Documentation Virtualization Beat: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:35, 2 October 2008

Virtualization

Virtualization in Fedora 10 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support the Xen and KVM platforms.

Unified Kernel Image

The kernel-xen package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The kernel in Fedora 10 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.

Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 10 host requires the KVM based xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.

KVM requires hardware virtualization features in the host system. Systems lacking hardware virtualization will not support Xen guests at this time.

For more information refer to: Features/XenPvops and Features/XenPvopsDom0.

Improved Storage Management

Previously/ Fedora introduced the ability to manage existing guest domains remotely using libvirt. It was not possible to create new guests due to the lack of storage management capabilities. There is now a new storage management capability that can create and delete storage volumes from a remote host using libvirt.

PolicyKit Integration

Previously, the virt-manager application ran as root when managing a local hypervisor, and used consolehelper to authenticate from a desktop session. Running GTK applications as root is bad practice. PolicyKit integration now permits running virt-manager as a regular user.

Other Improvements

Fedora also includes the following virtualization improvements:

storage and network paravirtual-drivers for KVM guests
full support for monitoring network and block statistics of QEMU and KVM in libvirt and virt-top, bringing parity with statistics monitoring, previously only available to Xen guests

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 Virtualization in Fedora 10 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support the Xen and KVM platforms.
-=== Kernel Integration Improvements ===
+=== Unified Kernel Image ===
+The <code>kernel-xen</code> package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The <code>kernel</code> in Fedora 10 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.
-The Xen kernel is now based on the paravirt ops implementation from the upstream kernel. Previously, the Xen kernel was created by forward-porting Xen bits from the 2.6.18 kernel into the current Fedora kernel. This task was arduous and labor intensive, and resulted in the Xen kernel being several releases behind the bare-metal kernel. The inclusion of paravirt ops now makes this process unnecessary and the kernel-xen package has been eliminated. Currently, domU's must be booted via a [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvops paravirt_ops] enabled kernel or with the KVM-based [http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenner/ xenner].
+Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 10 host requires the [http://sourceforge.net/projects/kvm KVM] based <code>[http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenner/ xenner]</code>. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.
-Fully virtualized Linux guests now have 3 possible installation methods:
+{{Admon/note | KVM requires hardware virtualization features in the host system. Systems lacking hardware virtualization will not support Xen guests at this time. }}
-* PXE boot from the network.
+For more information refer to: [[Features/XenPvops]] and [[Features/XenPvopsDom0]].
-* Local CDROM drive / ISO image.
-* Network install from a FTP/HTTP/NFS hosted distribution tree.
-The latter allows for fully automated installation through the use of kickstart files. This provides parity between Xen HVM and KVM guests in terms of installation methods.
-For more information refer to:
-[[Features/XenFullvirtKernelBoot]]
 === Improved Storage Management ===

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