From Fedora Project Wiki

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* The new experimental <code>xenwatch</code> package provides utilities for interacting with <code>xenstore</code> on Xen-based virtualization hosts. http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenwatch/
* The new experimental <code>xenwatch</code> package provides utilities for interacting with <code>xenstore</code> on Xen-based virtualization hosts. http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenwatch/


==== libvirt Updated to 0.4.6 ====
==== libvirt Updated to 0.6.0 ====


The <code>libvirt</code> package provides an API and tools to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). The <code>libvirt</code> software is designed to be a common denominator among all virtualization technologies with support for the following:
The <code>libvirt</code> package provides an API and tools to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). The <code>libvirt</code> software is designed to be a common denominator among all virtualization technologies with support for the following:
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* Storage on IDE/SCSI/USB disks, FibreChannel, LVM, iSCSI, and NFS
* Storage on IDE/SCSI/USB disks, FibreChannel, LVM, iSCSI, and NFS


'''New features and improvements since 0.4.2:'''
'''New features and improvements since 0.4.6:'''
* Enhanced OpenVZ support
* thread safety of the API and event handling
* Enhanced Linux containers (LXC) support
* allow QEmu domains to survive daemon restart
* Storage pools API
* extended logging capabilities
* Improved iSCSI support
* support copy-on-write storage volumes
* USB device passthrough for QEMU and KVM
* support of storage cache control options for QEmu/KVM
* Sound, serial, and parallel device support for QEMU and Xen
* driver infrastructure and locking
* Support for NUMA and vCPU pinning in QEMU
* Test driver infrastructure
* Unified XML domain and network parsing for all virtualization drivers
* parallelism in the daemon and associated config
* virsh help cleanups
* logrotate daemon logs
* more regression tests
* QEmu SDL graphics
* add --version flag to daemon
* memory consumption cleanup
* QEmu pid file and XML states for daemon restart
* gnulib updates
* PCI passthrough for KVM
* generic internal thread API
* RHEL-5 specific Xen configure option and code
* save domain state as string in status file
* add locking to all API entry points
* new ref counting APIs
* IP address for Xen bridges
* driver format for disk file types
* improve QEmu/KVM tun/tap performances
* enable floppies for Xen fully virt
* support VNC password settings for QEmu/KVM
* qemu driver version reporting
 
There were also dozens of cleanups, documentation enhancements, portability and bug fixes.


For further details refer to:
For further details refer to:

Revision as of 21:11, 3 February 2009

Virtualization

Virtualization in Fedora 10 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support KVM, Xen, and many other virtual machine platforms.

Unified Kernel Image

The kernel-xen package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The kernel package 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.

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

For more information refer to:

Virtualization Storage Management

Advances in libvirt now provide the ability to list, create, and delete storage volumes on remote hosts. This includes the ability to create raw sparse and non-sparse files in a directory, allocate LVM logical volumes, partition physical disks, and attach to iSCSI targets.

This enables the virt-manager tool to remotely provision new guest domains, and manage the storage associated with them. It provides improved SELinux integration, since the APIs ensure that all storage volumes have the correct SELinux security context when being assigned to a guest.

Features

  • List storage volumes in a directory, and allocate new volumes, raw files both sparse and non-sparse, and formats supported by qemu-img (cow, qcow, qcow2, vmdk, etc)
  • List partitions in a disk, and allocate new partitions from free space
  • Connect to an iSCSI server and list volumes associated with an exported target
  • List logical volumes in an LVM volume group, and allocate new LVM logical volumes
  • Automatically assign correct SELinux security context label (virt_image_t) to all volumes when associating with a guest.

For further details refer to:

Remote Installation of Virtual Machines

Improvements in Virtualization Storage Management have enabled the creation of guests on remote host systems. By leveraging Avahi, systems supporting libvirt can be automatically detected by virt-manager. Upon detection guests can be provisioned on the remote system.

Installations can be automated with the help of cobbler and koan. Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments. Network installs can be configured for PXE boot, reinstallations, media-based net-installs, and virtualized guest installs. Cobbler uses a helper program, koan, for reinstallation and virtualization support.

For further details refer to:

Other Improvements

Fedora also includes the following virtualization improvements:

  • Utilities in the new virt-mem package provide access to process tables, interface information, dmesg, and uname of QEmu and KVM guests from the host system. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-mem/
Note.png
virt-mem is experimental.
Only 32 bit guests are supported at this time.

libvirt Updated to 0.6.0

The libvirt package provides an API and tools to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). The libvirt software is designed to be a common denominator among all virtualization technologies with support for the following:

  • The Xen hypervisor on Linux and Solaris hosts.
  • The QEMU emulator
  • The KVM Linux hypervisor
  • The LXC Linux container system
  • The OpenVZ Linux container system
  • Storage on IDE/SCSI/USB disks, FibreChannel, LVM, iSCSI, and NFS

New features and improvements since 0.4.6:

  • thread safety of the API and event handling
  • allow QEmu domains to survive daemon restart
  • extended logging capabilities
  • support copy-on-write storage volumes
  • support of storage cache control options for QEmu/KVM
  • driver infrastructure and locking
  • Test driver infrastructure
  • parallelism in the daemon and associated config
  • virsh help cleanups
  • logrotate daemon logs
  • more regression tests
  • QEmu SDL graphics
  • add --version flag to daemon
  • memory consumption cleanup
  • QEmu pid file and XML states for daemon restart
  • gnulib updates
  • PCI passthrough for KVM
  • generic internal thread API
  • RHEL-5 specific Xen configure option and code
  • save domain state as string in status file
  • add locking to all API entry points
  • new ref counting APIs
  • IP address for Xen bridges
  • driver format for disk file types
  • improve QEmu/KVM tun/tap performances
  • enable floppies for Xen fully virt
  • support VNC password settings for QEmu/KVM
  • qemu driver version reporting

There were also dozens of cleanups, documentation enhancements, portability and bug fixes.

For further details refer to:

http://www.libvirt.org/news.html

virt-manager Updated to 0.6.1

The virt-manager package provides a GUI implementation of virtinst and libvirt functionality.

New features and improvements since 0.6.0:

  • VM disk and network stats reporting (Guido Gunther)
  • VM Migration support (Shigeki Sakamoto)
  • Support for adding sound devices to an existing VM
  • Enumerate host devices attached to an existing VM
  • Allow specifying a device model when adding a network device to an existing VM
  • Combine the serial console view with the VM Details window
  • Allow connection to multiple VM serial consoles
  • Bug fixes and many minor improvements.

For further details refer to:

http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/

virtinst Updated to 0.400.1

The python-virtinst package contains tools for installing and manipulating multiple VM guest image formats.

New features and improvements since 0.400.0:

  • Add virt-image -> vmx support to virt-convert, replacing virt-pack (Joey Boggs)
  • Add disk checksum support to virt-image (Joey Boggs)
  • Enhanced URL install support: Debian Xen paravirt, Ubuntu kernel and boot.iso, Mandriva kernel, and Solaris Xen Paravirt (Guido Gunther, John Levon, Cole Robinson)
  • Expanded test suite
  • Numerous bug fixes, cleanups, and minor improvements

For further details refer to:

Xen Updated to 3.3.1

Fedora 11 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided in the upstream kernel. Support for a pv_ops dom0 is targeted for Xen 3.4.

Changes since 3.3.0:

  • TODO

For further details refer to: