Virtualization
In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt, @fedora-xen-list, @libguestfs, @libvirt-list, @virt-tools-list, and @ovirt-devel-list lists.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
Events
On December 9th 9am EST to 6pm EST, Red Hat will be holding an online "event focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions, including virtualization and cloud computing." Titled "Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009"[1] Attendees can participate in keynote sessions and "chats with business leaders, executives, key developers, customers, and strategic partners", and "learn what's on the horizon from Red Hat and industry partners—innovations in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, tools, security, and deployment in the cloud."
Fedora Virtualization List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.
KSM Tuning Daemon and the KSM Kernel Thread Process
Gianluca Cecchi
was[1]
surprised to find that ksm was not running even though it was
enabled with chkconfig. After starting more guests, ksm was found to be
running.
Dan Kenigsberg
added the follwing explaination to the KSM feature page[2]
"Fedora's kvm comes with 2 services controlling the behavior of ksm. One,
simply called ksm, is just a nice means to start and stop ksm's kernel thread.
The other, called ksmtuned, controls the first service and tunes its
parameters according to the memory stress that is generated by KVM virtual
machines. ksmtuned may stop ksm service alltogether, if memory is not in need.
Later, if ksmtuned senses that memory stress has risen, it will fire up ksm again."
Soon after the explaination, Dan posted a patch[3]
which will cause ksmtuned to log any ksm state changes. This patch will soon be available in an update.
KSM was also recently covered in FWN 200[4].
New Release virt-manager 0.8.1
Cole Robinson
announced[1] new releases of 
virt-manager
Virtual Machine Manager[2] provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines, using
Virtinst is a python module that helps build and install libvirt based virtual
machines. Currently supports KVM, QEmu and Xen virtual machines. Package
includes several command line utilities, including virt-install (build
and install new VMs) and virt-clone (clone an existing virtual machine).
New virt-manager Features:
- VM Migration wizard, exposing various migration options
- Enumerate CDROM and bridge devices on remote connections
- Can once again list multiple graphs in the manager window (Jon Nordby)
- Support disabling dhcp (Michal Novotny), and specifying 'routed' type for new virtual networks
- Support storage pool source enumeration for LVM, NFS, and SCSI
- Allow changing VM ACPI, APIC, clock offset, individual vcpu pinning, and video model (vga, cirrus, etc.)
- Many improvements and bugfixes
New virtinst Features:
- virt-install now attempts --os-variant detection by default. This can be disabled with '--os-variant none' (distro detection currently only works for URL installs)
- New --disk option 'format', for creating image disks formats such as qcow2 or vmdk
- Many improvements and bugfixes
"Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback!"
Also see coverage of the release on linux-kvm.com[3].
Version 0.8.0 of virt-manager was announced[4] on July 28th, 2009.
Virtualization Tools List
This section contains the discussion happening on the virt-tools-list list.
Libvirt List
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
oVirt Devel List
This section contains the discussion happening on the ovirt-devel list.