoughlin''': I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days. |
| | |
| == Current draft BASE ==
| |
| | |
| <pre>
| |
| mchua: Why don't we start with everyone introducing themselves briefly, and giving a sentence or two about what they do, and what virt features they worked on for F12?
| |
| | |
| rwmjones: I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf
| |
| | |
| mchua: what would sysadmins have to do to fix that before libguestfs arrived?
| |
| | |
| rwmjones: that's really tricky ... it was sort of possible using tools like kpartx and loopback mounts, but it was dangerous stuff, hard and you had to be root. now there's no root commands needed, and it's organized as nice little command line tools for each task with proper manual pages. I'd point people to the home page -- http://libguestfs.org/ -- to see lots of examples, and documentation.
| |
| | |
| mchua: How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools?
| |
| | |
| rwmjones: we've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offer something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here.
| |
| | |
| 15:16:34 <mchua> rwmjones: Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit?
| |
| 15:17:35 <rwmjones> mchua, sure ... guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. The basic usage is to do:
| |
| 15:17:51 <rwmjones> guestfish -i yourguest # where yourguest is some guest name known by libvirt
| |
| 15:18:22 <rwmjones> and that gives you a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands
| |
| 15:18:42 <rwmjones> that's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html
| |
| 15:19:09 <mchua> rwmjones: Wow. That documentation is gorgeous.
| |
| 15:19:12 <rwmjones> and if you run out of ideas, we have some "recipes" you can try out with guestfish: http://libguestfs.org/recipes.html
| |
| 15:20:03 <markmc> mchua, we've certainly all been put to shame by rwmjones docs :)
| |
| 15:20:32 <lutter> the pwoer of OCaml ;)
| |
| | |
| ==============
| |
| | |
| markmc: I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days.
| |
|
| |
|
| Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it. | | Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it. |
Line 220: |
Line 149: |
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| Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest. | | Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest. |
| 15:16:22 <markmc> As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused.
| |
|
| |
|
| 15:17:04 <markmc> But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware.
| | As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused. But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware. Windows, for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license. We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host. |
| 15:17:29 <markmc> Windows for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license.
| |
| 15:17:51 <markmc> We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host.
| |
|
| |
|
| | === David Lutterkort on "Network scripts: complex no more!" === |
|
| |
|
| =============
| | '''David Lutterkort''': David Lutterkort, software engineer at Red Hat, worked on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Management feature), in the past worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools. besides that, work some on http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/ |
|
| |
|
| lutter: David Lutterkort, software engineer at Red Hat, worked on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Mgmt feature), in the past worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools. besides that, work some on http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/
| | Network Interface Management lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API; in the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager) |
|
| |
|
| Network Interface Mgmt lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API; in the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager)
| | '''Mel Chua''': Awesome. If I'm understanding you right, this means that now sysadmins can automate complex custom network configurations for VMs? |
|
| |
|
| mchua: Awesome. If I'm understanding you right, this means that now sysadmins can automate complex custom network configurations for VMs?
| | '''David Lutterkort''': Complex network configs on the host, generally ... a common request is 'how do I share a physical NIC between various VM's'; in the past, you had to manually go and edit ifcfg-* files. libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's. |
|
| |
|
| lutter: complex network configs on the host, generally ... a common request is 'how do I share a physical NIC between various VM's'; in the past, you had to manually go and edit ifcfg-* files. libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's
| | '''Mel Chua''': Ahhh, okay - thanks for the clarification. How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms? |
|
| |
|
| mchua: Ahhh, okay - thanks for the clarification. How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms?
| | '''David Lutterkort''': right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click. There you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts. |
|
| |
|
| lutter: right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click
| | '''Mel Chua''': Is there a place where our readers can go to find out more about how to use the libvirt API? How do folks try these features out? |
| 15:17:18 <lutter> mchua: there you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts
| |
|
| |
|
| 15:21:01 <mchua> lutter: Is there a place where our readers can go to find out more about how to use the libvirt API? How do folks try these features out?
| | '''David Lutterkort''': Beside bugzilla? ;)There's a small amount of docs on the netcf site (I have to add more) and libvirt.org has API docs for the various virInterface* calls. |
| 15:22:02 <lutter> mchua: there's a small amount of docs on the netcf site (I have to add more) and libvirt.org has API docs for the various virInterface* calls
| |
| 15:22:03 <mchua> lutter: I see instructions on how to test at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Network_Interface_Management#How_To_Test
| |
| 15:22:59 <lutter> mchua: there's also a blog post somebody else wrote on netcf http://linux-kvm.com/content/netcf-silver-bullet-network-configuration
| |
| 15:23:40 <lutter> mchua: besides bz ? ;)
| |
| 15:22:28 <mchua> lutter: Is there a place folks should be watching to see things go up as the F12 GA date approaches?
| |
| 15:24:01 <mchua> lutter: *grin* what components should we be keeping track of?
| |
| 15:24:30 <lutter> mchua: I don't know of a good central place where this gets summarized, though FWN has been pretty good reporting about virt features. Besides that, watching the individual projects is everybody's best bet
| |
| 15:25:38 <lutter> mchua: libvirt, libguestfs, virt-install, virt-manager are the most important ones from a user's POV
| |
| 15:25:38 * mchua nods
| |
| 15:25:51 <mchua> lutter: the user typically being a sysadmin?
| |
| 15:26:30 <lutter> mchua: virt-manager is definitely for end users, not just sysadmins; virt-install somewhere in the middle, the others get fairly technical
| |
|
| |
|
| 15:27:47 <mchua> lutter: What would be a use-case for an end-user using virt-manager? (I'm guessing there will be users reading this interview who may not have tried out virt stuff before, but who might read this and go "ooh, hey..." and try it out.)
| | '''Mel Chua''': I see instructions on how to test at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Network_Interface_Management#How_To_Test |
| 15:28:45 <lutter> mchua: try out rawhide w/o the risk of breaking your current system
| |
| 15:29:37 <lutter> mchua: of course, that goes for any $OS ... in general, virt-manager is a graphical user interface to most/all virt features
| |
| 15:31:59 <mchua> lutter: Ok - imagine I'm a new Fedora user, I've just installed F12, love it, want to get a preview of rawhide so I can see what's coming for F13. What do I need to install/run to get rawhide running in a VM? (If that process is quick and painless enough to put in a few "try this!" lines mid-interview.)
| |
| 15:32:39 <mchua> lutter: (I realize this is a pretty basic question, but I'd like to get virt used by as many folks as possible so that hopefully we'll have some of those folks going deeper and trying out the tools you've made)
| |
| 15:33:09 <lutter> mchua: lemme dig around
| |
| 15:34:08 <rwmjones> mchua: lvcreate -n F13Rawhide -L 10G vg_yourhost; virt-install -v -n F13Rawhide --accelerate -r 512 -f /dev/vg_yourhost/F13Rawhide -c /tmp/Fedora-13-netinst.iso
| |
| 15:34:39 <markmc> rwmjones, hmm, no - I'd point people at virt-manager
| |
| 15:35:01 <markmc> mchua, go to Applications -> System Tools -> Virtual Machine Manager
| |
| 15:35:10 <rwmjones> yeah virt-manager will be easier ...
| |
| 15:35:44 <markmc> mchua, (well, first install the 'Virtualization' group in Add/Remove Software)
| |
| 15:35:53 <markmc> mchua, then click on New VM
| |
| 15:36:10 <markmc> mchua, choose a name for the guest, choose network install
| |
| 15:36:26 <mchua> lutter: ^^ (I think we've got it, no worries)
| |
| 15:36:55 <markmc> mchua, and then add a URL like http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/x86_64/os/
| |
| 15:37:12 <markmc> mchua, after that, the instructions in the wizard should be fairly self explanatory
| |
| 15:37:19 <lutter> mchua: yeah, what markmc said
| |
| 15:37:22 * mchua will make a video for the "how to try out virt" procedure in the next week or two
| |
|
| |
|
| | '''David Lutterkort''': There's also a blog post somebody else wrote on netcf: http://linux-kvm.com/content/netcf-silver-bullet-network-configuration. I don't know of a good central place where this gets summarized, though FWN has been pretty good reporting about virt features. Besides that, watching the individual projects is everybody's best bet: libvirt, libguestfs, virt-install, virt-manager are the most important ones from a user's point of view. |
|
| |
|
| ==============
| | '''Mel Chua''': The user typically being a sysadmin? |
|
| |
|
| 15:12:22 <markmc> mchua, was that interview you did for f11 published anywhere? would be good to link to it from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization/History
| | '''David Lutterkort''': virt-manager is definitely for end users, not just sysadmins; virt-install somewhere in the middle, the others get fairly technical. |
| 15:21:07 <markmc> mchua, found it : http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2009/05/fedora-11-virtualization-reality.html
| |
|
| |
|
| | '''Mel Chua''': What would be a use-case for an end-user using virt-manager? (I'm guessing there will be users reading this interview who may not have tried out virt stuff before, but who might read this and go "ooh, hey..." and try it out.) |
|
| |
|
| ================
| | '''David Lutterkort''': Try out rawhide without the risk of breaking your current system. Of course, that goes for any $OS ... in general, virt-manager is a graphical user interface to most/all virt features. |
|
| |
|
| | === How to try out virtualization === |
|
| |
|
| 15:24:42 <mchua> lutter, rwmjones, markmc: in a moment, I'd like to pull back and have the three of you talk with each other about how virt in Fedora has progressed in the past few releases.
| | '''Mel Chua''': Ok - imagine I'm a new Fedora user, I've just installed F12, love it, want to get a preview of rawhide so I can see what's coming for F13. What do I need to install/run to get rawhide running in a VM? |
| 15:25:16 <markmc> mchua, one sec - I'll cover gpxe and qcow2 featurehs
| |
| 15:25:25 <markmc> mchua, the feature owners aren't here
| |
| 15:25:55 <mchua> (in this case)
| |
| 15:25:57 <markmc> okay, the gPXE feature is about replacing the boot ROMs used by qemu for PXE booting with newer versions, basically
| |
| 15:26:14 <markmc> etherboot was the name of the project previously, but it's now called gPXE
| |
| 15:27:31 <markmc> It's important that we made the switch to gPXE because all future upstream development (new features, bug fixes) will go into gPXE instead of etherboot.
| |
| 15:28:28 <markmc> the qcow2 performance feature was about taking a cold hard look at the qcow2 file format and fixing an major bottlenecks
| |
| 15:28:33 <markmc> basically, we see qcow2 as a very useful format for virtual machine images
| |
| 15:29:15 <markmc> e.g. the size of qcow2 files is determined by the amount of disk space used by the guest, not the entire size of the virtual disk we're presenting to the guest
| |
| 15:29:30 <markmc> i.e. the images should be smaller on disk, even if you copy them between hosts
| |
| 15:29:45 <markmc> also, qcow2 supports a "copy on write" feature
| |
| 15:30:01 <markmc> whereby you can base multiple guest images from the one base image
| |
| 15:30:32 <markmc> so you can reduce disk space further by installing one guest image, creating multiple qcow2 images backed by the first image
| |
| 15:30:40 <markmc> and yet, the guest can still write to their disks
| |
| 15:30:59 <markmc> so, in summary, we want more people to use qcow2, but they couldn't because the performance was poor
| |
| 15:31:23 <markmc> Kevin Wolf put serious effort in upstream to iron out those kinks and obtain a serious speedup
| |
| 15:31:29 <markmc> figures are in a table on the feature page
| |
| 15:30:01 <mchua> markmc: (to backtrack a bit) why the switch from etherboot? (From what I've read, it sounds like the switch was actually requested by the etherboot upstream, in part.)
