Tutorials on virtualization system and software, such as Xen.
Docker is a convenient tool to quick create containers from different Linux images. If we use the common way to start a docker container like docker run image bash, after the the process exists, the container is still stored there. That is, the docker container persists after it has exited. Sometimes, we would like to…
VirtualBox is a nice open source virtual machine software. It works nicely on Linux and is supported by many Linux distros like Ubuntu in their official package repositories, so it is quite easy to set it up on Linux. The VMs can also be managed in command line using the vboxmanage command line tool provided…
If a team with many accounts share and manages the virtual machines under that same AWS accounts, it is a common practice to limit AWS EC2 accounts’ access to view or start all VMs yet stop only certain VMs. For example, one account has 50 VMs tagged “prod” while 25 VMs tagged “dev”. The developers…
Introduction As we know, network subsystems are important in computer systems since they are I/O systems and need to be optimized with many algorithms and skills. This article will introduce how QEMU/KVM [2] network part works. In order to put everything simple and easy to understand, we will begin with several examples and then understand…
Abstract Most popular task monitor systems (such as top, iotop, proc, etc) can only get tasks’ disk I/O information like tasks’ I/O utilization percentage every seconds due to kernel timer/tick frequency and high time cost of system interfaces. This article presents I/O Microscopy, a new way to get tasks’ disk I/O information with high accuracy….
Abstract In systems, sometimes, we use one global lock to keep synchronization among different threads. This principle also happens in QEMU/KVM (http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page) system. However, this may cause lock contention problem. The performance/scalability of whole system will be decreased. In order to solve this problem in QEMU/KVM, x-data-plane feature is designed/implemented, which the high-level idea is…
In this post, creating a file-backed virtual block device (VBD) and installing Fedora 20 in the Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. This domain is created on a Fedora 20 Dom0 as introduced in https://www.systutorials.com/installing-xen-on-fedora-20-as-domain-0/. For better performance, you may consider using LVM backed VM. Create file-backed VBD The actual space of VBD will…
I ever introduced [[installing-xen-domain-0-on-fedora-17]] as the first try to use the xen package delivered from Fedora and get away from manually compiling Xen and patching the kernel. In this post, I introduce installing Xen Dom0 on Fedora 20. Installing Xen First, install the xen pacakges: # yum install xen The Linux kernel is already ready…
VMware Player and VirtualBox are two cool and free full virtualization solutions and both can run on top of a Linux host. In this post, I introduce how to install, run, and uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux. VMware Player Install VMware Player Download the installation bundle from VMware’s website. For example, the…
The performance of Xen’s Dom0 is important for the overall system. The disk and network drivers are running on Dom0. I/O intensive guests’ workloads may consume lots Dom0′s CPU cycles. The Linux kernel calculates various network related parameters based on the amount of memory at boot time. The kernel also allocate memory for storing memory…
Shutting down servers is a common operations for managing a cluster. However, if this server is configured to a Xen Dom0 and has Xen VMs (DomUs), the VMs should be shutdown first to avoid data lost on these VMs. xm supports a -a option to shutdown all VMs: # xm shutdown -a Add the -w…
An introduction to the general method of installing Domain-U on Xen is introduced here: Setting Up Stable Xen DomU with Fedora: Unmodified Fedora 12 on top of Xenified Fedora 12 Dom0 with Xen (this is a general introduction, some details are changed, such as ‘xl’ replacing ‘xm’, LVM backing the disk for higher performance. But…
The new development of Xen and Linux kernel make it easy to install Xen on Fedora as the Domain-0 now. This post uses Fedora 17 as an example platform to introduce how to set up Domain-0 on Fedora Linux. Compared to our old method (https://www.systutorials.com/setting-up-stable-xen-dom0-with-fedora-xen-3-4-3-with-xenified-linux-kernel-2-6-32-13-in-fedora-12/) which requires manually compiled Xen and patched kernel, the current…
Setting up Ubuntu 10.10 DomU on top of Fedora Xen Dom0 is introduced in this post. The process of setting up Ubuntu 10.10 DomU is the same as Setting Up Stable Xen DomU with Fedora: Unmodified Fedora 12 on top of Xenified Fedora 12 Dom0 with Xen 4.0 This post only show the difference which…
The is a simple introduction to paravirt_ops in Linux kernel for Xen, VMware, etc. We make this introduction from the view of code. We use the function raw_local_irq_disable() and raw_local_irq_enable() functions in Linux kernel to introduce paravirt_ops for Xen and Xenified kernel. Please download the introduction to paravirt_ops pdf file: introduction-to-pv-ops-v3.pdf
LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. Creating LVM-backed Xen DomU is introduced in this post. Create LVM-backed VBD Suppose we have a LVM volume…
LVM’s snapshot feature enables us to duplicate an LVM backed Xen DomU in seconds rather than minutes. We no longer need to copy the entire file system image like backing up file backed Xen DomU. We just need to make a snapshot of the current Xen DomU in seconds. When there are changes to the…
The Xen hypervisor is a powerful virtualization solution that provides virtualization capabilities for x86, x86-64, and ARM architectures. The source code structure of Xen is organized into several directories, each of which contains a specific set of files. The backend and frontend drivers are an important part of the Xen hypervisor, and they provide a…
This posts list benchmark (using bonnie++) result of I/O performance of Xen LVM and loopback backed VBDs. The configuration of machines Dom0 VCPU: 2 (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520Â @ 2.27GHz) Memory: 2GB Xen and Linux kernel: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified 2.6.32.13 kernel DomU VCPU: 2 Memory: 2GB Linux kernel: Fedora (2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64) DomU’s profile: name=”10.0.1.200″ vcps=2…
This is the latest stable and recommended stable Xen Dom0 solution on Fedora 12. No serious bug found till now and we will fix the bugs by ourselves if some appears. It also works on Fedora 14 as well. It should not be hard to use this solution on other versions of Fedora or other…