Tag Archives: KVM

Linux

Getting started with KVM coming from Vmware

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By karlochacon

hi guys

In order to test new ideas and reduce cost I would like to test KVM.
I think Vmware has these 3 things which are valuable:
– HA which restart VMs (Virtual Machines) in other hosts when a Hardware failure.
– DRS which basically is an intelligent VM placement when a hosts is overcommited
– vMotion which migrates VMs up and running to other hosts.

So my question:
Can I get those 3 features using KVM? I suppose I need a KVM Central Console equivalent to vCenter?

is there such console offering those 3 things? for free?
Will Openstack cover those 3?

is just I need to talk to my boss about moving to KVM but I know for sure he will ask OK…does it have the same capabilities as Vmware has?

thanks a lot guys

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Red Hat Announces New Head of Virtualization

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By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Red Hat Announces New Head of Virtualization

Radhesh Balakrishnan to Lead Red Hat OpenStack and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Technologies and Solutions

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Red Hat, Inc. (NYS: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has appointed a new head of its virtualization technologies and solutions. Radhesh Balakrishnan, previously of Microsoft, will serve as the global leader of Red Hat‘s virtualization infrastructure solutions, including responsibilities for the company’s Red Hat OpenStack and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies and solutions.

Virtualization is the cornerstone of cloud computing and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which serves as the foundation for Red Hat‘s virtualization initiatives, is a predominant hypervisor in the cloud. OpenStack has also gained broad industry support because of the power of open source development. Under Balakrishnan’s leadership, Red Hat plans to expand its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offerings as well as deliver enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions powered by OpenStack.

Balakrishnan joins Red Hat from Microsoft, where he held product management and product marketing responsibilities across a wide range of product lines. Most recently Balakrishnan served as a senior director responsible for the Windows Azure cloud platform business in the Asia Pacific region.

Supporting Quotes

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat

“Radhesh and his team will continue to drive open virtualization forward through our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat OpenStack technologies and solutions – both of which are central to Red Hat‘s open hybrid approach to the cloud. We welcome Radhesh to the Red Hat team.”

Radhesh Balakrishnan, global leader, Virtualization, Red Hat

“Red Hat‘s leadership in open source, KVM and OpenStack are assets key to delivering cost-effective virtualization and IaaS solutions to enterprise customers as well as cloud service providers. I am excited to join Red Hat to lead the efforts to help deliver on its promise of open hybrid cloud.”

For more information

Linux

Jon Corbet Mulls Linux Kernel Changes

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By libbyclark

Collaboration Summit in April.” class=”caption” />

Now that the Linux kernel 3.9 merge window is closed, it’s safe to say we know what features will be included in the next kernel release. What lies beyond is predictable, still, but will likely hold a surprise or two. That’s where the annual Linux kernel weather report comes in.

Delivered by Linux kernel contributor and LWN.net co-founder Jon Corbet at Collaboration Summit in San Francisco April 15-17, the forecast will help prepare the Linux community for the year ahead.

In this Q&A, Corbet gives us a preview of his talk, reveals some kernel changes that surprised him last year, and discusses some of the biggest challenges kernel developers face in the months and years ahead.

What changes to the kernel over the past year have surprised you?

I do try not to be surprised by kernel changes – it’s my job to be on top of that stuff, after all 🙂

One of my biggest surprises, I guess, was when I realized that the Android developers had dropped their wakelock/suspend blocker implementation in favor of the solution that had been merged into the mainline kernel. A long-running, high-profile, bitter fight had been resolved quietly with almost nobody even noticing, and one of the biggest differences between the Android and mainline kernels is no more. A lot of credit is due to the developers in both the Android and mainline communities for their hard work in creating a solution that is acceptable to everybody involved.

Another surprise is the speed with which the bufferbloat problem has been brought under control. With a relatively small number of changes, many of the over-buffering problems in the Linux kernel were taken care of, to the point that the problem is pretty well solved for wired Ethernet networking. There is, of course, still a lot of work yet to be done, especially with wireless networking.

What features will we find in the 3.9 kernel?

We’ll get support for the ARC and Metag processor architectures. The “dm-crypt” subsystem enables the use of a fast (solid-state) drive as a front-end cache for slower storage. The ARM architecture now supports virtualization with KVM. User namespaces now work with almost all filesystems, making it possible to enable this feature in almost any kernel (though that may not yet be a wise thing to do).

What other new features are coming down the pike this year? 

Some of the more interesting work on the horizon may be the various solutions to the problem of scheduling on ARM big.LITTLE systems. The Linux scheduler was never written with asymmetric processors in mind, so it currently does not know how to schedule tasks to take advantage of the big.LITTLE architecture. The two existing patch sets try to solve this problem in very different ways; the “big LITTLE MP” work, in particular, will be the beginning of a new push to make the scheduler more power aware.

We will see the continuation of the ARM architecture cleanup work and, probably, true multiplatform ARM kernels for the first time. The integration of the Android code into the mainline will also continue.

What are some of the biggest issues kernel developers are tackling and how are they being addressed?

Power consumption is a …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Foundation

Linux

Screen Resolution on External Monitor from RHEL 6.3

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By rchaud10

Hey everyone,

I have a KVM or External monitor (19″ Dell) that I am trying to hook up to a laptop running RHEL 6.3 (via VGA which is the only option). When I connect it, and go to System->Preferences->Display, the max resolution option it provides me for these external devices is 1280×1024. Now, the KVM should provide a maximum resolution capability of 1600×1200, and the Dell monitor should have a capability of 1920×1080. Neither of those come up. How do I get this to work? I was reading online that Red Hat OS needs to be configured for the graphics card on the laptop in order to provide higher resolutions. I would hope it’s simpler to this. Any hints or tips?

