Virtualization From the Trenches

Date: 07 September 2008

We’re in the process of trying to virtualize our data center at work. I was given the task of testing and evaluating the various VM technologies. I have to say that I am not impressed.

VMWare ESX

Let’s start with the big player in the VM world, VMWare ESX. The Banner team uses ESX for a few of their servers. ESX stood head and shoulders over everything else that I looked at. VMWare has done a good job of building a system that is easy to work with and can run almost any system thrown at it.

What kills me with ESX is the price. For five VM servers, we’re looking at about $12,000 per year, making it the most expensive product out there. We also need to deploy a SQL Server to run the backend for the management console (which is needed if you plan on running more that five hosts).

Citrix XenServer

Citrix’s entry in the VM space has some interesting things going for it. First, XenServer is a paravirtualized solution which means that you’ll get closer to bare metal speeds than you would with a fully virtualized system like ESX or kvm. Second, they’re working with Microsoft so keep the paravirtualized layer compatable between XenServer and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. This is a big win if you are running (or plan on running) Windows Server 2008 VMs.

My first test with Citrix was to install Windows Server 2008. It just worked. So, I was a happy camper … until I tried to install Linux off an ISO image. Both Ubuntu Hardy and Fedora failed. The CD wouldn’t even boot. (It hung when it tried to start isolinux.) Apparently, if you want to install Linux, you have to use one of their prebuilt templates. (RedHat, CentOS, Suse and Debian only.) But I don’t use any of those.

I talked to one of their support guys who claims that, if you use a Windows install template to install Linux, it would work. Once you’re installed, then you can switch back to a paravirtual kernel and be all set. I didn’t bother. It was just more hassle than it should have been.

Citrix doesn’t use a single management console like VMWare ESX. Instead, you use a little desktop client to connect to one server in your cluster and you can manage the entire cluster. That’s nice but the client only runs in Windows. Since three of our four admins use Linux on their desktops, that’s really annoying.

Open Source Xen

The Open Source version of Xen has all of the features of Citrix XenServer but without the console. You have to use the command line tools to manage the system. Not a problem, given our admins. Unfortunately, I never could get Xen to function properly and doing simple things, such as changing a guest’s CD, was extremely hard. There is a tool that RedHat sponsers called libvirt that it supposed to abstract that all out and make things easy but it’s broken too. More on that later.

KVM

KVM is extremely simple to setup and use and is included in many distributions already, including Ubuntu and RedHat. It’s based on qemu but relies on hardware to give you the performance you need.

I ran into problems with kvm-69 (the prepackaged version with Ubuntu Hardy). It seems live migration was broken in that release. Migration in kvm-70 works just great though I ran into issues with mouse pointer tracking with Windows guests after a migration. I have seen some problems with usb (I started getting constant usb errors going to my Linux console) in kvm-70 but, acording to the ChangeLog, those where fixed in more recent versions.

KVM’s biggest drawback is the UI. The command line to start a VM is about 100 characters long, if you do more that the basics. You will definitely want to wrap your startup commands in a script. Also, the actual console interface could use a little polish. The main interaction with KVM is via the qemu console. It’s not hard to use but will require a bit of training for less savy users.

libvirt

Libvirt is a bit of glue designed to abstract away the differences in managing VM using different products. It has support for Xen, KVM/QEMU and OpenVZ. This is the basis for a lot of the Open Source VM management tools such as RedHat’s virt-manager and oVirt products.

Unfortunately, libvirt lies. It claims to support live migration for KVM but, having looked through the code troubleshooting another problem, my colleague and I discovered that it doesn’t actually support live migration. There’s only one place in the code (as of this writing) that uses the qemu migrate command and that’s to save the state to a file when suspending a VM. Also, thanks to advances in qemu, libvirt cannot change a CD for a VM. This isn’t a huge problem for Linux guests but is essential for my Windows systems. (Ubuntu has released a patch for libvirt that lets you change CDs for the primary CD drive.)

Conclusion

Eventually, we settled on KVM. It’s simplicity to setup and use was a win and the fact that it ran everything I threw at it was a big win. It also lets us leverage our existing knowledge without having to learn an entirely new system. I’m looking forward to what happens with KVM in the future. It looks like it will be a serious rival to VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V in the next year or so.