| |
| 15:31:59 <markmc> mchua, yes, the etherboot project is no more; it is deprecated in favor of gPXE
| |
| 15:32:45 <markmc> mchua, but they're not completely identical, so there was some significant work involved ... done by Glauber Costa (our Brazilian joker) and Matt Domsch from Dell (AFAIR)
| |
| 15:33:01 <mchua> markmc: is gPXE being used by other OSes and distros too?
| |
| 15:33:06 <markmc> yeah, it was Matt Domsch
| |
| 15:33:29 <markmc> mchua, it may be used by other distros, I'm not 100% sure about that
| |
| 15:33:51 <markmc> mchua, I'd imagine we're slightly ahead of the curve on this - upstream qemu is still using etherboot images
| |
|
| |
|
| | '''Richard Jones''': |
| | <pre>lvcreate -n F13Rawhide -L 10G vg_yourhost; virt-install -v -n F13Rawhide --accelerate -r 512 -f /dev/vg_yourhost/F13Rawhide -c /tmp/Fedora-13-netinst.iso</pre> |
|
| |
|
| 15:25:24 <rwmjones> mchua, I would say that in Fedora 6 which is where I really started off with Fedora, it was quite primitive and unfriendly, although we did have virt-manager which has always been a nice tool
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: Hmm, no - I'd point people at virt-manager. Install the 'Virtualization' group in Add/Remove Software, go to Applications -> System Tools -> Virtual Machine Manager, then click on New VM. Choose a name for the guest, choose network install, and then add a URL like http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/x86_64/os/ - after that, the instructions in the wizard should be fairly self explanatory. |
| 15:26:53 <mchua> rwmjones: What was the F6 virt experience like?
| |
| 15:27:22 <rwmjones> mchua, here's a guestfish example ... making a backup of /home from a Debian guest:
| |
| 15:27:30 <rwmjones> # guestfish -i --ro Debian5x64
| |
| 15:27:31 <rwmjones> Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
| |
| 15:27:31 <rwmjones> editing virtual machine filesystems.
| |
| 15:27:31 <rwmjones> Type: 'help' for help with commands
| |
| 15:27:31 <rwmjones> 'quit' to quit the shell
| |
| 15:27:31 <rwmjones> ><fs> cat /etc/debian_version
| |
| 15:27:33 <rwmjones> squeeze/sid
| |
| 15:27:35 <rwmjones> ><fs> tgz-out /home home.tar.gz
| |
| 15:29:40 <rwmjones> mchua, Fedora 6 -> 12 .. it's a story of everything improving dramatically. It's not really that there are big new features eg. we have virt-manager back in 6, but modern virt-manager is just far better.
| |
| 15:30:27 <rwmjones> and I've been trying to work on making it better for sysadmins who want to automate things, hence libguestfs is very shell-script / automation-friendly
| |
| 15:33:57 <mchua> rwmjones: So one area of improvement between F6 virt and F12 virt is "F12 virt is far more automatable and shell-script friendly."
| |
| 15:34:19 <rwmjones> mchua, yeah I'd say that's true
| |
| 15:34:35 <mchua> rwmjones: "It's not really that there are big new features... but [features are] just far better" - so you can do the same things, more or less, just much faster (in terms of sysadmin-headache-time needed)?
| |
| 15:36:10 <rwmjones> mchua, well there are a lot of big new features behind the scenes (KVM, KSM, virtio ...). It's not clear how apparent they'll be to end users, but it will just all work better and faster.
| |
| 15:37:43 <rwmjones> mchua, there's a story behind virt-df (http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html). When I used to manage a bunch of virtual machines at my previous job, it was the tool that I wanted. It didn't exist, so at Red Hat, I wrote it.
| |
| 15:37:57 <markmc> mchua, the big change between F6 and F12 is that we've switched from Xen to KVM
| |
| 15:38:34 <markmc> mchua, but because all our work is based on the libvirt abstraction layer, the tools used in F6 for using Xen should be familiar to people using KVM in F-12
| |
| 15:38:58 <markmc> mchua, we've also put a significant emphasis on improving security over the last number of releases
| |
| 15:39:13 <markmc> mchua, danpb has more details on the security efforts in his F-11 interview
| |
| 15:39:13 <rwmjones> mchua, yeah ... someone on F6 who was using virt-manager or "virsh list", will be using exactly the same commands in F12, even though the hypervisor is completely different
| |
| 15:39:23 * mchua nods
| |
| 15:39:27 <markmc> mchua, and he'll also have more details wrt. the VirtPrivileges feature
| |
| 15:40:19 <lutter> mchua: libvirt, and therefore the whole virt tool stack now manages a much broader area of virt related aspects, not just VM lifecycles
| |
| 15:41:08 <markmc> mchua, lutter has a good point - we now have tools for e.g. managing networking and storage
| |
| 15:41:14 <markmc> mchua, we also have much better support for remotely managing virtualization hosts
| |
| 15:41:41 <markmc> mchua, e.g. you can point virt-manager at a host, create a guest on that host, create storage for the guest, configure the network etc.
| |
| 15:42:12 <lutter> mchua: the tools are now a prety solid basis for datacenter virt management software like ovirt and RHEV-M
| |
| 15:42:18 <markmc> mchua, wrt. fedora virt changing over the years, we're also pushing very hard to adopt new virtualization hardware features introduced by vendors
| |
| 15:42:40 <markmc> mchua, so, for example, in F-11 we introduced VT-d support and in F-12 we're introducing SR-IOV support
| |
| 15:43:01 <markmc> mchua, and KVM itself is based on Intel and AMD hardware virtualization
| |
| 15:43:09 <markmc> mchua, also EPT/NPT support
| |
| 15:43:38 <markmc> mchua, so yeah, we're definitely leading the field in terms of shipping support for new hardware features
| |
| 15:44:00 <markmc> mchua, e.g. AFAIK no-one else (not even other hypervisor vendors) are yet shipping SR-IOV support
| |
| 15:44:06 <markmc> ...
| |
| 15:44:34 <lutter> yeah, Fedora is very likely the first place where you see a lot of new hardware virt features supported in OSS, mostly since so many upstream maintainers/developers for virt-related stuff work at RH and generally push their work to Fedora 'by default' .. spin that any way you want to avoid a distro war ;)
| |
| 15:45:13 <mchua> All while maintaining a consistent, familiar interface - as rwmjones pointed out, folks using virt-manager and virsh on F6 are still using the same commands. Though now they also have the option to use additional tools like guestfish to script the process (so, alternative-but-even-easier interface).
| |
| 15:45:40 <lutter> mchua: we also added the capability to deploy and build appliances (through virt-install/virt-image and the thincrust project)
| |
|
| |
|
| ============ | | === From etherboot to gPXE === |
| 15:46:13 <mchua> rwmjones_, markmc, lutter: two last questions I wanted to toss out: (1) what's coming up for virt in f13 and the future? and (2) what do you folks do for fun when you're not hacking on virt stuff?
| |
| 15:46:16 <markmc> mchua, oh, "Cloud"
| |
| 15:46:27 <markmc> mchua, none of us said that yet, how silly of us
| |
| 15:46:31 <markmc> cloud, cloud, cloud
| |
| 15:46:35 * markmc gets it in a few times
| |
| 15:46:37 <markmc> for good effect
| |
| 15:46:40 <rwmjones_> mchua, yeah the outlook is cloudy
| |
| 15:46:56 * mchua chuckles
| |
| 15:47:16 <lutter> haha .. yeah ... everybody watch deltacloud.org
| |
| 15:47:21 <markmc> mchua, fedora based cloud project : http://deltacloud.org/
| |
| 15:47:42 <markmc> mchua, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F13_Virt_Features
| |
| 15:47:52 * mchua grins. We'll keep an eye on cloud for F13.
| |
| 15:47:56 * rwmjones_ trolls OCaml features to C programmers
| |
| 15:48:05 <markmc> mchua, VHostNet is maybe the most exciting there so far
| |
| 15:48:05 <lutter> mchua: and virt datacenter mgmt along the lines of ovirt
| |
| 15:48:11 <markmc> mchua, we'll be adding more feature pages as time goes on
| |
| 15:48:30 <markmc> mchua, VHostNet is about handling virtio networking in the kernel, rather than in the qemu process
| |
| 15:48:48 <markmc> mchua, so network traffic goes straight from the guest to the kernel out to the network
| |
| 15:48:58 <markmc> mchua, without ever being diverted through the qemu process
| |
| 15:49:17 <markmc> mchua, Red Hat's Michael Tsirkin is busy getting that feature into the 2.6.33 kernel
| |
| 15:49:28 * lutter blames markmc and rwmjones and a bunch of other people
| |
| 15:49:53 <markmc> mchua, also, the VNCResourceTunnel means we'll get sound from guests again, which would be nice :)
| |
| 15:50:15 <markmc> mchua, not sure how to spin that so it doesn't sound like "uh, we suck at audio, we're going to try a little harder" though :)
| |
|
| |
|
| 15:48:55 <mchua> rwmjones_, lutter, markmc: Whoa. Documentation and project webpages and a list of F13 features and *everything.* You folks are awesome.
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''': I'll cover gpxe and qcow2 features; the feature owners aren't here. |
|
| |
|
| 15:50:34 <lutter> mchua: there's a much bigger group within RH working on all these virt features .. might be worth a mention; it's far from being just us 3 or 5
| | The gPXE feature is about replacing the boot ROMs used by qemu for PXE booting with newer versions, basically. Etherboot was the name of the project previously, but it's now called gPXE. It's important that we made the switch to gPXE because all future upstream development (new features, bug fixes) will go into gPXE instead of etherboot. |
| 15:51:11 <rwmjones_> mchua, chris lalancette too
| |
| 15:51:12 <markmc> mchua, lutter's dead right - there's a huge list of people working upstream on KVM and libvirt etc.
| |
| 15:51:34 <markmc> mchua, I might send you a full list later, rather than forget people now
| |
| 15:51:36 <lutter> markmc: might be worth underscoring how many of them are at RH
| |
| 15:52:08 <markmc> lutter, oh, I meant "a huge list of Red Hat" people
| |
| 15:52:19 <lutter> mchua: off the top of my head, Danial Veillard, Matt Booth and Laine Stump should be on that list .. also a long list of qemu/kvm/kernel hackers that markmc has a better overview of
| |
| 15:52:48 <lutter> mchua: Cole Robinson (virt-install and virt-manager)
| |
| 15:52:49 <markmc> mchua, Avi Kivity, Gerd Hoffman, Christoph Hellwig, ...
| |
| 15:52:59 <markmc> dammit, I'm just going to forget people if I try and list here
| |
| 15:53:14 <lutter> yeah, that's the danger with these lists
| |
| 15:53:14 <rwmjones_> yeah, not forgetting the $100M investment in qumranet, now Red Hat
| |
| 15:53:35 * mchua nods. Not going to treat these lists as complete, just as potential starting spots to find out more
| |
| 15:54:11 <lutter> mchua: if you want to plug virtual appliances, Bryan Kearney, Joey Boggs and David Huff are to blame for thincrust
| |
|
| |
|
| 15:54:34 <mchua> lutter, markmc, rwmjones: Thanks - this is all awesome stuff. I know y'all have a ton of work to do, and really appreciate you taking the time to come and fill us in.
| | '''Mel Chua''': Why the switch from etherboot? From what I've read, it sounds like the switch was actually requested by the etherboot upstream, in part. |
|
| |
|
| ======
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''': Yes, the etherboot project is no more; it is deprecated in favor of gPXE, but they're not completely identical, so there was some significant work involved ... done by Glauber Costa (our Brazilian joker) and Matt Domsch from Dell |
|
| |
|
| Mel: Last question - when you're not hacking on virt stuff, what do you do for fun? | | '''Mel Chua''': Is gPXE being used by other OSes and distros too? |
|
| |
|
| Richard: I troll OCaml features to C programmers ...
