Category Archives: KVM

zfs on linux links part II

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Proxmox 3.4 was recently released with additional integrated support for ZFS.  More details are provided here in the Proxmox ZFS wiki section. I also decided to start gathering up another more current round of links related to performance, best practices, benchmarking, etc.

If you are looking for up to date links to help you understand some of the more advanced aspects and use cases surrounding zfs, or if you are just getting started and are looking for some relevant reading material on the subject, you should find these links extremely useful:

1.The state of ZFS on linux
2.Arch linux ZFS wiki page
3.Gentoo linux ZFS wiki page
4.ZFS Raidz Performance, Capacity and Integrity
5.ZFS administration
6.KVM benchmarking using various filesystems
7.How to improve ZFS performance

Finding and installing pre-created images on OpenStack

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Once you have your OpenStack cluster up and running you will need to either find some pre-created image templates or you may decide that you want to roll your own.  I’ll leave the details of creating images from scratch for a different post, this post will focus on providing links to both image files and instructions for installing pre-created Linux templates on OpenStack infrastructure.

First, if you are looking to install any version of Ubuntu, you should visit

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/

and download the file that corresponds to your desired version and architecture.

Once you have that file, you can follow the instructions here.

If you are looking to install a version of Debian, CentOS or Fedora, you should visit

http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusUserImageCreatorGuide_v1.6,

and download one of pre-created images that the folks over at Eucalyptus have provided.

Once you have are ready to install one of those files, you can follow the instructions here.

Meet StackOps

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While looking into what it would take to setup a development instance of OpenStack, I came across a bare-metal distro that makes it much easier to setup OpenStack nodes especially if (but not limited to) you are simply looking to setup a single node environment for dev or testing.

This distribution is called StackOps.

According to their wiki StackOps is:

‘a complete, ready to use Openstack Nova distribution verified, tested and designed to reach as many users as possible thanks to a new and simple installation process. Stackops democratizes the cloud computing technology to companies of all sizes and sectors. You only need to download the ISO image with the distro from our site and install it on as many servers as you require. In a few minutes you will be able to enjoy the power of the Cloud for your own!’

Now let’s take a little closer look into what OpenStack is exactly.

According their wiki, OpenStack is:

‘open source software to build public and private clouds. OpenStack is a community and a project as well as a stack of open source software to help organizations run clouds for virtual computing or storage. OpenStack contains a collection of open source projects that are community-maintained including OpenStack Compute (code-named Nova), OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift), and OpenStack Imaging Service (code-named Glance). OpenStack provides an operating platform, or toolkit, for orchestrating clouds.

OpenStack is more easily defined once the concepts of cloud computing become apparent, but we are on a mission: to provide scalable, elastic cloud computing for both public and private clouds, large and small. At the heart of our mission is a pair of basic requirements: clouds must be simple to implement and massively scalable.‘

Here is a link to the StackOps confluence page, which helps provide all necessary documentation you need get get started.  At this point I do not have enough first hand experience to comment too much more, except to say that after burning the .iso, I was able to have a single node installation setup and running virtual machines within a couple of hours.

I do think that the beauty of this product is that once you go through the install process, which simply involves filling in a series of answers about your architectural preferences, you are then free to focus almost completely on learning the ins and out of OpenStack without having to spend too much time worrying about the StackOps side of things.

Proxmox 2.0 feature list

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Martin Maurer sent an email to the Proxmox users mailing list detailing some of the features that we can expect from the next iteration of Proxmox VE. Martin expects that the first public beta release of the 2.x branch will be ready for use sometime around the second quarter of this year.

Here are some of the highlights currently slated for this release:

  • Complete new GUI
    • based on Ext JS 4 JavaScript framework
    • fast search-driven interface, capable of handling hundreds and probably thousands of VM´s
    • secure VNC console, supporting external VNC viewer with SSL support
    • role based permission management for all objects (VM´s, storages, nodes, etc.)
    • Support for multiple authenication sources (e.g. local, MS ADS, LDAP, …)
  • Based on Debian 6.0 Squeeze
    • longterm 2.6.32 Kernel with KVM and OpenVZ as default
    • second kernel branch with 2.6.x, KVM only
  • New cluster communication based on corosync, including:
    • Proxmox Cluster file system (pmcfs): Database-driven file system for storing configuration files, replicated in realtime on all nodes using corosync
    • creates multi-master clusters (no single master anymore!)
    • cluster-wide logging
    • basis for HA setup´s with KVM guests
  • RESTful web API
    • Ressource Oriented Architecture (ROA)
    • declarative API definition using JSON Schema
    • enable easy integration for third party management tools
  • Planned technology previews (CLI only)
    • spice protocol (remote display system for virtualized desktops)
    • sheepdog (distributed storage system)
  • Commitment to Free Software (FOSS): public code repository and bug tracker for the 2.x code base
    • Topics for future releases
      • Better resource monitoring
      • IO limits for VM´s
      • Extend pre-built Virtual Appliances downloads, including KVM appliances