Archive for 7 March, 2010

The Linux Kernel should also be a Hypervisor…

 | Sunday, 7. March 2010 23:57

As a Linux developer, it’s hard for me to be that interested in Xen…
When you think about it, it is really quite silly. We advocate Linux for
everything from embedded systems to systems requiring real-time
performance, to high-end mainframes. I trust Linux to run on my dvd
player, my laptop, and to run on the servers that manage my 401k.
Is virtualization so much harder than every other problem in the
industry that Linux is somehow incompatible of doing it well on its own?
Of course not.
– Anthony Liguori, Qemu maintainer

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Virtualisation with Linux

 | 23:45

After lot of googeling in the Internet for some Basics about Virtualistion with Linux / Windows I collect some links abhout this.

One good Description why they choice KVM was the following from http://www.elastichosts.com/cloud-hosting/infrastructure

Why we chose KVM virtualization

Before selecting Linux KVM, we evaluated VMWare and Xen, two other virtualization platforms providing similar capabilities to KVM (Virtuozzo only provides OS-level containers). We selected KVM as the best architecture for virtualization on modern processors with fast hardware virtualization support (VT-x and NPT on Intel or AMD-V and EPT on AMD).
Increasing hardware virtualization support

* Historically, virtualization platforms used software to trap and simulate certain instructions, memory management and I/O in the host virtual machines. VMWare was an early leader in this software technology.
* With the first generation of hardware virtualization, the VT-x/AMD-V extensions trapped these instructions in hardware, giving a significant speed improvement. However, virtualized memory management and I/O remained bottlenecks. Xen was an early proponent of paravirtualization, which attacks those bottlenecks by modifying the host operating system at compile time.
* With the second generation of hardware virtualization, the NPT/EPT extensions minimize the memory management bottleneck. As a result, MMU paravirtualization is a legacy approach, leaving just scheduling and I/O to be virtualized in software by a hypervisor. (I/O virtualization requires a good set of device drivers for the underlying hardware, of course: an area in which Linux excels.)

Hypervisor architecture and device drivers

* Linux KVM is a hypervisor which is built into mainline Linux. It uses the full range of hardware virtualization support, and directly uses the regular Linux scheduler and I/O device drivers.
* Xen runs an external hypervisor for scheduling, and uses a modified Linux kernel in domain 0 to provide device drivers.
* VMWare runs a proprietary external hypervisor, which includes scheduling and device drivers, many of which are adapted from Linux.
* We believe the KVM architecture is superior to both Xen and VMWare, since the mainline Linux scheduler and device drivers are both extremely well designed, widely deployed, professionally maintained and throughly tested, to a level likely well above what a single company can achieve on either their own proprietary codebase or locally maintained fork of Linux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual_machines

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-hypervisor/index.html

Cloud Links:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/01/new-whitepaper-architecting-for-the-cloud-best-practices.html

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2009/08/amazon_virtual_private_cloud.html

http://www.jroller.com/MasterMark/entry/the_enterprise_cloud

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9915


Generel Virtualisation:

http://www.elastichosts.com/cloud-hosting/infrastructure

http://berrange.com/posts/2010/02/15/guest-cpu-model-configuration-in-libvirt-with-qemukvm/

http://blog.codemonkey.ws/2008/05/truth-about-kvm-and-xen.html

http://avikivity.blogspot.com/

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/virtualization-guide/f12/en-US/html-single/

http://virtualization.com/

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0718.html

http://www.brocade.com/downloads/documents/white_papers/FCoE%20AT%20A%20Glance.pdf

http://virtualization.sys-con.com/

http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Virtual-bus

http://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2007/ols2007v2-pages-173-178.pdf

http://virtualizationreview.com/Blogs/Mental-Ward/2009/02/KVM-BareMetal-Hypervisor.aspx

http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page

http://www.redhat.com/promo/svvp/

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Apple iPad Clone JooJoo or Crunchpad works with Linux

 | 22:01

The Apple iPad Clone JooJoo is not launched right now. Looks like they have lot of Problems.

I hope they will launch it anyway because they use my Favorite Operating System –> Linux

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Intel Nehalem – EX Overview

 | 21:42

With the Nehalem – EX we will have the first Time since 2006 the possibility to choice between Intel and AMD also for our Database Servers. The Nehalem – EX will also scale over all Sockets for the Memory Performance.

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IBM Nehalem EX Server released, 1.5 TB RAM ready!

 | 0:23

First Nehalem EX Server are released from IBM!

They looks very good with lot of Memory Slots and also impressive RSA Features.

maybe I will also do some tests. Actualy they run already with RHEL 4 !

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