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

Linux

GlusterFS: First impressions

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Recently I fooled around with GlusterFS, a distributed file system especially intended for use as backend storage. The first impression is quite good – as long as you use it for the right task.

Background

GlusterFS is a distributed file system which is supposed to scale to large storage sizes. Besides file distribution it also offers “RAID” like features: if you have two GlusterFS servers you can either stripe the data on both of them, or mirror them. Or, if you got more servers, you can even create more complex setups with a mixture of striping and mirroring. The client protocol is very similar to NFS, and thus clients can GlusterFS servers via GlusterFS-Fuse or directly via NFS.

The advantage of a distributed file system is obvious: if one server goes down, the clients fail over to another server, and you still have the data. Also, you can add more servers in case you need more storage. A distinct advantage of GlusterFS compared to for example AFS or Ceph is that you do not need to worry about setting up special servers dedicated to processes like addressing the data. Each GlusterFS server has the same rights and tasks as the next (in simple setups, highly complex setups may vary.

Competition

GlusterFS faces competition first of all in its own field: distributed file systems as mentioned above (Ceph, AFS, etc.). But for simpler setups you can also create similar results with a shared block level device like DRBD and and NFS or even cluster file systems like GFS and OCFS. And in the end GlusterFS steps up to fight against high cost storage systems (SAN, …).

The Setup

For my tests of GlusterFS I used a couple of CentOS 6 VMs in KVM on my main machine. I followed the well written GlusterFS-CentOS-Howto by falco. However, one thing which is probably not outlined enough in the howto: GlusterFS really depends on host name resolution. And really depending means that an entry in /etc/hosts on the GlusterFS machines is not enough. You should have a working DNS!

That said, the easiest way to accomplish this with a running KVM test setup is to just add the necessary entries to /etc/hosts on the host side (!). These information are forwarded to the VM guests and provide a reliable name resolution.

Tests and Results

I run a couple of tests: shutting down a server, shutting down the interfaces, shutting down the GlusterFS services, etc. The data on the machines were a couple of various text files, nothing fancy.

And all in all, I must say I was impressed with the features and capabilities: the setup was reliable, files where automatically distributed, servers started offline where resynced automatically, and so on. The collision detection is pretty neat, it works on file level: even if there occurs a split brain, i/o is only blocked for files which are actually affected. This is – of course and by design – a huge advantage over shared block devices which block the access to the entire …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Computers

Supercharge your laptop with 6 powerful utilities

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It’s a dark day. Your shiny new laptop has arrived, but it doesn’t deliver the performance or usability you expected. You’ve taken for granted all the tricks your desktop system has delivered on a daily basis, and now your new (and much more mobile) PC pales in comparison.

The display seems cramped, your games run slower than expected, and battery life isn’t anywhere near what you were promised. But don’t resign yourself to choosing between a desktop behemoth and a finger-smudged smartphone. Below are a handful of utilities that can help get your laptop up to speed—and bring that new-computer smile back on your face.

Extra screen space gives you room to roam

Unless you spring for the elusive built-in 1080p display, chances are your laptop is starved for desktop pixels. The more portable your system, the worse this problem gets. You don’t have to lasso your laptop to a monitor with an HDMI cable to get more screen real estate, however. MaxiVista ($40, free demo) lets any display on your network act as an extra monitor or mirrored view.

MaxiVista’s interface may not turn heads, but the extra screen space it gets you is well worth a look.

You can also go the other way and use your laptop’s screen to extend your desktop system’s display or use MaxiVista as a virtual KVM switch, allowing up to four computers to be connected to a single keyboard, display and mouse. Although vendor Bartels Media has recently added iPad support to MaxiVista, laptop users with Mac-centric hardware should also take a look at Avatron’s similar Air Display, which was designed from the ground up with Apple products in mind but includes Windows support.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Linux

Ubuntu Classroom: Interested in helping with Quality? Several sessions next week!

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Back in January, the Classroom team hosted Section 1 of the Quality Assurance sessions for this cycle, logs here. During the week of February 4th, the Classroom team is happy to report that we will be hosting a series of sessions given by phillw, Gema, Noskcaj, letozaf, SergioMeneses, and primes2h!

Section 2: Reporting Bugs

These sessions will be an introduction to reporting bugs

This section will be held in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).

Introduction to bug reporting

Following a bug report

Laptop testing

In this section, several of our instructors will be guiding users through the basics of laptop testing!

This section will be held in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).

Registering your laptop on the database

Testing on a laptop

Section 3: Introduction to QA tools

Now learn more tools of the Ubuntu QA trade!

Due to overlap with Ubuntu User Days in the classroom channels on Saturday, these classes will be hosted in #ubuntu-quality on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-quality-chat for questions).

These sessions and beyond will require people to have various things pre-installed, please see to Section 3 requirements for the details.

Introduction to QA tools; Zsync, Vbox, KVM

Using Testdrive

The full details and any last minute changes will be available here on this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Activities/Classroom


Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Cannot install KVM guest on CentOS/RedHat

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By hiddenshadow

Hi,

I’ve a CentOS Server and I need to create KVM guest machine without X.

Code:
/usr/sbin/virt-install --name server1 --ram 4000 --vcpus=8 --file=/srv/virtual/server1.img --file-size=20 --cdrom /tmp/server1.iso --mac=52:54:00:fd:48:7c

The iso was created with cobbler…
So, now the machine is present :

Code:
root@mainserver:/etc/libvirt/qemu $ virsh list
Id Name State
----------------------------------
5 server1 running

But the installation was not completed, so I couldn’t stop it! I couldn’t connect it! and when I try to install again:

Quote:

ERROR Guest name ‘server1’ is already in use.

What should I do?

Please help!

Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums