Posts on Virtualization

Tutorials on virtualization system and software, such as Xen.

31 posts in total.

How to limit shared AWS EC2 accounts’ access to view and start all VMs yet stop only certain VMs

By Eric Z Ma | In Tutorial, Virtualization, Web |

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 […]

I/O Microscopy: Tasks’ Disk I/O Information with High Accuracy

By Weiwei Jia | In Systems, Virtualization |

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. […]

x-data-plane feature in QEMU/KVM

By Weiwei Jia | In Linux, Tutorial, Virtualization |

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 […]

Creating Fedora 20 Domain-U on Fedora 20 Domain-0

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Tutorial, Virtualization |

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 Installing Xen on Fedora 20 as Domain-0. For better performance, you may consider using LVM backed VM. Create file-backed VBD […]

How to Install, Run and Uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

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 […]

Managing Xen Dom0′s CPU and Memory

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Tutorial, Virtualization |

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 […]

Installing Fedora 17 PV Domain-U on Xen with PXE Booting

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

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 […]

Setting Up Ubuntu DomU on Xen: Ubuntu 10.10 on Fedora Xen Dom0

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

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 […]

Simple Introduction to paravirt_ops for Xen

By Eric Z Ma | In Virtualization |

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

Xen with LVM

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

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. This post is a summary of tutorials related Xen DomU and LVM. Setting Up LVM Backed Xen DomU […]

An Introduction to Xen Source Code Structure and Disk in Xen

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

Please note these slides on Xen was made in around 2013 and the Xen source code structure might have already changed a lot. Please check this as a reference to the Xen source structure only. I have created slides from introducing Xen’s source code structure and backend and frontend drivers in Xen. Please find the […]

Xen DomU’s I/O Performance of LVM and loopback Backed VBDs

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

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 E5520  @ 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 […]

Setting up Stable Xen Dom0 with Fedora: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified Linux Kernel 2.6.32.13 in Fedora 12

By Eric Z Ma | In Linux, Virtualization |

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 […]