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''': It may be used by other distros, I'm not 100% sure about that. I'd imagine we're slightly ahead of the curve on this - upstream qemu is still using etherboot images. |
|
| |
|
| Mel: *grins* Got that.
| | === qcow2: now with better performance! === |
|
| |
|
| Richard: And cook the best pizza of anyone I know
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''': The qcow2 performance feature was about taking a cold hard look at the qcow2 file format and fixing an major bottlenecks. Basically, we see qcow2 as a very useful format for virtual machine images, e.g. the size of qcow2 files is determined by the amount of disk space used by the guest, not the entire size of the virtual disk we're presenting to the guest, i.e. the images should be smaller on disk, even if you copy them between hosts. |
|
| |
|
| David: Hacking on non-virt stuff ? ;) I have two little kids that take up most of my free time.
| | Also, qcow2 supports a "copy on write" feature whereby you can base multiple guest images from the one base image so you can reduce disk space further by installing one guest image, creating multiple qcow2 images backed by the first image, and yet, the guest can still write to their disks. So, in summary, we want more people to use qcow2, but they couldn't [previously] because the performance was poor. Kevin Wolf put serious effort in upstream to iron out those kinks and obtain a serious speedup. Figures are in a table on the feature page. |
|
| |
|
| Mark: I live in Dublin, Ireland with my wife. Close to the sea and mountains, so I race sailing dinghys, run, hike and generally try and avoid computers as much as possible.
| | === Virtualization in Fedora: a historical retrospective === |
|
| |
|
| Mel: Sounds like y'all have the good life. | | '''Mel Chua''': In a moment, I'd like to pull back and have the three of you talk with each other about how virt in Fedora has progressed in the past few releases. |
|
| |
|
| Mark: Mel, introduce yourself too by the way! We haven't met.
| | '''Richard Jones''': I would say that in Fedora 6 which is where I really started off with Fedora, it was quite primitive and unfriendly, although we did have virt-manager which has always been a nice tool. Here's a guestfish example, making a backup of /home from a Debian guest: |
|
| |
|
| Mel: I'm a new Red Hatter on the Community Architecture team, running Fedora Marketing. This is also my first Fedora release, and I had to look up "Marketing" on wikipedia after Jack and Max asked me to step in... long story.
| | <pre> |
| | # guestfish -i --ro Debian5x64 |
| | Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for |
| | editing virtual machine filesystems. |
| | Type: 'help' for help with commands |
| | 'quit' to quit the shell |
| | ><fs> cat /etc/debian_version |
| | squeeze/sid |
| | ><fs> tgz-out /home home.tar.gz |
| | </pre> |
|
| |
|
| Mark: Cool stuff, welcome to Red Hat!
| | '''Mel Chua''': What was the F6 virt experience like? |
|
| |
|
| Mel: Thanks! I think we're pretty much set, unless there's anything you folks want to chime in on.
| | '''Richard Jones''': It's a story of everything improving dramatically. It's not really that there are big new features eg. we have virt-manager back in 6, but modern virt-manager is just far better, and I've been trying to work on making it better for sysadmins who want to automate things, hence libguestfs is very shell-script / automation-friendly. |
|
| |
|
| ===========
| | '''Mel Chua''': So you can do the same things, more or less, just much faster (in terms of sysadmin-headache-time needed)? |
|
| |
|
| Chris arrives.
| | '''Richard Jones''': Well there are a lot of big new features behind the scenes (KVM, KSM, virtio ...). It's not clear how apparent they'll be to end users, but it will just all work better and faster. There's a story behind virt-df (http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html). When I used to manage a bunch of virtual machines at my previous job, it was the tool that I wanted. It didn't exist, so at Red Hat, I wrote it. |
|
| |
|
| Mark: Chris, Mel. Mel, Chris. | | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: The big change between F6 and F12 is that we've switched from Xen to KVM, but because all our work is based on the libvirt abstraction layer, the tools used in F6 for using Xen should be familiar to people using KVM in F-12. We've also put a significant emphasis on improving security over the last number of releases. Dan Berrange has more details on the security efforts in his F-11 interview. |
|
| |
|
| Chris: Hi.
| | '''Richard Jones''': Yeah ... someone on F6 who was using virt-manager or "virsh list", will be using exactly the same commands in F12, even though the hypervisor is completely different, and he'll also have more details with respect to the VirtPrivileges feature. |
|
| |
|
| Mark: Chris, I said you'd cover KSM, huge pages and SR-IOV ...okay ?
| | '''David Lutterkort''': libvirt, and therefore the whole virt tool stack now manages a much broader area of virt related aspects, not just VM lifecycles. |
|
| |
|
| Chris: Ok, works for me.
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: David has a good point - we now have tools for e.g. managing networking and storage. We also have much better support for remotely managing virtualization hosts, e.g. you can point virt-manager at a host, create a guest on that host, create storage for the guest, configure the network etc. |
|
| |
|
| Mel: If you want to start by introducing yourself and giving an overview of those features...
| | '''David Lutterkort''': The tools are now a prety solid basis for datacenter virt management software like ovirt and RHEV-M. |
|
| |
|
| Mark: Richard, David, and I just had a case of verbal spew for the past hour. | | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: With respect to Fedora virtualization changing over the years, we're also pushing very hard to adopt new virtualization hardware features introduced by vendors. So, for example, in F-11 we introduced VT-d support and in F-12 we're introducing SR-IOV support, and KVM itself is based on Intel and AMD hardware virtualization. Also EPT/NPT support. So yeah, we're definitely leading the field in terms of shipping support for new hardware features. AFAIK no-one else (not even other hypervisor vendors) are yet shipping SR-IOV support. |
|
| |
|
| Chris: Fun!
| | '''David Lutterkort''': Yeah, Fedora is very likely the first place where you see a lot of new hardware virt features supported in open source software, mostly since so many upstream maintainers/developers for virt-related stuff work at Red Hat and generally push their work to Fedora 'by default.' |
|
| |
|
| David: Talk amongst yourself. *grins*
| | '''Mel Chua''': All while maintaining a consistent, familiar interface - as Richard pointed out, folks using virt-manager and virsh on F6 are still using the same commands, though now they also have the option to use additional tools like guestfish to script the process (so, alternative-but-even-easier interface). |
|
| |
|
| Chris: My name is Chris Wright. I'm a kernel hacker working at Red Hat on virtualization, specifically KVM. We're continually improving the virtualization infrastructure and Fedora 12 has a nice long list of virtualization specific features as a result.
| | '''David Lutterkort''': We also added the capability to deploy and build appliances through virt-install/virt-image and the thincrust project. |
|
| |
|
| Mel: For those reading along who aren't familiar with KVM, that's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine.
| | === What's Next? Virtualization in F13 and beyond === |
|
| |
|
| Chris: Right, thanks. Our goals are to improve the efficiency of KVM so that there is very little cost associated with running an OS in a virtual machine compared with bare metal, and to improve the density that we can acheive when consolidating multiple guest OS's to a single physical host.
| | '''Mel Chua''': What's coming up for virtualization in Fedora 13 and the future? |
|
| |
|
| 16:09:43 <danpb_ltop> mchua: hello, what do you want to talk about ?
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F13_Virt_Features. VHostNet is maybe the most exciting there so far. |
| 16:09:55 <mchua> hey, danpb_ltop!
| |
| 16:10:11 <mchua> danpb_ltop: the game plan is to do a round of introductions on who you are and what you're working on
| |
| 16:10:23 <cdub> One of the features we added for F12 is called KSM, which is about improving density, i.e. the number of VMs we can run on a since host
| |
| 16:10:35 <mchua> danpb_ltop: and then cdub was going to talk about huge page backed memory, KSM, and SR-IOV
| |
| 16:10:53 <mchua> danpb_ltop: which leaves VirtPrivileges, VirtStorage and libvirt TCK for you to explain
| |
| 16:10:57 <mchua> danpb_ltop: sound good?
| |
| 16:11:14 <cdub> And the other 2 I planned to talk about, hugepages and SR-IOV, are about improving the efficiency of the VM.
| |
| 16:11:26 * mchua nods.
| |
| 16:11:49 <mchua> cdub: let's start with KSM.
| |
| 16:12:19 <cdub> mchua: alright, KSM...really cool feature that addresses one of the bottlenecks in virtualization.
| |
| 16:12:42 <mchua> #link https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KSM
| |
| 16:13:07 <cdub> A modern computer has lots of cores, but memory is still relatively expensive
| |
| 16:13:29 <mchua> That's Kernel SamePage Merging (or the Korean Service Medal, or the Kothagudem School of Mines, but we're talking about the first one here. ;)
| |
| 16:13:44 <danpb_ltop> mchua: ok
| |
| 16:13:45 <cdub> So you can run out of memory for all the virtual machines you may want to run on a box, despite the fact that you've got CPU power to spare
| |
| 16:13:47 * mchua nods and sits back to listen
| |
| 16:14:21 <mchua> danpb_ltop: I reckon we'll just go through the features in order, so feel free to chime in on the KSM/hugepages/SR-IOV discussion, and then when we switch to your 3, you get to drive.
| |
| 16:14:44 <cdub> mchua: heh, right. The acronym started life with a different translation, but same underlying meaning -- used to mean Kernel Shared Memory ;-)
| |
| 16:16:00 <cdub> KSM, at it's core, simply scans regions of physical memory, looking for duplicate contents.
| |
| 16:17:11 <cdub> And when it finds 2 pages of memory with identical contents, it collapses them to a single page.
| |
| 16:17:52 <cdub> So this has the effect of compressing memory utilization.
| |
| 16:18:16 <cdub> Now, when you consider this in a virtual machine context, you can see how this can be really useful.
| |
| 16:18:57 <cdub> If the virtual machines are running similar OSes, they'll contain some of the same memory just for the kernels and programs running in the OS.
| |
| 16:19:43 <cdub> So when we launch a VM, we register the memory associated with the VM to KSM, and let KSM scan away in the background.
| |
| 16:20:10 <mchua> cdub: Do you have a rough idea of the range of how much memory (%?) this might typically save?
| |
| 16:20:15 <cdub> You can actually watch as your free memory shrinks when you start a new VM, and then slowly grows back as KSM fins pages to merge.
| |
| 16:20:17 <mchua> (for a particular type of use case, etc.)
| |
| 16:20:30 <mchua> Ooh, I should get some screen captures of that.
| |
| 16:20:50 <cdub> mchua: good question, it's very workload dependent, I don't have a number right off the top of my head.
| |
| 16:20:52 <mchua> #action mchua get screencaps of free-memory-over-time for KSM section
| |
| 16:21:29 <cdub> mchua: but one thing to keep in mind that's interesting here, is that some OSes opportunistically write zeros to their free memory
| |
| 16:21:47 <mchua> cdub: Ok. Is there a way to find out? (I'm happy to do the legwork needed to get that comparison if there's a quick descript of what I should do / look to compare.)
| |
| 16:21:59 <cdub> this has the effect from the KVM point of view of making they hypervisor believe that the memory is in use (it's been written to)
| |
| 16:22:31 <cdub> but it's actually free, awaiting an allocation. With KSM, we'll find thousands of these pages, and collapse then to a single page.
| |
| 16:22:32 <mchua> cdub: Interesting. So it can't tell the free memory is free.
| |
| 16:22:44 <mchua> Nifty.
| |
| 16:23:11 <mchua> cdub: should we switch gears and talk about huge pages and SR-IOV for a bit?
| |
| 16:23:16 <cdub> mchua: right, the hypervisor doesn't have all the information, so it can only tell when a page is used, not unused
| |
| 16:23:37 <mchua> cdub: Oh - wait, before we do that... is there anything like KSM outside Fedora?
| |
| 16:23:48 <mchua> similar tools in other OSes, etc?
| |
| 16:23:59 <cdub> mchua: sure, one last thing on KSM...there are statistics you can view in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/
| |
| 16:24:05 * mchua nods
| |
| 16:24:28 <cdub> mchua: actually, good question, reminds me of something I wanted to point out...
| |
| 16:24:50 <cdub> mchua: yes, there's at least one other OS that has a feature like this, ESX (VMware).
| |
| 16:25:00 <cdub> mchua: but in Fedora, KSM is not exclusive to VMs
| |
| 16:25:15 <cdub> mchua: KSM works w/ any program that registers it's memory as "mergeable"
| |
| 16:25:52 <cdub> mchua: so even regular programs running in Fedora could benefit, and some number crunchers at CERN have used this to improve their own application's memory usage
| |
| 16:26:18 <cdub> mchua: so that they can run more apps, and do more number crunching w/ the same hardware
| |
| 16:26:54 <mchua> Nice!
| |
| 16:27:03 <cdub> mchua: so that's KSM, shall we move on to hugepages and SR-IOV?
| |
| 16:27:12 <mchua> cdub: I was just about to suggest the same.
| |
| 16:27:16 <cdub> cool
| |
| 16:27:28 <mchua> danpb_ltop: Feel free to chime in any time; we'll get to your features in just a moment. :)
| |
| 16:27:30 <cdub> ok, moving from density to efficiency...
| |
| 16:28:20 <cdub> hugepages, another feature added to F12, give the user the ability to run a VM backed by huge pages
| |
| 16:28:38 <cdub> normally, when we run a VM, we simply malloc() the memory for the guest OS.
| |
| 16:29:15 <cdub> this means that the memory for the guest will be allocated in page sized chunks, 4k to be specific
| |
| 16:30:12 <cdub> the hypervisor needs to be able to translate between the guests view of physical memory and the hosts view of physical memory
| |
| 16:31:10 <cdub> when the host is using large pages, like 2M pages, or huge pages, to allocate guest memory, those translations become cheaper (there are fewer to do)
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| 16:31:46 <cdub> and, if the guest actually wants to use huge pages (database servers like to do this, as do some Java workloads)
| |
| 16:32:01 <cdub> the translation cost goes down further
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| 16:32:29 <cdub> ultimately, with hug pages we've seen double digit percentage improvement for some of those workloads
| |
| 16:33:33 <cdub> in fact, w/out backing the guest's memory w/ huge pages on the host, when a guest asked for a huge page...we lied. so this is really nice to fix
| |
| 16:34:09 <mchua> "we lied" --> "we said 'here is a huge page' that wasn't actually a huge page"?
| |
| 16:34:32 <cdub> exactly, which is not very nice since the reason the guest asked for a huge page was to improve it's own performance
| |
| 16:35:48 * mchua nods.
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| 16:36:06 <mchua> SR-IOV real quick, and then on to danpb_ltop's features?
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| 16:36:15 <cdub> alright
| |
| 16:36:35 <cdub> SR-IOV is another attempt to improve guest VM efficiency
| |
| 16:36:52 <cdub> the I/O path for a guest is traditionally tough to virtualize
| |
| 16:37:28 <mchua> danpb_ltop, cdub: I'd also like to have the two of you talk together a bit on how virt has progressed overall between F6 and F12, where virt is headed for F13 and beyond, and then some non-virt stuff about yourselves so our readers get to know you a little better, just so you know what's coming up.
| |
| 16:37:35 * mchua listens to SR-IOV
| |
| 16:39:07 <cdub> a typical VM has a NIC and a storage device that may be either emulated devices (this is the most expensive, but least likely to require any new drivers in the OS), like an emulated realtek NIC, or a virtual device which requires a special device driver, but doesn't need to emulate anything, it knows that it's just a virtual path to the hypervisor's I/O subsystem
| |
| 16:40:20 <cdub> in both of those cases, there is a fair amount of CPU involved in processing the I/O request. the emulated device has the most overhead, but even a virtual device (like KVM's virtio devices) have to copy data around, and cause expensive exits from the VM to the hypervisor
| |
| 16:41:39 <cdub> SR-IOV is an attempt by the industry to move virtualization out of the CPU (hardware virtualization extensions that allow KVM to work at all), past the chipset (like an IOMMU that allows memory isolation when a guest is talking directly to a physical device), and into the I/O devices
| |
| 16:42:27 <mchua> So this is something that's happening outside of just Fedora, too.
| |
| 16:42:33 <cdub> So, it requires newer hardware, specifically, the CPU, IOMMU and an SR-IOV capable card (there aren't a lot of these on the market yet, so Fedora is really on the leading edge)
| |
| 16:42:52 <cdub> right, SR-IOV is a PCI standard
| |
| 16:43:20 <cdub> An SR-IOV capable card allows you to effectively virtualize the I/O hardware
| |
| 16:44:02 <cdub> so rather than having a single physical E1000 NIC that you must share with each VM via some indirection (the emulated or virutal device I mentioned above)
| |
| 16:44:35 <cdub> you get a single physical NIC that you can allocate multiple virtual instances of
| |
| 16:45:14 <cdub> So now you can allocate some resource from the SR-IOV NIC (called a Virtual Function, or VF)
| |
| 16:45:23 <cdub> that shows up as a PCI device, just like real hardware
| |
| 16:45:51 <cdub> and w/ the existing ability in Fedora to do PCI device assignment to a guest, you can assign that VF directly to the guest
| |
| 16:46:26 <cdub> that means the guest is communicating directly to the hardware, it's running the same device driver you'd run on the hypervisor
| |
| 16:46:35 * mchua nods
| |
| 16:46:36 <cdub> and this really shortens the I/O path.
| |
| 16:46:55 <cdub> With this you can effectively acheive bare metal I/O performance from a guest
| |
| 16:47:13 <cdub> IOW, the I/O bottle neck is removed
| |
| 16:48:10 <mchua> Nice.
| |
| 16:48:22 <cdub> Yeah, KVM in F12 is looking really good
| |
| 16:48:31 <mchua> danpb_ltop: ready to go?
| |
| 16:49:13 <mchua> cdub, danpb_ltop: I don't want to keep you folks waiting, so what we might do is have the two of you talk together about F6-->F12 virt improvements and what's coming down the virt pipeline for future releases together
| |
| 16:49:44 <cdub> mchua: I'm fine idling waiting for danpb_ltop to finish too
| |
| 16:49:44 <cdub> mchua: either way
| |
| 16:49:44 <mchua> cdub: and have you at some point throw in a "when I'm not hacking on virt stuff, I... <do these other things for fun>"
| |
| 16:50:09 <mchua> and then cdub can run off, and I'll go through danpb_ltop's intro and those 3 features with him
| |
| 16:50:26 <mchua> cdub: while we're waiting, what do you do for fun aside from virt hackin'?
| |
| 16:50:33 <mchua> cdub: (and how did you get started doing it?)
| |
| 16:51:23 <cdub> mchua: well, I got started hacking on virt stuff because I was interested in security and isolation. The thing that I found really exciting was that this was an area where hardware was rapidly evolving
| |
| 16:51:51 <cdub> mchua: so, as a kernel hacker, it was really fun to work on software that's adpating to these new hardware features.
| |
| 16:53:07 <danpb_ltop> wow, well F6 to F12 is a huge amount of time - almost 3 years worth of Fedora releases
| |
| 16:53:18 <cdub> mchua: I was convinced that the virt stuff which I originally learned about in the context of Trusted Computing, had some other more useful benefits...that was probably 6 years ago, wow
| |
| 16:54:12 <danpb_ltop> Way back in F6 all focus was on Xen and making it easy to manage, this was the first release where we had apps like virt-manager available
| |
| 16:54:59 <cdub> mchua: as for fun...I've got two small children...so, sleep! ;-) Heh, that or hangin' w/ my kids, or riding my bike
| |
| 16:55:27 <danpb_ltop> and the first to introduce graphical installation for guests, so it really set the foundations for future work
| |
| 16:55:35 <mchua> cdub: Mmm, biking. :)
| |
| 16:55:46 * mchua switches gears to F6-->F12 convo
| |
| 16:55:55 <cdub> mchua: markmc recently told me my bike has bling! never been associated w/ bling before ;-)
| |
| 16:56:04 * mchua listens to danpb_ltop, waits for cdub to chime in on F6-->F12 too.
| |
| 16:56:09 <danpb_ltop> in Fedora 7, we added a very early release of KVM, along with support in libvirt + virt-mnanager for KVM+QEMU
| |
| 16:56:25 <danpb_ltop> but Xen was still the primary virt platform at that time
| |
| 16:57:03 <danpb_ltop> Fedora 8 focused on stepping up the security capabilites of the management toolchain
| |
| 16:57:12 <cdub> And it was a lot of effort to forward port Xen all along that path
| |
| 16:57:34 <danpb_ltop> by introducing support for securely using libvirt from a remote host using TLS/SSL or SSH tunnel, with similar capability added to the VNC server
| |
| 16:58:17 <danpb_ltop> yes, as chris says there was always a massive effort going on in the background from F5 right through F8 on forward porting the old Xen kernel trees to something uptodate
| |
| 16:59:13 <danpb_ltop> by F8 though, KVM was really gaining ground and was genuinely usable so many Fedora users had switch from Xen to KVM already at that time
| |
| 17:00:02 <danpb_ltop> in Fedora 9, we finally stopped trying to forward port the old Xen kernel trees, and switched to only support paravirt-ops based kernels from LKML upstream
| |
| 17:00:30 <danpb_ltop> this meant dropping support for Xen has a virtualization host platform, so from Fedora 9 onwards we only supported Xen as a guest
| |
| 17:00:54 <cdub> That was a tough decision to make. But reality was the forward porting just got too hard
| |
| 17:01:05 <danpb_ltop> fortunately KVM was in great shape by then, and hardware virtualization support was pretty widely available
| |
| 17:02:05 <danpb_ltop> Fedora 9 also introduce more security features, such as support for SASL which allows use of Kerberos authentication for libvirt and PolicyKit for local desktop authentication
| |
| 17:02:36 <cdub> Right, that was the key change. You could find new laptops, desktops, servers all w/ hardware virt support
| |
| 17:03:13 <danpb_ltop> libvirt work to provide APIs for managing storage allowed Fedora 10 to introduce full remote provisioning in virt-manage
| |
| 17:04:14 <danpb_ltop> and then finally F11 we added SASL support to the VNC server, comparable to that we'd done for libvirt in F10
| |
| 17:04:45 * mchua enjoying this whirlwind tour through the ages
| |
| 17:04:45 <danpb_ltop> so both libvirt & VNC can now integrate with pretty much any commonly found authentication services
| |
| 17:05:43 <danpb_ltop> the most important feature in F11 though was the introduction of sVirt
| |
| 17:06:18 <danpb_ltop> which is integration between libvirt and SELinux to provide security protection between virtual machines running on the same host
| |
| 17:06:35 <danpb_ltop> (previously SELinux had merely protected the host from VMs, but not VMs from each other)
| |
| 17:07:06 <cdub> Yeah, also a nice way to show the benefit of KVM being a part of Linux
| |
| 17:08:20 <danpb_ltop> yep, it avoids having to reinvent all these concepts in a separate hypervisor
| |
| 17:09:01 <mchua> cdub,danpb_ltop: And I think that brings us to F12 and the features we've just covered / are about to cover. Sweet.
| |
| 17:09:03 <danpb_ltop> there are soo many important & useful features available in Linux we want to take advantage of that you really don't want to start having to re-invent them all
| |
| 17:09:10 * mchua nods
| |
| 17:09:26 <danpb_ltop> all this stuff is summarized in our history page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization/History
| |
| 17:09:34 <mchua> danpb_ltop, cdub: can you talk a little bit about where you see virt work headed in the future, for Fedora N where N > 12?
| |
| 17:09:43 * mchua notes that and will link to virt history wiki page heavily
| |
| 17:10:10 <mchua> danpb_ltop, cdub: cloud sounded like a big thing to watch.
| |
| 17:10:13 <mchua> deltacloud, specifically
| |
| 17:10:21 <cdub> It's nice to look back and see how in a few years we've gone from no virt support in Fedora to what you see in F12
| |
| 17:11:03 <cdub> mchua: one thing to underscore in that F6->F12 is the importance of libvirt
| |
| 17:11:04 <danpb_ltop> mchua: you can thing of deltacloud as doing for clouds, what libvirt did for hypervisors
| |
| 17:11:13 <cdub> exactly
| |
| 17:11:26 <danpb_ltop> libvirt made it possible to write applications against a simple, standard, stable API regardless of the underlying hypervisor technology
| |
| 17:11:47 <cdub> so the success of libvirt in isolating tools from the underlying hypervisor is just waht deltacloud is for cloud management
| |
| 17:12:09 <danpb_ltop> the fact that we now have libvirt support for Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, VMWare ESX, VMWare GSX, LXC (native containers), IBM Power Hypervisor & OpenNebula
| |
| 17:12:52 <danpb_ltop> shows just how much people like the idea of libvirt - all of those drivers except for Xen & KVm were started by libvirt community members
| |
| 17:13:25 <cdub> libvirt made it possible to move from F5 w/ paravivrt only Xen to Xen w/ HVM to KVM, w/out having to keep rewriting the magnement tools (they did evolve, like danpb_ltop mentioned ;-)
| |
| 17:13:29 <danpb_ltop> deltacloud is aiming todo the same for cloud providers so you can write one app targetting any service and avoid being locked into proprietary cloud mgmt APis
| |
| 17:14:05 <danpb_ltop> oh, add VirtualBox to that list for libvirt - mustn't forget one !
| |
| 17:14:16 <cdub> mchua: idea being you can manage multiple clouds from single tool, and even support moving from one cloud to another
| |
| 17:14:48 <mchua> Nice!
| |
| 17:15:05 <cdub> mchua: of course, we'll keep working on the infrastructure too
| |
| 17:15:33 <cdub> mchua: continually improving the efficiency of the hypervisor, the managability of the hypervisor, etc.
| |
| 17:15:41 <danpb_ltop> there's still plenty of work to be done for non-cloud related virt of course
| |
| 17:16:08 <danpb_ltop> in the management tools we really want to polish the desktop virt usage scenario
| |
| 17:16:34 <danpb_ltop> we've tended to focus more on server virt, so there's some things that aren't so nice to use for the single desktop case
| |
| 17:16:57 <danpb_ltop> you can see the start of this with the major design overhaul of virt-manager UI in F12
| |
| 17:17:33 <danpb_ltop> there's always more work to be done with security features too
| |
| 17:17:55 <cdub> another thing we should see is better work on the remote desktop
| |
| 17:18:07 <danpb_ltop> previously introduced sVirt allows us to protect VMs from each other, but all VMs still had more or less the same policy rules
| |
| 17:18:29 <danpb_ltop> we want to start making this more tunable so you can easily customize policy for individual VMs
| |
| 17:18:50 <danpb_ltop> for example, if running a Windows desktop, you might give it a policy that blocks all network traffic on port 25
| |
| 17:18:56 <danpb_ltop> to prevent it being turned into a spam botnet
| |
| 17:19:38 <danpb_ltop> or just want to restrict what VMs on a host are allowed to communicate with each other
| |
| 17:20:02 <cdub> the whole way we manage VM networking is being reviewed as well
| |
| 17:20:51 <danpb_ltop> fine grained access control over the libvirt APIs is also another thing we'd like todo
| |
| 17:21:00 <cdub> just seeing new patches on the libvirt dev list to try and create new APIs for managing the rules surrounding a VMs network interface
| |
| 17:21:24 <danpb_ltop> so you can determine who can manage each VM & what operations they can perform, etc
| |
| 17:22:02 <danpb_ltop> anyway, shall we get back to the F12 features
| |
| 17:22:49 <mchua> danpb_ltop: Yep.
| |
| 17:23:03 <danpb_ltop> (05:10:53 PM) mchua: danpb_ltop: which leaves VirtPrivileges, VirtStorage and libvirt TCK for you to explain
| |
| 17:23:10 <danpb_ltop> so taking them in that order
| |
| 17:23:10 <mchua> cdub: I think I have everything I need from you - you're welcome to stick around, of course! but if you have to run, we're good. ;)
| |
| 17:23:15 <mchua> danpb_ltop: thanks!
| |
| 17:23:24 <cdub> mchua: cool, thanks
| |
| 17:23:48 <danpb_ltop> VirtPrivileges is yet another feature focusing on security (you've noticed that's a common theme in virt work :-)
| |
| 17:24:20 <danpb_ltop> libvirt has two modes of running virtual machines
| |
| 17:24:56 <danpb_ltop> what we call our 'system' instance, is a per-host instance that runs maximum privileges for accessing storage / networking / etc
| |
| 17:25:10 <danpb_ltop> this was primarily intended for server virtualization scenarios
| |
| 17:25:37 <danpb_ltop> and then what we call our 'session' instance, is a per-user instance that runs with the same privileges as the user connecting to it
| |
| 17:26:11 <danpb_ltop> this was intended for desktop virtualization, although it has not been really used much yet because it is hard to provide useful networking connectivity with it
| |
| 17:26:39 <danpb_ltop> For the VirtPrivileges feature we wanted to improve security by reducing the privileges of the QEMU/KVM process
| |
| 17:26:53 <danpb_ltop> but without sacrificing the functionality available
| |
| 17:27:12 <danpb_ltop> so we now have QEMU running as a dedicated 'qemu' user account and group, instead of 'root'
| |
| 17:27:29 <danpb_ltop> and libvirt manages permissions on resources that are assigned to QEMU, such as its disks
| |
| 17:27:52 <danpb_ltop> one of the hard things was being able to maintain full network connectivity
| |
| 17:28:08 <danpb_ltop> so we had to work with QEMU developers to provide a new way to hotplug network cards
| |
| 17:28:38 <danpb_ltop> where libvirt sets up a "TAP" device and then passes it across to an already running QEMU process with a little UNIX blackmagic
| |
| 17:28:58 <danpb_ltop> so this all improved security of the libvirt "system" instance
| |
| 17:29:12 <danpb_ltop> to make the 'session' instance more useful, we also changed the KVM setup so that
| |
| 17:29:29 <danpb_ltop> any user on the system can access /dev/kvm and thus run hardware accelerated virtual machines
| |
| 17:30:34 <danpb_ltop> once we figure out how to provide better network connectivity to unprivileged virtual machines the 'session' instance of libvirt will finally be useful for desktop virt and address alot of long standing bugs/RFEs people have had
| |
| 17:31:06 <danpb_ltop> Moving onto the 'VirtStorage' feature
| |
| 17:31:23 <danpb_ltop> quite a few releases back we introduced storage management APIs into libvirt
| |
| 17:31:30 <mchua> Does VirtPrivileges intersect with any of the other virt feature work being done with F12? I know there's been some network interface dev going on, etc.
| |
| 17:31:47 <danpb_ltop> at the time we supported local disks, LVM, file based storage, iSCSI in the storage APis
| |
| 17:32:08 <danpb_ltop> mchua: yes the network interface dev work was related to it, allowing us to hotplug network interfaces to running VMs
| |
| 17:32:38 <danpb_ltop> the VirtStorage feature, extends our existing storage APis to now support SCSI FibreChannel adapters
| |
| 17:33:02 <danpb_ltop> so you can discover what SCSI adapters you have, and what LUNs they are exporting to the host
| |
| 17:33:34 <danpb_ltop> there is some fairly new technology called "NPIV" which allows one physical SCSI host adapter to be used
| |
| 17:33:48 <danpb_ltop> to create many virtual host adapters, each with their own set of LUNs
| |
| 17:33:48 <rwmjones> mchua, quick question, where do you publish these interviews when you've edited them together?
| |
| 17:34:09 <danpb_ltop> so work was also done to allow libvirt to create / delete virtual host adapters when NPIV is supported
| |
| 17:34:35 <danpb_ltop> the idea behind NPIV is that you might have one virtual SCSI host adapter associated with each VM
| |
| 17:35:01 <danpb_ltop> and so instead of having to expose all SCSI luns to all hosts
| |
| 17:35:06 <mchua> rwmjones: I'm going to be doing the editing on the Fedora wiki and it'll temporarily live there, but we'll also publish it on Fedora Insight once that goes live.
| |
| 17:35:17 <danpb_ltop> you only need to expose the virtual SCSI host adapter to the host on which the VM is currently running
| |
| 17:35:42 <mchua> rwmjones: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Insight, the publictest is http://publictest6.fedoraproject.org/zikula/ and it's almost ready to go staging --> production.
| |
| 17:35:43 <danpb_ltop> this makes management of storage much more flexible, an secure
| |
| 17:36:08 <rwmjones> mchua, cool - I'd not heard of that site before, but it looks excellent
| |
| 17:36:32 <danpb_ltop> finally the libvirt TCK
| |
| 17:37:54 <mchua> rwmjones: it's just a centralized place to publish all the Fedora marketing materials we already generate (but currently scatter across multiple blogs / wiki pages / etc)
| |
| 17:38:06 <danpb_ltop> readers may or may not be aware of the Java TCK which is a huge test suite that people who write Java JRE/JDKs have to run & pass to ensure compliance with the java specification
| |
| 17:38:08 <rwmjones> that's a very very good idea
| |
| 17:38:37 <danpb_ltop> with libvirt we've had some ups & downs on the quality front and as we gained support for more & more APis & hypervisors
| |
| 17:38:53 * mchua pulls up supporting materials to explain TCK
| |
| 17:38:55 <danpb_ltop> it was becoming increasingly hard to ensure the new libvirt releases were off the quality people expect
| |
| 17:38:57 <mchua> #link http://jcp.org/en/resources/tdk
| |
| 17:39:08 <mchua> #link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit
| |
| 17:39:15 <mchua> (the wikipedia article == more useful resource)
| |
| 17:39:26 <danpb_ltop> so we decided to build what we call the 'libvirt TCK' (libvirt Technology Compatability Kit)
| |
| 17:39:43 <danpb_ltop> the idea being that we write a huge set of tests covering all aspects of libvirt APIs
| |
| 17:40:03 <danpb_ltop> which we can then run against each hypervisor libvirt supports to ensure everything is working as it is expected to
| |
| 17:40:31 <danpb_ltop> this not only finds bugs in libvirt, but also helps identify bugs in new releases of the underlying hypervisor/virtualization platform
| |
| 17:40:44 <danpb_ltop> or in the way an OS distributor built / packaged them
| |
| 17:40:59 <mchua> danpb_ltop: how is that kind of QA being carried out now (or before the libvirt TCK came around?)
