Re: [vserver] Linux Vserver and Hypervisors

From: Allan Latham <alatham_at_flexsys-group.de>
Date: Thu 07 Nov 2013 - 08:44:52 GMT
Message-ID: <527B5304.8010405@flexsys-group.de>

Hi all

I think this is an important subject but is only a subset of a major
disadvantage of vserver.

I looked at vserver a while ago and I really liked it from a technical
point of view. Dealing with networking is a challenge at first because
all the guest IPs are really on the host and there is no forwarding
taking place - it impinges on how you set up iptables.

However that is not the greatest problem. The resulting system must be
handed over to a client who does not have the deep knowledge of the
technician who set it up. In our case throughout the entire system and
applications there are just two components which require compilation
from source with patches. This is frowned upon from a management point
of view but can be justified because there is no alternative.

In the case of vserver there are alternatives: OpenVZ, LXC, Xen and KVM.

Whatever the technical arguments, all of these are better documented
than vserver and are available as standard packages in Debian Wheezy.
Management loves this as they can always find someone who can help when
the original technician is no longer available.

Before I wrote this I took a look again at the documentation. Please try
it yourselves and imagine you have practical working knowledge of Linux
but you are not 'sysop of the year' nor do you know (or want to know)
the internals of vserver or any other similar tool. You just want to try
out multiple guests on one box so you can convince the boss it is worth
looking at it.

As a minimum you need consistent up-to-date documentation, packages -
including libvirt - and guest images for the top 3 server distros.

I know it's a free product and documentation and packaging is volunteer
work but I would hate to see this fine product go under because it's so
hard to use.

In the end we chose KVM on Debian Wheezy (guests and hosts). Why?

1. All involved were already familiar with KVM virtual servers on a
server farm.
2. It works out of the box - we used libvirt but we also know how to do
it 'by hand' with qemu-kvm.

I wish you all a great future and I think devoting effort in this
direction is the best decision you could make. You've done a great job
technically now's the time to roll it out to the world before it's too
late. The best technically does not always win - anyone remember the
Betamax vs VHS battle.

Good luck and have good day

Allan

On 06/11/13 13:38, Daniel Hokka Zakrisson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> So what functionality would you all like to see? Discovering running guests
> and reporting status on them? Building guests using virtinst? Removing
> guests?
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel
>
> Claus Herwig wrote:
>>>> If we want to have linux vserver supported someone has to sponsor
>>>> a libvirt dev.
>>>
>>> There have been various input to this:
>>>
>>> https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2008-January/msg00097.html
>>>
>>> https://github.com/amery/libvirt-vserver
>>>
>>> Who should be approach about this now. I'd like to know how much this
>>> would cost. It would be most beneficial in various areas of my work.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Ben
>>>
>>
>> I'd like to support this.
>>
>> Claus
>>
>>
>> --
>> CHECON EDV-Consulting * Marktstr. 14 * 80802 München
>> Tel +49 89 452 41 352-0 * Fax 45241352-9 * Mail info@checon.de
>> Inhaber Claus Herwig * USt-Id DE213002181
>>
>
>
Received on Fri Nov 8 10:15:51 2013

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