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Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Enterprise Management Tools List

This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list


Fedora Virtualization List

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

New list for libguestfs

Richard Jones announced[1] the creation of a new list[2] dedicated to "Package-x-generic-16.pnglibguestfs/guestfish/virt-inspector discussion/development".

Fedora Virt Status Update

Mark McLoughlin posted[1] another Fedora Virt Status Update reminding that Fedora 12 is quickly approaching with the Feature Freeze on 2009-07-28.

Also mentioned were:

  • Details of a fix for "a dramatic slowdown in virtio-blk performance in F-11 guests"[2]
  • Note on Xen Dom0 support.
  • New wiki pages created.
  • Detailed run-down of current virt bugs.

USB Passthrough to Virtual Machines

Mark McLoughlin posted instructions[1] for attaching a USB device to a guest using Package-x-generic-16.pngvirt-manager in Fedora 11. This was could previously (FWN#165[2]) be accomplished only on the command line by hand.

Unfortunately, those wishing to manage their iPhone in a guest (yours truly included), KVM does not yet support the required USB 2.

best Fedora virtualization

Rich Mahn asked[1]

I am planning on running several virtual machines on a single host.  I
will have two or three Linux baeed virtual machines and one or two
Windoze.  I plan on using a F11 host system.

I need most of these to run automatically on boot-up of the host
system.  It would be really nice if I could use something like the
Ctl-Alt-FN to be able to access and switch between virtual machines.
This needs to be stable.  The machines that these virtual machines are
intended to replace are often running hundreds of days between
reboots.

My gut feel is that the virt-manager suite might be the way to go,
editting the apropriate xml files as required.  I also see there
is a qemu launcher and it seems to work okay.  I suspect there are
others as well.

What tends to be the consensus here on the various virtual machine
managers?  Are there white papers somewhere that could give some
insight?

Richard Jones answered[2]

For stability and long-term maintainability, I wonder if you've
considered using RHEL or CentOS?  That means you have to use Xen as
the hypervisor, but if you use libvirt / virsh / virt-manager, the
future upgrade path to KVM is reasonable.  All tools stay the same,
and you just need to run our forthcoming v2v tool on the guests (or
reinstall the guests) when you upgrade.
The only one we're supporting here on
Fedora<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization</ref> is libvirt / virsh /
virt-manager.  Use 'virsh edit <domain>' to edit the XML for a domain.
The same commands will work on RHEL / CentOS too.

Rich Mahn reported problems with ISO images stored on NFS and Gene Czarcinski opened[3] a bug (RHBZ #508865

I suspect this is the result of trying to use SELinux to protect everything 
and the mandatory access control idea that everything is disallowed except 
that which is explicitly permitted.

But, I just do not understand what and why CD/DVD images and devices are being 
protected.  Furthermore, when virtualization changes a file's context 
(including /dev/sr0), could this effect other valid usage of these 
files/devices?  If there is no effect for other applications, then just what is 
protected?

507555

Libvirt List

This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.


Fedora-Xen List

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

Xen dom0 Forward Ported to Latest Kernel

Previously, Xen dom0 support in Fedora was provided by forward porting the Xensource patches from kernel 2.6.18 to the version found in the Fedora release at the time. This consumed developer resources and led to separate Package-x-generic-16.pngkernel and Package-x-generic-16.pngkernel-xen packages for a time. As of Fedora 9[1] this practice was deamed[2] untenable, and support for hosting Xen guests was dropped from Fedora.

Work has since focused on creating a paravirt operations dom0[3] kernel based on the most recent upstream vanilla kernel. This work is incomplete and not expected to be done before F12 or even F13. However, experimental dom0 kernels[4] have been created for the adventurous.

Pasi Kärkkäinen tells[5] us the Xen 2.6.18 patches have now been forward-ported to the current 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernel. "Forward-porting has been done by Novell for OpenSUSE. Novell also has a forward-port to 2.6.27 for SLES11."

The patches can be found here[6] here [7] and here[8].

Pasi added "These patches are still more stable and mature than the pv_ops dom0 code.. Also, these patches have the full Xen feature set (pv_ops still lacks some features)."

More history is avilable[9].