Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

With its virtualized Linux environments, Scania is achieving shortened time-to-services and increased flexibility. Scania can now perform system maintenance by shutting down servers in a structured process, enabling preserved stability and reliability. Throughout the rest of its virtualized Linux infrastructure, Scania also has the option of leveraging the solution's included Live Migration functionality, allowing for the transfer of virtual systems between physical machines in the network to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to maintain the same workload. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform replaces some proprietary Unix dialects in Scania's infrastructure with an open platform without lock-in to a specific vendor. We are now building a cost-efficient, flexible and stable infrastructure on top of the Red Hat platform, and have maintained high security and stability throughout the process," said Mikael Ahlqvist, service team responsible for Unix at S...

Our friend Matt has released a video on deploying KVM VM's with openQRM More information can be found here

The openQRM-Team is happy to announce the 4.1 version of the Data-Center Management platform. After the initial 4.0 release of the "next generation" of openQRM, re-written in PHP, the new release comes with some nice new features. e.g. support for KVM-Virtualization was added and an image-shelf plugin now provides ready-made and ready-to-deploy server-images to get started easily. The 4.1 version also provides lots of usability-enhancements, shorter GUI-sequences, meaning less mouse-clicks), some security- and other bug-fixes as documented in our bug-tracker. Another cool feature was added by request, making it possible to set the root-password for a server-image via the GUI. Binary packages (RPM and DEB) for Centos 5, openSuse 10.3, Debian 4.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 are available at : http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=153504&package_id=291488 and the Changelog at : http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=626496&group_id=153504 We hope you...

Ok so all those whisperings were getting ouder and louder in my head and I had to just let it out. The video is by Greg Hartman and my industry insider friend, who wishes anonymity, had some pointers: Featured opinion from an industry insider/researcher (This individual has no affiliation to VMware, Citrix , Microsoft or whoever): o The rate-of-change has gone up significantly, and fairly uniformly across all parts of the kernel (core, arch-specific, device drivers, networking, etc). It's greater than any other software project on Earth. It's also broaden out (flattened), with lots of changes coming from a broader set of people. o KVM will win out over the Xen/VMware models. KVM uses Linux as the hypervisor, whereas Xen needs to recreate its own NUMA model, scheduling, memory management, power management, and needs to use Linux for drivers. KVM gets all these things for free from Linux (Qumranet's opinion also). Combined with the rate of change and massive amount of contr...

The lightweight Embedded Linux Hypervisor is based on the open source KVM project, and will support live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real time. Open source virtualisation technology would "deliver what proprietary products can't: open standards, true multi-vendor support and the ultimate in deployment and operational flexibility," said Paul Cormeir, president of products and technology at Red Hat in a statement. Link

Desktop virtualization will get too many hides and it might get increasingly difficult to choose the right ones from the right ones, you know what I mean. Moshe Bar, who helped raise XenSource, wants to do something whacky with SolidICE. Do I again hear that huge sucking noise from IBM towers...they have this thing for Israeli outfits :-) A startup is looking to tackle desktop virtualization by leveraging an open-source hypervisor and building management tools to help keep track of an entire fleet of PCs. The company, called Qumranet, is leveraging the virtualization technology found in the open-source KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor to create its first commercial product, dubbed Solid ICE (Independent Computing Environment). The new desktop virtualization is available now. Qumranet, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has its roots in open-source virtualization. The company’s co-founder, Moshe Bar, helped create XenSource, which uses the Xen hypervisor for its own virtualization...

KVM emerged out of an Israeli company, Qumranet, last year as lead developer Avi Kivity posted 12,000 lines of code to a Linux kernel mailing list. The Oct. 19 post "came out of nowhere" and was added to the kernel after a review of "just a few months," said Jonathan Corbet, kernel developer and author of the Linux Weather Forecast, a Linux Foundation update on weekly kernel developments, in an interview. "It looked like it was kernel-ready on day one. It was an exceptional patch in many ways," said Andrew Morton, Linux kernel maintainer and one of Linux Torvalds' top lieutenants. By "patch," Morton means a donation of new code, not a bug fix or repair of existing code. The kernel developers didn't know Kivity from previous contributions -- he hadn't made any. Nor was there good information available on his company. "I went to the Qumranet Web site. It didn't tell me much," said Morton. Qumranet, a venture capital backed...

A desktop virtualization vendor that's been operating in stealth mode, Qumranet, has emerged as one of the first companies to make use of the KVM virtualization engine, already implanted in the Linux kernel. Few developers know much about KVM. It was added to Linux kernel 2.6.20 in October 2006. KVM is a hypervisor capable of making use of the virtualization assists built into the latestIntel (NSDQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) chips. Those hardware hooks simplify some of the complexity in the x86 instruction set, giving KVM a lean and mean profile at just 12,000 lines of code. Qumranet is offering one of the first virtualization products to be built on top of KVM. That may be because the lead KVM developer, Avi Kiviti, and several other developers are part of the startup, which has offices in Netanya, Israel, and Sunnyvale, Calif. Qumranet made its debut Monday at the Demofall 07 show in San Diego, emphasizing its desktop virtualization product, Solid Independent Computing Environmen...

Rusty answers: KVM currently requires either AMD-V (SVM) or Intel's VT (VMX) extensions on the chip: these are implemented in separate modules. So it should be possible to implement a "lite" backend which uses lguest-like techniques to boot a (paravirtualized) guest. Why? To increase the coverage and reach of KVM: many low-end machines are still shipping without sufficient hardware support. Having a single "kvm" which can run across everything (at least, for Linux) makes a great deal of sense. Read the rest.