| |
| 17:41:12 <danpb_ltop> this is quite a new bit of work and we've only got a handful of test cases built into it so far
| |
| 17:41:40 <danpb_ltop> but it has already allowed us to identify & fix alot of bugs before releasing which would have otherwise caused regressions for users
| |
| 17:42:21 <danpb_ltop> mchua: well there's testing by upstream libvirt developers, testing by OS packagers / distributors and testing by end users (eg in a Fedora test day, or even of the final releases)
| |
| 17:42:40 <danpb_ltop> the libvirt TCK is primarily targetted at upstream libvirt, and OS distributors
| |
| 17:43:06 <danpb_ltop> upstream libvirt community wants to make sure they don't release something which stupid bugs in it
| |
| 17:43:16 * mchua nods
| |
| 17:43:25 <danpb_ltop> and OS distributors want to make sure they've built & packaged everything, and then when they update to the latest KVM / Xen / whatever
| |
| 17:43:38 <danpb_ltop> that they are not going to cause regressions in libvirt or applications using libvirt
| |
| 17:43:52 <danpb_ltop> above all we want to catch as many bugs as possible before they get to end-users
| |
| 17:45:16 <danpb_ltop> its got fairly minimal testing coverage for F12, but come F13 we want to have all important core functionality automatically tested
| |
| 17:45:35 <mchua> danpb_ltop: What can our readers to to help out with this testing?
| |
| 17:45:44 <mchua> (or to try out any of these features and send feedback, really?)
| |
| 17:46:45 <danpb_ltop> well had a Virtualization Test Day a few weeks back now, but if interested in doing testing
| |
| 17:47:01 <danpb_ltop> keep an eye out for future test days during the course of Fedora 13 development
| |
| 17:47:18 <danpb_ltop> joining the fedora-virt mailing list is a good way to get involved in Fedora virtualization work
| |
| 17:47:57 <danpb_ltop> or if they have development experiance, then the various upstream communities always have plenty of need for help
| |
| 17:49:27 * mchua nods - thanks!
| |
| 17:49:57 <mchua> danpb_ltop: I think we're almost done - anything else on those three features (or any others) you'd like to call out/explain/plug?
| |
| 17:52:35 <rwmjones> danpb_ltop, V2V?
| |
| 17:54:51 <mchua> danpb_ltop: I'd also like to get a sentence or two of introduction from you (since we missed that at the beginning) and a couple things you do for fun outside of virt-hackin'
| |
| 17:54:58 <mchua> and then we'll be done.
| |
| 17:55:07 <mchua> danpb_ltop: Thanks for being so patient - I know this took longer than expected.
| |
| 17:55:56 <danpb_ltop> rwmjones: there's no V2V stuff in F12 AFAIK
| |
| 17:56:27 <rwmjones> didn't matt add it? anyhow, doesn't matter
| |
| 17:58:37 <danpb_ltop> mchua: I've worked on Red Hat for quite a long time now, must be more than 7 years, with the last 3 focusing on virtualization
| |
| 17:58:58 <danpb_ltop> i originally got involved in the virtualization team by writing the virt-manager application
| |
| 17:59:21 <danpb_ltop> but since then Cole Robinson has taken the lead on that development, and I'm spending most time on lower level areas
| |
| 17:59:51 <danpb_ltop> probably 80% libvirt, and the rest related things like QEMU / KVM / VNC
| |
| 18:00:13 <mchua> danpb_ltop: Why do dev work for those things in Fedora?
| |
| 18:00:15 <danpb_ltop> its a good mixture of upstream work, Fedora work and RHEL work
| |
| 18:00:42 <danpb_ltop> well upstream libvirt is on an approx monthly schedule
| |
| 18:01:43 <danpb_ltop> Fedora has a short 6 month schedule, which means Fedora is a great place to get early exposure to real users
| |
| 18:02:16 <danpb_ltop> a new libvirt release ends up in Fedora rawhide almost always the same day
| |
| 18:02:46 <danpb_ltop> and Fedora stable releases are only a couple of releases behind latest
| |
| 18:03:18 <danpb_ltop> it works out well for us as libvirt community developers, and for users who always want the latest stuff
| |
| 18:04:11 <mchua> Sweet. And then eventually that work finds its way over to RHEL?
| |
| 18:05:50 <danpb_ltop> yep, periodically it works its way into RHEL, but on a much longer timescale
| |
| 18:06:13 <danpb_ltop> since RHEL has more prolonged testing / quality control cycles before release than you'd get with Fedora
| |
| 18:07:08 * mchua references http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu81frqUtlc, Paul's video
| |
| 18:07:22 <mchua> danpb_ltop: Thanks. And what do you do when you're not hacking on virt?
| |
| 18:07:57 <danpb_ltop> err, sleep
| |
| 18:08:16 <mchua> Sleep is good stuff.
| |
| 18:08:32 <danpb_ltop> nah, seriously i spend quite alot of time on photography
| |
| 18:08:40 * mchua notes "sleep" seems to be one of the first "what do I do in my free time" responses from virt hackers...
| |
| 18:08:53 <stickster> mchua: They all have guest instances working while they snooze.
| |
| 18:09:28 <mchua> oh, nice! seems like we've got a pretty good set of hobbyist photographers at RH
| |
| 18:09:34 <mchua> danpb_ltop, dwa, mizmo, etc
| |
| 18:10:15 <mchua> danpb_ltop: is there a gallery you'd like to share with folks, just for fun?
| |
| 18:10:21 <mchua> (totally optional)
| |
| 18:11:07 <mchua> stickster: btw, I'm going to be cleaning this up en route to Toronto, do you want it tomorrow or sometime over the weekend or Monday or at some later date?
| |
| 18:11:29 <mchua> stickster: I have *way* more than enough info now to make multiple marketing shiny things from this
| |
| 18:12:10 <stickster> mchua: Monday would be fine -- I'll be mostly out of commission FAD-ing this weekend
| |
| 18:12:24 <stickster> mchua: Might want to let f-mktg-l know, Kara will see it there too
| |
| 18:12:33 <danpb_ltop> hah, they can google for it !
| |
| 18:12:46 <mchua> danpb_ltop: maybe I will ;)
| |
| 18:12:58 <mchua> danpb_ltop: anything else? otherwise I think we're done - thanks for all your time (and patience!)
| |
| 18:13:08 * mchua waves at mthompson
| |
| 18:15:14 <danpb_ltop> think that's all
| |
| 18:15:55 <mchua> danpb_ltop: We're all set, then. Thanks for your time!
| |
| 18:16:00 * mchua will try to find a way to streamline this process in the future - I think yours was the one that went most over, because of the staggered scheduling.
| |
| 18:16:22 * rbergeron yawns
| |
| 18:16:29 * mchua closes out logs
| |
| 18:16:31 <mchua> #endmeeting
| |
| </pre>
| |
|
| |
|
| == Interview Highlights: Virtualization Improvements in Fedora 12 ==
| | '''David Lutterkort''': And virt datacenter mgmt along the lines of ovirt. |
|
| |
|
| Red Hat's Mel Chua recently did a series of interviews on Fedora 12's virtualization improvements with members of the virtualization team. Here are some of the highlights from those discussions. | | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: We'll be adding more feature pages as time goes on. VHostNet is about handling virtio networking in the kernel, rather than in the qemu process, so network traffic goes straight from the guest to the kernel out to the network without ever being diverted through the qemu process. Red Hat's Michael Tsirkin is busy getting that feature into the 2.6.33 kernel. |
|
| |
|
| '''''...Richard Jones, talking about libguestfs''''' | | '''Mel Chua''': Whoa. Documentation and project webpages and a list of F13 features and everything. You folks are awesome. |
|
| |
|
| : I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf. | | '''David Lutterkort''': There's a much bigger group within Red Hat working on all these virt features; it's far from being just us 3 or 5. |
|
| |
|
| ; How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools?
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: David's dead right - there's a huge list of people working upstream on KVM and libvirt etc. |
|
| |
|
| : We've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offer something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here. | | '''David Lutterkort''': Off the top of my head, Danial Veillard, Matt Booth and Laine Stump should be on that list .. also a long list of qemu/kvm/kernel hackers that Mark has a better overview of. Cole Robinson (virt-install and virt-manager)... |
|
| |
|
| ; Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit?
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: Avi Kivity, Gerd Hoffman, Christoph Hellwig, ... |
|
| |
|
| : mchua, sure ... guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. [One can open] a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands! That's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html | | '''Richard Jones''': Yeah, not forgetting the $100M investment in qumranet, now Red Hat... |
|
| |
|
| '''''...Mark McLoughlin, on virtual upgrades to your Virtual Machine''''' | | '''David Lutterkort''': If you want to plug virtual appliances, Bryan Kearney, Joey Boggs and David Huff are to blame for thincrust. |
|
| |
|
| : I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days. | | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: Oh, cloud. None of us said that yet, how silly of us. Cloud, cloud, cloud. |
|
| |
|
| : Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it. | | '''Richard Jones''': Yeah, the outlook is cloudy. |
|
| |
|
| : That's much harder to do when the guest is already running. So, most of the work involved some scary UNIX voodoo to allow passing that file descriptor between two running processes. As for use cases, people often want to add and remove hardware from their guests without re-starting them. You might want to add a guest to a new network, for example. | | '''David Lutterkort''': Haha, yeah, everybody watch deltacloud.org. |
|
| |
|
| : Now, the Stable Guest ABI feature is really quite boring, but is about preparing KVM so that we can maintain compatibility across new releases. The idea is that if you are running a Fedora 12 KVM host and you install a new host with Fedora 13, you might like to migrate your running guests from the Fedora 12 host to the Fedora 13 host, without re-starting them. | | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: Fedora based cloud project : http://deltacloud.org/. |
|
| |
|
| : Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest.
| | === When they're not hacking... === |
|
| |
|
| : As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused. | | '''Mel Chua''': Last question - when you're not hacking on virt stuff, what do you do for fun? |
|
| |
|
| : But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware.
| | '''Richard Jones''': I troll OCaml features to C programmers ... |
|
| |
|
| : Windows for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license. | | '''Mel Chua''': *grins* Got that. |
|
| |
|
| : We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host. | | '''Richard Jones''': And cook the best pizza of anyone I know |
|
| |
|
| '''''...David Lutterkort, on reducing complexity in network scripts''''' | | '''David Lutterkort''': Hacking on non-virt stuff ? *wink* I have two little kids that take up most of my free time. |
| ; David Lutterkort is a software engineer at Red Hat, working on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Mgmt feature). In the past he worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools, as well as http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/.
| |
|
| |
|
| : Network Interface Management lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API. In the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager). | | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: I live in Dublin, Ireland with my wife. Close to the sea and mountains, so I race sailing dinghys, run, hike and generally try and avoid computers as much as possible. |
|
| |
|
| : libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier [than in the past]. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's. | | '''Mel Chua''': Sounds like y'all have the good life. |
|
| |
|
| ; How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms?
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: Mel, introduce yourself too by the way! We haven't met. |
| | |
| : Right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click; there you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts.
| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| '''''...talking about the typical user'''''
| |
| | |
| '''''...discussing the history of PXE'''''
| |
| | |
| '''''...the history of virt-manager'''''
| |
| | |
| Many thanks go out to the members of the virt team for participating in this interview, including rwmjones (aka: rwmjones), David Lutterkort (aka: lutter), and Mark McLoughlin (aka: markmc), as well as Mel Chua (aka: mchua) for arranging the interview. The transcript of the full interview is available on [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization_improvements_in_Fedora_12 the Fedora Project's website].
| |
| | |
| If you want to find more information about the projects discussed in this interview, there are a number of resources available.
| |
| * [http://libguestfs.org/ libguestfs]
| |
| *
| |
| | |
| | |
| And of course, if you want to find out more about the Fedora Project and give it a whirl, everything you need to get started is available at [http://www.fedoraproject.org/ www.fedoraproject.org].
| |
|
| |
|
| | '''Mel Chua''': I'm a new Red Hatter on the Community Architecture team, running Fedora Marketing. This is also my first Fedora release, and I had to look up "Marketing" on wikipedia after Jack and Max asked me to step in... long story. |
|
| |
|
| | '''Mark McLoughlin''':: Cool stuff, welcome to Red Hat! |
|
| |
|
| | '''Mel Chua''': Thanks! I think we're pretty much set, unless there's anything you folks want to chime in on. |
|
| |
|
| --[[User:Rbergero|Rbergero]] 16:15, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
| | == Press == |
| | Article on virtualization features in Fedora 12 in the [http://www.linuxforu.com/ Linux For You] Magazine. [[File:F12VirtFeat.pdf]] |
Fedora 12 includes a number of improvements in the field of Virtualization. New tools enable system administrators to perform nearly impossible - until now - tasks easily. Imagine re-configuring a virtual machine off-line, add new hardware to VM without restarting it, migrate to another host without restarting the VMs and many other exotic features. Let's hear what developers have to say about those wonderful new options.
Highlights: Virtualization Improvements in Fedora 12
Mel Chua recently did a series of interviews on Fedora 12's virtualization improvements with members of the virtualization team. More detailed interviews are available below, but here are some of the highlights from those discussions.
...Richard Jones, talking about libguestfs
- I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf.
- How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools?
- We've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offer something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here.
- Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit?
- mchua, sure ... guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. [One can open] a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands! That's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html
...Mark McLoughlin, on virtual upgrades to your Virtual Machine
- I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days.
- Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it.
- That's much harder to do when the guest is already running. So, most of the work involved some scary UNIX voodoo to allow passing that file descriptor between two running processes. As for use cases, people often want to add and remove hardware from their guests without re-starting them. You might want to add a guest to a new network, for example.
- Now, the Stable Guest ABI feature is really quite boring, but is about preparing KVM so that we can maintain compatibility across new releases. The idea is that if you are running a Fedora 12 KVM host and you install a new host with Fedora 13, you might like to migrate your running guests from the Fedora 12 host to the Fedora 13 host, without re-starting them.
- Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest.
- As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused. But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware. Windows, for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license. We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host.
...David Lutterkort, on reducing complexity in network scripts
- David Lutterkort is a software engineer at Red Hat, working on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Mgmt feature). In the past he worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools, as well as http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/.
- Network Interface Management lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API. In the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager).
- libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier [than in the past]. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's.
- How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms?
- Right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click; there you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts.
...David Lutterkort, talking about the typical user
- [Is] the user typically being a sysadmin?
- virt-manager is definitely for end users, not just sysadmins; virt-install somewhere in the middle, the others get fairly technical.
- What would be a use-case for an end-user using virt-manager? (I'm guessing there will be users reading this interview who may not have tried out virt stuff before, but who might read this and go "ooh, hey..." and try it out.)
- Try out rawhide without the risk of breaking your current system of course, that goes for any $OS ... in general, virt-manager is a graphical user interface to most/all virt features.
...Mark McLoughlin, discussing the gPXE and qcow2
- The gPXE feature is about replacing the boot ROMs used by qemu for PXE booting with newer versions, basically etherboot was the name of the project previously, but it's now called gPXE. It's important that we made the switch to gPXE because all future upstream development (new features, bug fixes) will go into gPXE instead of etherboot.
- The qcow2 performance feature was about taking a cold hard look at the qcow2 file format and fixing major bottlenecks. Basically, we see qcow2 as a very useful format for virtual machine images; e.g. the size of qcow2 files is determined by the amount of disk space used by the guest, not the entire size of the virtual disk we're presenting to the guest. The images should be smaller on disk, even if you copy them between hosts. Also, qcow2 supports a "copy on write" feature whereby you can base multiple guest images from the one base image so you can reduce disk space further by installing one guest image, creating multiple qcow2 images backed by the first image and yet, the guest can still write to their disks! So, in summary, we want more people to use qcow2, but they couldn't because the performance was poor. Kevin Wolf put serious effort in upstream to iron out those kinks and obtain a serious speedup.
...Richard Jones, David Lutterkort, and Mark McLoughlin on the history of virt-manager
- Richard Jones: I would say that in Fedora 6, which is where I really started off with Fedora, it was quite primitive and unfriendly, although we did have virt-manager which has always been a nice tool. [Going from F6 to F12]... it's a story of everything improving dramatically. It's not really that there are big new features; we had virt-manager back in F6, but modern virt-manager is just far better.
- So one area of improvement between F6 virt and F12 virt is that F12 virt is far more automatable and shell-script friendly; so you can do the same things, more or less, just much faster (in terms of sysadmin-headache-time needed)?
- Richard Jones: Well there are a lot of big new features behind the scenes (KVM, KSM, virtio ...). It's not clear how apparent they'll be to end users, but it will just all work better and faster.
- Mark McLoughlin: The big change between F6 and F12 is that we've switched from Xen to KVM. But because all our work is based on the libvirt abstraction layer, the tools used in F6 for using Xen should be familiar to people using KVM in F12. We've also put a significant emphasis on improving security over the last number of releases.
- Richard Jones: ...someone on F6 who was using virt-manager or "virsh list", will be using exactly the same commands in F12, even though the hypervisor is completely different.
- Mark McLoughlin: David has a good point - we now have tools for e.g. managing networking and storage, [and] have much better support for remotely managing virtualization hosts - e.g., you can point virt-manager at a host, create a guest on that host, create storage for the guest, configure the network, etc.
- David Lutterkort: The tools are now a pretty solid basis for datacenter virt management software, like ovirt and RHEV-M.
- Mark McLoughlin: We're also pushing very hard to adopt new virtualization hardware features introduced by vendors. So, for example, in F11 we introduced VT-d support, and in F12 we're introducing SR-IOV support. And KVM itself is based on Intel and AMD hardware virtualization. So yeah, we're definitely leading the field in terms of shipping support for new hardware features. As far as I know, no-one else (not even other hypervisor vendors) are yet shipping SR-IOV support.
- David Lutterkort: Yeah, Fedora is very likely the first place where you see a lot of new hardware virt features supported in OSS.
- All while maintaining a consistent, familiar interface - as rwmjones pointed out, folks using virt-manager and virsh on F6 are still using the same commands. Though now they also have the option to use additional tools like guestfish to script the process (so, alternative-but-even-easier interface).
Many thanks go out to the members of the virt team for participating in this interview, including rwmjones (aka: rwmjones), David Lutterkort (aka: lutter), and Mark McLoughlin (aka: markmc), as well as Mel Chua (aka: mchua) for arranging the interview. The transcript of the full interview is available on the Fedora Project wiki.
If you want to find more information about the projects discussed in this interview, there are a number of resources available.
And of course, if you want to find out more about the Fedora Project and give it a whirl, everything you need to get started is available at www.fedoraproject.org.
Featured interviewees
Interviews
Interviews were conducted online on October 22, 2009. The full IRC transcript from which this interview series was extracted is available here.
Richard Jones on guestfish and friends (libguestfs and libvirt)
Mel Chua: Why don't we start with everyone introducing themselves briefly, and giving a sentence or two about what they do, and what virt features they worked on for F12?
Richard Jones: I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, and I am working on http://libguestfs.org/. libguestfs is a set of tools which you can use to examine and modify virtual machine images from outside (ie. from the host), so for example if you had an unbootable guest, you could try to fix it by doing: virt-edit myguest /boot/grub/grub.conf
Mel Chua: What would sysadmins have to do to fix that before libguestfs arrived?
Richard Jones: that's really tricky ... it was sort of possible using tools like kpartx and loopback mounts, but it was dangerous stuff, hard and you had to be root. now there's no root commands needed, and it's organized as nice little command line tools for each task with proper manual pages. I'd point people to the home page -- http://libguestfs.org/ -- to see lots of examples, and documentation.
Mel Chua: How do libguestfs capabilities in Fedora compare with how a sysadmin might do the same thing on other, non-Linux (or linux-but-on-another-distribution) platforms? Are there other similar tools?
Richard Jones: we've worked with Guido Gunther from Debian on getting a parts of libguestfs packaged up for Debian. On Windows, Microsoft offers something called DiscUtils.Net which is similar but not nearly as powerful. So I'm confident Fedora is well ahead of everyone here.
Mel Chua: Do you want to talk about the guestfish interface a bit?
Richard Jones: Sure. guestfish is one of the ways to get access to the libguestfs features, for use from shell scripts. The basic usage is to do:
guestfish -i yourguest
...where yourguest is some guest name known by libvirt, and that gives you a shell where you can list files in the guest, edit them, look in directories, find out what LVs the guest has (or create new ones) ... literally 200 commands. That's all documented here: http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html
Mel Chua: Wow. That documentation is gorgeous.
Richard Jones: and if you run out of ideas, we have some "recipes" you can try out with guestfish: http://libguestfs.org/recipes.html
Mark McLoughlin:: We've certainly all been put to shame by Richard's docs. :)
David Lutterkort: The power of OCaml. ;)
Mark McLoughlin on virtual upgrades to your virtual machine
Mark McLoughlin: I'm an engineer at Red Hat, joined from Sun nearly 6 years ago. Previously worked on GNOME desktop related stuff, but have been working on virtualization for the past few years. For Fedora 12, I worked on the NIC Hotplug and Stable Guest ABI features, along with packaging, bug triaging and general shepherding of all the other virt bits. I work upstream on both qemu and libvirt, but at lot of my time is taken up by Fedora work these days.
Okay, the NIC hotplug feature - the ability to add a new virtual NIC while the guest is running - was a pretty obviously missing feature from our KVM support previously. The problem we had with implementing it, is that libvirt is responsible for configuring the virtual NIC and passes a file descriptor to the qemu process when it starts it.
That's much harder to do when the guest is already running. So, most of the work involved some scary UNIX voodoo to allow passing that file descriptor between two running processes. As for use cases, people often want to add and remove hardware from their guests without re-starting them. You might want to add a guest to a new network, for example.
Now, the Stable Guest ABI feature is really quite boring, but is about preparing KVM so that we can maintain compatibility across new releases. The idea is that if you are running a Fedora 12 KVM host and you install a new host with Fedora 13, you might like to migrate your running guests from the Fedora 12 host to the Fedora 13 host, without re-starting them.
Now, as we add new features to qemu in Fedora 13, we might end up 'upgrading' the virtual machine's hardware. We might, for example, emulate a new chipset by default or add a new default NIC. The Stable Guest ABI feature means that when you migrate to the Fedora 13 host, the hardware emulated by qemu will remain the same for that guest.
As you can imagine, if you change around the hardware under a running guest, the guest may get seriously confused. But it's not just about live migration - if you upgrade your host and restart your guest, not all guest OSes will like if you've changed around the hardware. Windows, for example, with significant enough changes to the hardware, will require you to re-validate your license. We want to avoid that happening when you upgrade your Fedora host.
David Lutterkort on "Network scripts: complex no more!"
