Graphical virtualisation management system

Graphical virtualisation management system

[Freddie Cash]

What is everyone using to manage their virtualisation setup?  Anyone
using a pre-packaged management system like ConVirt, oVirt,
Virt-Manager, etc?  Everyone rolling their own management scripts?
Something else?

Right now, we're using our home-grown kvmctl script (as seen in the
KVM wiki) to manage KVM-based VMs on Debian and Ubuntu Server.  It's
working ok, but limited to a single host, so there's no redundancy or
shared storage or migration possible in our current setup.

We want to move to a multi-tiered, SAN-based virtualisation setup, but
can't find a VM management tool that handles both KVM and Xen (we have
some old Opteron hardware that doesn't support SVM), and does not
require Linux from end-to-end.  For example, we want to run FreeBSD +
ZFS on our storage servers, exporting storage via iSCSI (or NFS).  We
want to run a minimal Debian/Ubuntu install on the VM hosts (just to
boot and run the management agents), with all of the VMs getting their
storage via iSCSI.  With a separate box acting as the management
system.  Preferably with a web-based management GUI, but that's more
of an "nice to have" than a hard requirement.

>From the research I've done into the VM management systems available
for KVM/Xen, either Linux is required on every host (including the
storage servers), or they don't support iSCSI (or off-server shared
storage of any kind), or they require an X server installed, or they
only support one of Xen/KVM, or they are geared toward managing a
single server (desktop).

So, if you have a setup similar to above (multiple physical servers,
separate storage, etc), what are you using to manage it?  Is it free,
open-source, shareware, pay-ware, proprietary, abandonware, something
else?

So far, I've looked at:
  * Convirture 2.0 which looks pretty, but doesn't work with iSCSI,
and the docs are all horribly out-of-date making it very hard to
troubleshoot;
  * oVirt which requires Fedora/CentOS/RedHat on everything;
  * virt-manager which requires X and seems to be more desktop-oriented;
  * ProxMox which doesn't support Xen.

What else is available?  Where else should I be looking?

Any suggestions on what to look at greatly appreciated.  Any
suggestions on how to improve our setup also greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash@gmail.com

Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Freddie Cash <fjwcash@gmail.com> wrote:
>  * virt-manager which requires X and seems to be more desktop-oriented;

don't know about the others, but virt-manager runs only on the admin
station.  on the VM hosts you run only libvirtd, which doesn't need X

in fact, that's what you get when you install Ubuntu server and choose
'VM host'.

about the storage servers, i don't know if they manage them, as i
simply add PVs to the VG, and libvirt handles from there.  it doesn't
care about the type of block devices.

-- 
Javier

Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 02:01:52PM -0500, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Freddie Cash <fjwcash@gmail.com> wrote:
> > ??* virt-manager which requires X and seems to be more desktop-oriented;
> 
> don't know about the others, but virt-manager runs only on the admin
> station.  on the VM hosts you run only libvirtd, which doesn't need X

While it can connect to remote systems it seems totally unusable for
that to me.  For one thing working over higher latency links like DSL
or even transatlantik links seems to be almost impossible.  Second I
still haven't figure out how to install and manage a system using the
serial console with KVM, which certainly contributes to the complete
lack of usability above.

Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On 06/25/10 09:05, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 02:01:52PM -0500, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Freddie Cash<fjwcash@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> ??* virt-manager which requires X and seems to be more desktop-oriented;
>>
>> don't know about the others, but virt-manager runs only on the admin
>> station.  on the VM hosts you run only libvirtd, which doesn't need X
>
> While it can connect to remote systems it seems totally unusable for
> that to me.  For one thing working over higher latency links like DSL
> or even transatlantik links seems to be almost impossible.

Works but is quite slow indeed.  Also virt-manager remote host support 
works ok for a small number of hosts, but if you want to manage dozens 
of them it becomes unusable.

> Second I
> still haven't figure out how to install and manage a system using the
> serial console with KVM, which certainly contributes to the complete
> lack of usability above.

Serial console support doesn't work for remote connections.  Dunno 
whenever that is a restriction of virt-manager or the underlying libvirt.

cheers,
   Gerd

Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 11:07:26AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On 06/25/10 09:05, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> 
> >Second I
> >still haven't figure out how to install and manage a system using the
> >serial console with KVM, which certainly contributes to the complete
> >lack of usability above.
> 
> Serial console support doesn't work for remote connections.  Dunno 
> whenever that is a restriction of virt-manager or the underlying libvirt.

libvirt, kvm, virt-manager - arguably all of them :-) We really need to
either tunnel the character device backend streams over VNC, or add a
remote streams access API to libvirt, or virt-manager could do an ssh
tunnel. VNC tunnelling is what I'd really like todo because that gives
a solution that can work with even normal VNC clients like Vinagre.

Daniel
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Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Gerd Hoffmann]

   Hi,

> We want to move to a multi-tiered, SAN-based virtualisation setup, but
> can't find a VM management tool that handles both KVM and Xen (we have
> some old Opteron hardware that doesn't support SVM), and does not
> require Linux from end-to-end.  For example, we want to run FreeBSD +
> ZFS on our storage servers, exporting storage via iSCSI (or NFS).  We
> want to run a minimal Debian/Ubuntu install on the VM hosts (just to
> boot and run the management agents), with all of the VMs getting their
> storage via iSCSI.  With a separate box acting as the management
> system.  Preferably with a web-based management GUI, but that's more
> of an "nice to have" than a hard requirement.

> So far, I've looked at:
>    * oVirt which requires Fedora/CentOS/RedHat on everything;

NFS/iSCSI being hosted on non-linux shouldn't be a problem I think, at 
least the underlying libvirt handles this just fine and I can't see a 
reason why oVirt shouldn't (don't know oVirt in detail although I've 
played with it a bit a while ago).

To manage the hosts oVirt wants to have some oVirt bits running on them. 
  Porting them to Debian should be possible.  But as the stuff interacts 
with the distro bootup scripts it is most likely noticable more work 
than just compile+install.

cheers,
   Gerd

Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 03:05:42AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 02:01:52PM -0500, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Freddie Cash <fjwcash@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > ??* virt-manager which requires X and seems to be more desktop-oriented;
> > 
> > don't know about the others, but virt-manager runs only on the admin
> > station.  on the VM hosts you run only libvirtd, which doesn't need X
> 
> While it can connect to remote systems it seems totally unusable for
> that to me.  For one thing working over higher latency links like DSL
> or even transatlantik links seems to be almost impossible.

It is fair to say that virt-manager is not really targetted at high 
latency WAN scenearios. It is really aimed at small scale local LAN
deployments with 5-20 hosts maximum.  For a serious WAN deployment
you can't use the hub <-> spoke synchronous RPC architecture, instead
you need a asynchronous message bus - this is where something like
oVirt or RHEV is best.  So I'd agree that you shouldn't use virt-manager
across high latency DSL or transatlantic links, just use it in your local 
home or office LAN.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
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