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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

Fedora Virtualization List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

Distributing I/O Load Among Guests

Dennis J. asked[1] "What is the best way to deal with I/O load when running several VMs on a physical machine with local or remote storage?" "What I'm primarily worried about is the case when several VMs cause disk I/O at the same time." "What is the best way to soften the impact of such a situation?"

Pasi Kärkkäinen suggested "If the IOS are not split evenly between VMs, you could use some tool like dm-ioband[2] to make sure IOs are split fairly between VMs. Or then get faster disks. Single 15k rpm SAS disk will give you up to 350 IOPS, so it's 2-3x faster than 7200 rpm SATA."

Richard Jones concurred[3] "For KVM, each VM isn't really any different from a host process, so you have to deal with them the same way that you'd deal with having lots of host processes doing I/O. So: lots of spindles, expensive I/O hardware, etc."


Virtualization Tools List

This section contains the discussion happening on the virt-tools-list list.

The very newest releases of virt packages are available (for testing purposes only) in the Virtualization Preview Repository before they become generally available.

New Release virt-manager 0.8.0

Cole Robinson [1] a new Package-x-generic-16.pngvirt-manager[2] release, version 0.8.0.

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

New features:

  • New 'Clone VM' Wizard
  • Improved UI, including an overhaul of the main 'manager' view
  • System tray icon for easy VM access (start, stop, view console/details)
  • Wizard for adding serial, parallel, and video devices to existing VMs.
  • CPU pinning support (Michal Novotny)
  • Ability to view and change VM security (sVirt) settings (Dan Walsh)
  • Many bug fixes and improvements

New Release virtinst 0.500.0

Cole Robinson announced[1] a new Package-x-generic-16.pngpython-virtinst release, version 0.500.0.

virtinst is a module that helps build and install libvirt based virtual machines. It 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 features:

  • New virt-install device options --serial, --parallel, and --video
  • Allow various auth types for libvirt connections (PolicyKit, SASL, ...)
  • New virt-clone option --auto-clone: generates all needed input.
  • Option to specify network device model via virt-install --network (Guido Gunther)
  • New virt-install option --virt-type for specifying hypervisor type (kvm, qemu). --accelerate is now the default behavior: To provision a plain qemu VM on a KVM enabled host, use '--virt-type qemu'
  • OVF input support for virt-convert
  • Many bug fixes and improvements

New Release virt-viewer 0.2.0

Daniel Berrange announced[1] a new Package-x-generic-16.pngvirtinst[2] release, version 0.2.0.

New features:

  • Switch UI over to use Glade
  • Support graphical dialog for VNC and libvirt authentication
  • Resize window to match VNC desktop size where possible
  • Scale down VNC desktop if it cannot fit in host desktop space
  • Allow user to resize window to arbitrary size, scaling VNC
  • Fix blocking of accelerators
  • Allow automatic reconnect to a VM via --reconnect
  • Use libvirt events to detect when VM changes state
  • Wait for VM to appear if it does not exist
  • Fix plugin build with newer xulrunner
  • Port & build for Mingw32 target