plethroa of virtualization technologies

English Virtualization
1

Dear Opensuse Users:
I’ve been googling around and can’t get a clear idea of how to decide on virtual machines for OS 13.x. I see several are offered. I wanted to host Win2k3server under OS 13.1 on my local workstation and my only real consideration is FLOPS performance (for numerical calculations in Win with MPICH) - which is a direct hardware thing (I think) so I was thinking KVM would be preferred to VirtualBox. (Screen and multiple-application performance don’t matter on the client Win machine.) Can anyone help me understand that one aspect better?

Thank You Very Much,
patricia

2

Hi
Run vmware ESXi (it’s free) on your hardware, then run your instance of openSUSE and win server.

3

Thank you very much for the reply! Really? Wow! Things ARE changing. Downloading now… On a side note, win8 ate itself on my Win8/OS13.1 laptop - so I’m going to try ESXi there dual booting W7 and OS, rather than KVM or VirtualBox under OS13.1. I saw one review that shows VMware way ahead of the competition speed-wise, but I guess they get that by running the hardware themselves? Am I going to regret doing this? (just kidding) What I mean is, this is a very late-model AMD quad core laptop - I can’t even install Win7 due to how new the hardware drivers all are (it came with win8 installed and no other explicit HP support). So I’m wondering if ESXi will even install correctly? Anyway, it would be great to be able to pop between OS’s and still have near-native speeds. I hope you’re right :slight_smile:

4

Edit - I guess my laptop isn’t supported by VMware, so for that, it’s either virtualbox or KVM… Which do you recommend? It seems like KVM, being part of the Linux kernel would handle hardware better. OS13.1 handles my laptop hardware fine (some other distros didn’t…)

5

On Sat 15 Nov 2014 10:46:01 PM CST, PattiMichelle wrote:

Edit - I guess my laptop isn’t supported by VMware, so for that, it’s
either virtualbox or KVM… Which do you recommend? It seems like KVM,
being part of the Linux kernel would handle hardware better. OS13.1
handles my laptop hardware fine (some other distros didn’t…)

Hi
I’m guessing you checked that vt is enabled in the BIOS?

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.28-4-default
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6

IMO kvm on a laptop is not a good choice specially on some not so new hardware, but that is just me :).

Any way to check the virtualization of hardware is enabled try:

grep -Eow 'svm|vmx' /proc/cpuinfo -m1 || { echo 'NoDice' >&2; }
7

Hi Malcom: Yes, I always enable that, but thank you for asking. I was referring to the list that VMW has on their website of “supported” hardware. Seems to be high end Opterons and Xeons. It would probably work on my laptop, but only probably. It would definitely work on my Big Iron (…always wanted to say that) Opteron machine, so I might try on my laptop anyway…

So does ESXi simply install as a command-line operating system on bare iron - which has a tool to install “guest” OS’s. It sort of looks like GRUB2 then, maybe? It looks pretty powerful - Can one import existing OS’s which were installed on bare iron themselves?

8 
patti@linux-l8th:~> grep -Eow 'svm|vmx' /proc/cpuinfo -m1 || { echo 'NoDice' >&2; }
svm
patti@linux-l8th:~>

Thanks - its not a bad little laptop - it has a quad core AMD mobile A8-5550M - like a slow i5 I guess…
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+A8-5550M+APU

9

On Sun 16 Nov 2014 04:26:02 PM CST, PattiMichelle wrote:

malcolmlewis;2676451 Wrote:
> Hi
> I’m guessing you checked that vt is enabled in the BIOS?
>

Hi Malcom: Yes, I always enable that, but thank you for asking. I was
referring to the list that VMW has on their website of “supported”
hardware. Seems to be high end Opterons and Xeons. It would probably
work on my laptop, but only probably. It would definitely work on my
Big Iron (…always wanted to say that) Opteron machine, so I might try
on my laptop anyway…

Hi
What about the hypervisor?

Else use Xen…?

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.28-4-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

10

Thanks. I checked that link - looks easy. I wonder what the real differences for that and ESXi are? Oops, only 8 vCPUs per guest machine!!

I’m trying KVM right now. It looks like it will take 20 hours to create a 80 GB host drive on an NTFS partition. So I tried ext4 and that was even slower ~ 60 hours to preallocate an 80 GB partition. I think something isn’t right. Even preallocating the drive should not take that long. VERY weird…

What is the hypervisor compared to ESXi? Is that a kernel thing like KVM/Xen? It sounds like you like Xen over KVM, although I seen web articles that suggest KVM is better at hardware interfacing. I’m not sure how well it shares with the Host (like shared folders, video card sharing, etc.). I guess that’s why I’m trying it…

11

Hi
AFAIK Hypervisor is more similar to Xen, I think in your case Xen (or hypervisor) would integrate better than KVM with your hardware, No, I use kvm all the time for my vm’s :wink: Xen I believe is on the way out? But life is easy using the kernel tools rather than worrying about having to compile this and that to get your vm’s running after a kernel upgrade…

Seems very strange indeed taking that long, my SUSE Manager instance is 250GB, it took no time at all with kvm, oh it’s raw format, you should use that, the OS will take care of the formatting.

12

Oh, I’m not sure what you mean here “raw format” - The KDE KVM creation applet (virtual machine manager) wants the location where to put the drive (i.e., on an existing filesystem). The only choice seems to be whether to “preallocate” the drive. I assumed this was the creation of a full-size container, rather than an “expanding” container. But maybe it’s more than that?