David Lutterkort: David Lutterkort, software engineer at Red Hat, worked on http://fedorahosted.org/netcf (for the Network Interface Management feature), in the past worked on ovirt and some of the virt-install tools. besides that, work some on http://deltacloud.org/, and http://augeas.net/
Network Interface Management lets sysadmins set up fairly complex network configurations (e.g. a bridge with a bond enslaved) through a simple description of the config, using the libvirt API; in the past, that required initimate knowledge of ifcfg-* files and a lot of nailbiting. Having an API also means that such setups can be done by programs (e.g., centralized virt mgmt software or virt-manager)
Mel Chua: Awesome. If I'm understanding you right, this means that now sysadmins can automate complex custom network configurations for VMs?
David Lutterkort: Complex network configs on the host, generally ... a common request is 'how do I share a physical NIC between various VM's'; in the past, you had to manually go and edit ifcfg-* files. libvirt now has an API and XML description to make that setup much easier. The backend for the libvirt interface API is netcf, which is independent of virtualization, so you could use that to setup network configs in your VM's.
Mel Chua: Ahhh, okay - thanks for the clarification. How does this compare to how people would set up host network configs on other platforms?
David Lutterkort: right now this is exposed in the libvirt API; we're working (well, Cole Robinson is working) on exposing that in virt-manager so that people can say 'use this physical NIC for all my VM's' with one click. There you either have to manually edit the network configs, which generally is only really possible for humans, not programs, or rely on the very dodgy, never-quite-right Xen networking scripts.
Mel Chua: Is there a place where our readers can go to find out more about how to use the libvirt API? How do folks try these features out?
David Lutterkort: Beside bugzilla? ;)There's a small amount of docs on the netcf site (I have to add more) and libvirt.org has API docs for the various virInterface* calls.
Mel Chua: I see instructions on how to test at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Network_Interface_Management#How_To_Test
David Lutterkort: There's also a blog post somebody else wrote on netcf: http://linux-kvm.com/content/netcf-silver-bullet-network-configuration. I don't know of a good central place where this gets summarized, though FWN has been pretty good reporting about virt features. Besides that, watching the individual projects is everybody's best bet: libvirt, libguestfs, virt-install, virt-manager are the most important ones from a user's point of view.
Mel Chua: The user typically being a sysadmin?
David Lutterkort: virt-manager is definitely for end users, not just sysadmins; virt-install somewhere in the middle, the others get fairly technical.
Mel Chua: What would be a use-case for an end-user using virt-manager? (I'm guessing there will be users reading this interview who may not have tried out virt stuff before, but who might read this and go "ooh, hey..." and try it out.)
David Lutterkort: Try out rawhide without the risk of breaking your current system. Of course, that goes for any $OS ... in general, virt-manager is a graphical user interface to most/all virt features.
How to try out virtualization
Mel Chua: Ok - imagine I'm a new Fedora user, I've just installed F12, love it, want to get a preview of rawhide so I can see what's coming for F13. What do I need to install/run to get rawhide running in a VM?
Richard Jones:
lvcreate -n F13Rawhide -L 10G vg_yourhost; virt-install -v -n F13Rawhide --accelerate -r 512 -f /dev/vg_yourhost/F13Rawhide -c /tmp/Fedora-13-netinst.iso
Mark McLoughlin:: Hmm, no - I'd point people at virt-manager. Install the 'Virtualization' group in Add/Remove Software, go to Applications -> System Tools -> Virtual Machine Manager, then click on New VM. Choose a name for the guest, choose network install, and then add a URL like http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/x86_64/os/ - after that, the instructions in the wizard should be fairly self explanatory.
From etherboot to gPXE
Mark McLoughlin: I'll cover gpxe and qcow2 features; the feature owners aren't here.
The gPXE feature is about replacing the boot ROMs used by qemu for PXE booting with newer versions, basically. Etherboot was the name of the project previously, but it's now called gPXE. It's important that we made the switch to gPXE because all future upstream development (new features, bug fixes) will go into gPXE instead of etherboot.
Mel Chua: Why the switch from etherboot? From what I've read, it sounds like the switch was actually requested by the etherboot upstream, in part.
Mark McLoughlin: Yes, the etherboot project is no more; it is deprecated in favor of gPXE, but they're not completely identical, so there was some significant work involved ... done by Glauber Costa (our Brazilian joker) and Matt Domsch from Dell
Mel Chua: Is gPXE being used by other OSes and distros too?
Mark McLoughlin: It may be used by other distros, I'm not 100% sure about that. I'd imagine we're slightly ahead of the curve on this - upstream qemu is still using etherboot images.
qcow2: now with better performance!
Mark McLoughlin: The qcow2 performance feature was about taking a cold hard look at the qcow2 file format and fixing an major bottlenecks. Basically, we see qcow2 as a very useful format for virtual machine images, e.g. the size of qcow2 files is determined by the amount of disk space used by the guest, not the entire size of the virtual disk we're presenting to the guest, i.e. the images should be smaller on disk, even if you copy them between hosts.
Also, qcow2 supports a "copy on write" feature whereby you can base multiple guest images from the one base image so you can reduce disk space further by installing one guest image, creating multiple qcow2 images backed by the first image, and yet, the guest can still write to their disks. So, in summary, we want more people to use qcow2, but they couldn't [previously] because the performance was poor. Kevin Wolf put serious effort in upstream to iron out those kinks and obtain a serious speedup. Figures are in a table on the feature page.
Virtualization in Fedora: a historical retrospective
Mel Chua: In a moment, I'd like to pull back and have the three of you talk with each other about how virt in Fedora has progressed in the past few releases.
Richard Jones: I would say that in Fedora 6 which is where I really started off with Fedora, it was quite primitive and unfriendly, although we did have virt-manager which has always been a nice tool. Here's a guestfish example, making a backup of /home from a Debian guest:
# guestfish -i --ro Debian5x64
Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.
Type: 'help' for help with commands
'quit' to quit the shell
><fs> cat /etc/debian_version
squeeze/sid
><fs> tgz-out /home home.tar.gz
Mel Chua: What was the F6 virt experience like?
Richard Jones: It's a story of everything improving dramatically. It's not really that there are big new features eg. we have virt-manager back in 6, but modern virt-manager is just far better, and I've been trying to work on making it better for sysadmins who want to automate things, hence libguestfs is very shell-script / automation-friendly.
Mel Chua: So you can do the same things, more or less, just much faster (in terms of sysadmin-headache-time needed)?
Richard Jones: Well there are a lot of big new features behind the scenes (KVM, KSM, virtio ...). It's not clear how apparent they'll be to end users, but it will just all work better and faster. There's a story behind virt-df (http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html). When I used to manage a bunch of virtual machines at my previous job, it was the tool that I wanted. It didn't exist, so at Red Hat, I wrote it.
Mark McLoughlin:: The big change between F6 and F12 is that we've switched from Xen to KVM, but because all our work is based on the libvirt abstraction layer, the tools used in F6 for using Xen should be familiar to people using KVM in F-12. We've also put a significant emphasis on improving security over the last number of releases. Dan Berrange has more details on the security efforts in his F-11 interview.
Richard Jones: Yeah ... someone on F6 who was using virt-manager or "virsh list", will be using exactly the same commands in F12, even though the hypervisor is completely different, and he'll also have more details with respect to the VirtPrivileges feature.
David Lutterkort: libvirt, and therefore the whole virt tool stack now manages a much broader area of virt related aspects, not just VM lifecycles.
Mark McLoughlin:: David has a good point - we now have tools for e.g. managing networking and storage. We also have much better support for remotely managing virtualization hosts, e.g. you can point virt-manager at a host, create a guest on that host, create storage for the guest, configure the network etc.
David Lutterkort: The tools are now a prety solid basis for datacenter virt management software like ovirt and RHEV-M.
Mark McLoughlin:: With respect to Fedora virtualization changing over the years, we're also pushing very hard to adopt new virtualization hardware features introduced by vendors. So, for example, in F-11 we introduced VT-d support and in F-12 we're introducing SR-IOV support, and KVM itself is based on Intel and AMD hardware virtualization. Also EPT/NPT support. So yeah, we're definitely leading the field in terms of shipping support for new hardware features. AFAIK no-one else (not even other hypervisor vendors) are yet shipping SR-IOV support.
David Lutterkort: Yeah, Fedora is very likely the first place where you see a lot of new hardware virt features supported in open source software, mostly since so many upstream maintainers/developers for virt-related stuff work at Red Hat and generally push their work to Fedora 'by default.'
Mel Chua: All while maintaining a consistent, familiar interface - as Richard pointed out, folks using virt-manager and virsh on F6 are still using the same commands, though now they also have the option to use additional tools like guestfish to script the process (so, alternative-but-even-easier interface).
David Lutterkort: We also added the capability to deploy and build appliances through virt-install/virt-image and the thincrust project.
What's Next? Virtualization in F13 and beyond
Mel Chua: What's coming up for virtualization in Fedora 13 and the future?
Mark McLoughlin:: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F13_Virt_Features. VHostNet is maybe the most exciting there so far.
David Lutterkort: And virt datacenter mgmt along the lines of ovirt.
Mark McLoughlin:: We'll be adding more feature pages as time goes on. VHostNet is about handling virtio networking in the kernel, rather than in the qemu process, so network traffic goes straight from the guest to the kernel out to the network without ever being diverted through the qemu process. Red Hat's Michael Tsirkin is busy getting that feature into the 2.6.33 kernel.
Mel Chua: Whoa. Documentation and project webpages and a list of F13 features and everything. You folks are awesome.
David Lutterkort: There's a much bigger group within Red Hat working on all these virt features; it's far from being just us 3 or 5.
Mark McLoughlin:: David's dead right - there's a huge list of people working upstream on KVM and libvirt etc.
David Lutterkort: Off the top of my head, Danial Veillard, Matt Booth and Laine Stump should be on that list .. also a long list of qemu/kvm/kernel hackers that Mark has a better overview of. Cole Robinson (virt-install and virt-manager)...
Mark McLoughlin:: Avi Kivity, Gerd Hoffman, Christoph Hellwig, ...
Richard Jones: Yeah, not forgetting the $100M investment in qumranet, now Red Hat...
David Lutterkort: If you want to plug virtual appliances, Bryan Kearney, Joey Boggs and David Huff are to blame for thincrust.
Mark McLoughlin:: Oh, cloud. None of us said that yet, how silly of us. Cloud, cloud, cloud.
Richard Jones: Yeah, the outlook is cloudy.
David Lutterkort: Haha, yeah, everybody watch deltacloud.org.
Mark McLoughlin:: Fedora based cloud project : http://deltacloud.org/.
When they're not hacking...
Mel Chua: Last question - when you're not hacking on virt stuff, what do you do for fun?
Richard Jones: I troll OCaml features to C programmers ...
Mel Chua: *grins* Got that.
Richard Jones: And cook the best pizza of anyone I know
David Lutterkort: Hacking on non-virt stuff ? *wink* I have two little kids that take up most of my free time.
Mark McLoughlin:: I live in Dublin, Ireland with my wife. Close to the sea and mountains, so I race sailing dinghys, run, hike and generally try and avoid computers as much as possible.
Mel Chua: Sounds like y'all have the good life.
Mark McLoughlin:: Mel, introduce yourself too by the way! We haven't met.
Mel Chua: I'm a new Red Hatter on the Community Architecture team, running Fedora Marketing. This is also my first Fedora release, and I had to look up "Marketing" on wikipedia after Jack and Max asked me to step in... long story.
Mark McLoughlin:: Cool stuff, welcome to Red Hat!
Mel Chua: Thanks! I think we're pretty much set, unless there's anything you folks want to chime in on.
Press
Article on virtualization features in Fedora 12 in the Linux For You Magazine. File:F12VirtFeat.pdf