WEll Xen was embracing the Novell and Microsoft. Little guy, you'd say, got no choices. Anyways this article talks about how KVM will be coming up with a product by September. Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is a Linux kernel infrastructure that supports virtualization. It offers full virtualization using Intel VT or AMD-V hardware assist and limited support for paravirtualization for Linux guests and Windows. Xen is also supported in the kernel. In July, Linus Torvalds merged the XenSource patches into upstream for release as part of the 2.6.23 kernel, XenSource’s blog reported. Xen has a big lead over KVM to date. Xen is integrated into the two leading Linux distributions and the commercial spinoff the Xen open source project, XenSource, recently signed its 500th ccmmercial customer. The Palo Alto, Calif, company is preparing to launch a major upgrade of its platform, XenEnterprise 4.0, in late August that offers advanced management features as well as storage and server v...

Xen has been around for quite a while now, but in recent months the virtualization option to receive the most attention has been KVM, or the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. KVM development began by Qumranet and is designed to be a full virtualization solution and uses Intel VT or AMD-V technology (depending upon what processor you are using) to assist in the virtualization process. KVM also uses a modified version of QEMU. Premiering in the Linux 2.6.20 kernel was the inclusion of KVM. Our recent comparison of Xen, QEMU, QEMU Accelerator, and KVM can be found here. While we do not endorse Microsoft Windows, we do condemn pirating. For our testing Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP Home were all obtained legally. All of the Linux distributions were obtained from their respective mirrors... Read the rest here ...

Check out an XP running on KVM at this blogger's place. The problem that I face, however, was that my new virtual machine crawled with extraordinary sluggishness. One possible cause of it might be that I only have 512 MB of RAM on my system, but as far as I know, XP shouldn’t have problem running on 256 MB of available memory. And obviously for a lot of Virtualization vendors that will be the hardest nut to crack. After showcases have come and gone, its the performance and sluggishness that has to be shrugged off. Anyways check it out here for KVM installation instructions and here for the Blogger's XP on KVM .

This blogger raises some key issue on KVM. I don't think KVM is all bogus. It definitely has a massive potential. Like any other Virtualization option like rusty's Lguest, Qemu etc. I just wonder about: Interoperability Usability Reliability Production readiness So why do these companies (and Xensource makes this statement as a company) make such statements? The answer should be not surprising: they have a lot or all to lose. KVM can be the one-in-all solution, unlike any of the others. Xensource and VMWare want to get on your system by providing a hypervisor which then can be used with all kinds of OSes. But: they are in ultimate control. The idea that there suddenly is a virtualization solution which does not need any hypervisor must be absolutely frightening to them. So, they try to suppress this no technology from the start. Besides anything I also want to mention that innovation is a great thing. I already have Fedora Core 7 test distro and am equally anxious to try out KV...

KVM is growing and is really gaining a lot of momentum. But it sometimes seems like everyone is kind of building another Virtualization platform. I am sure it is unique and has a super cool micro-hypervisor and so on... But does the world need another virtualization option? EMC subsidiary VMware rules the roost today. Microsoft is working on a project, called Viridian, that is set to debut in roughly a year. And numerous open-source allies already have focused attention on an open-source rival called Xen. While KVM delivers some new options and competition, it also brings new complications. "In the near term, KVM will cause some pain because of the market confusion and developer dilution it will cause," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "But in the longer run, better technical options can only be good for Linux and open source." Virtual Box is working on its hyper-kernel and I'm sure everyone is doing something real cool. No doubt. But the important question ...

Kernel maintainer Andrew Morton, revealed some plans for the new kernel. I kind of look back and smile back at the Gartner's prediction of Linux will get to be the hero in 2007. Then it struck me! Would Virtualization make Linux the hero? Did Microsoft saw that in Linux and made a quick move to embrace Novell? Questions, Questions. When I look at that Virtualization Manager tool in Fedora Core 6, it is a sign. We could very well have users getting everything out of Linux and Xen in the coming years. You just don't know. In a message to the kernel developers mailing list, Morton gave an indication of some of the major new components that will go into 2.6.21. One change will be improvements to the KVM virtualization system, which made its debut in 2.6.20 along with an implementation of paravirtualization. Check it out here ...

I guess getting the Big Blue into the game (they have always helped the OSS out , look at Eclipse) might help KVM get really ahead of others in terms of performance. Also I guess by the time of oficial release of the kernel, the tests will show a lot more but for the time being, as this author says: Looking over the virtualization performance results, KVM was not the clear winner in all of the benchmarks. KVM had taken the lead during Gzip compression, but in the other four benchmarks it had stumbled behind Xen 3.0.3. However, both Xen with full virtualization and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine had performed in front of QEMU with the QEMU accelerator in our select benchmarks using dual Intel Xeon LV processors with Intel Virtualization Technology. The benefits of KVM are high performance, stable, no modifications of the guest operating system are necessary, and a great deal of other capabilities (e.g. using the Linux scheduler). Once the Linux 2.6.20 kernel is officially out the door...

At least that is how he describes it . [It is a Japanese article]. In any case some interesting data on the QEMU and KVM differences. More on Linux Virtualization and pretty simple and decent benchmarks check here .