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Revision as of 21:16, 5 December 2009 by Dale (talk | contribs) (→‎Fedora Xen List: none this week)



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 Package-x-generic-16.pngvirt-manager 0.8.1 and Package-x-generic-16.pngvirtinst 0.500.1.

Virtual Machine Manager[2] provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines, using Package-x-generic-16.pnglibvirt as the backend management API.

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.


Libguestfs List

This section contains the discussion happening on the libguestfs 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.