Oh no! Now I remember reading that KVM causes headaches when you upgrade your kernel. Hmmm… I wonder if they’re worse headaches than installing, say, a video driver?

13

On Sun 16 Nov 2014 11:16:02 PM CST, PattiMichelle wrote:

malcolmlewis;2676682 Wrote:
> Hi
> Seems very strange indeed taking that long, my SUSE Manager instance
> is 250GB, it took no time at all with kvm, oh it’s raw format, you
> should use that, the OS will take care of the formatting.

Oh, I’m not sure what you mean here “raw format” - The KDE KVM creation
applet wants the location where to put the drive (i.e., on an existing
filesystem).

Oh no! Now I remember reading that KVM causes headaches when you
upgrade your kernel. Hmmm… I wonder if they’re worse headaches than
installing, say, a video driver?

Hi
Use virt-manager and/or virsh for better control… :wink:

Not to my knowledge, upgrade the kernel, if/when reboot my vm’s come up
without any user action…

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.28-4-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

14

On Sun 16 Nov 2014 11:20:45 PM CST, malcolmlewis wrote:

[QUOTE]
On Sun 16 Nov 2014 11:16:02 PM CST, PattiMichelle wrote:

malcolmlewis;2676682 Wrote:
> Hi
> Seems very strange indeed taking that long, my SUSE Manager instance
> is 250GB, it took no time at all with kvm, oh it’s raw format, you
> should use that, the OS will take care of the formatting.

Oh, I’m not sure what you mean here “raw format” - The KDE KVM creation
applet wants the location where to put the drive (i.e., on an existing
filesystem).

Oh no! Now I remember reading that KVM causes headaches when you
upgrade your kernel. Hmmm… I wonder if they’re worse headaches than
installing, say, a video driver?

Hi
Use virt-manager and/or virsh for better control… :wink:

Not to my knowledge, upgrade the kernel, if/when reboot my vm’s come up
without any user action…

[/QUOTE]
Moving thread to the virtualization subforum

nntp users please hold your breath until after the move…

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.28-4-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

15

Thread moved and re-opened for consumption (and folks to find it at some later point in time… :wink: )

16

Hey, now that is a good idea! lol!

It is an interesting thread for future consumption.

17

I suppose I should add that this thread prompted me to read up on ESXi.

I remembered about ESX, but lost track sometime before ESXi. Looks very interesting.

Anything that required such an approach, I would turn over to those with more detailed experience. Such is the way of CIO, have a good overview understanding and some of the broader details, and the knowledge of which tech has the skill and knowledge to turn out the desired results.

18

(no idea what’s going on here - maybe after more coffee) Epic fail with KVM install of Win7. It may be my hard drive. I’ve never seen this behavior before - I installed a second hard drive on my laptop (replaced the dvd) and it formatted fine. But when I boot, neither of the partitions I created with gparted are mounted and both throw errors when I try to mount them and navigate to them from dolphin. But then, a few minutes later, they appear all mounted and apparently OK in dolphin. This is very odd behavior and may relate to the KVM fail (and slow disk allocation) because I was trying to create the KVM VM in those partitions.

I guess this now becomes a secondary (but related) thread… unless I’ve done something monumentally stupid…

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-HGST_HTS541075A9E680_JD13021X06UH4K-part6 swap                 swap       defaults              0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-HGST_HTS541075A9E680_JD13021X06UH4K-part7 /                    ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-HGST_HTS541075A9E680_JD13021X06UH4K-part2 /boot/efi            vfat       umask=0002,utf8=true  0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-HGST_HTS541075A9E680_JD13021X06UH4K-part8 /home                ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/mmc-NCard_0x25503bb5-part1 /OSS/Chip64          ntfs-3g    defaults,nofail                          0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10SPCX-55HWST0_WD-WX51AB3Y0134-part1 /OSS/Data1_Ext4      ext4       acl,user_xattr,nofail 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10SPCX-55HWST0_WD-WX51AB3Y0134-part2 /OSS/Data2           ntfs-3g    defaults,nofail      0 0
19

Hi
Since this has turned into an issue, please start a new thread in this subforum and will see if we can sort it out. (I can edit the post later with a link to the thread;) )

See new thread here: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/502705-disk-problem-affecting-KVM

20

Here are some of my observations which should address many issues in this thread…

  • ESXi should not be recommended generally, but can be recommended for specific use. Why? Because since ESXi is a very stripped down bootstrapped hypervisor platform, it does not include a variety of things, so life can be challenging. The list of supported hardware is <very> narrow and decidedly “enterprise.” Unless your laptop has enterprise components, you’ll likely be SOL. And, you’ll need to know how to manage ESXi remotely since you’re not supposed to manage your Guests locally…
  • Because the current state of hardware paravirtualization utilizes CPU extensions, there are generally few differences using any of the paravirtualization technologies (ie any technology which requires CPU extensions to be enabled in the BIOS). There are <some> lower level differences and of course at the app level there are major differences including support for various disk formats and User tools.
  • KVM… or VBox or VMware (even Xen) should all be fine for running a Windows Guest on a Linux Host. If you’re not planning on migrating any VMs to the cloud or other platforms, you can choose any. But if you have a specific other platform in mind, you should choose the most compatible technology.

As for your technical issue (reposted in another thread), yes and it applies to any/every app and virtualization technology. You need to resolve your partition mounting issues (and formatting) on the Host before you can store diskfile images on the partition for use.

TSU