Re: Migrating VMware instances

I'm actually trying qemu right now, I am having mixed success. A few 
instances seg faulted on migration and a few did not. I'm going to keep 
playing with it next week and see how it works. I think it may have some 
possibilties. If the performance without the kernel accelerator is as low 
as the docs indicate though it may be not worth the effort. I think I read 
the performance is like 10% of native without the accelerator. I'm not so 
worried about a 25% or even 50% cpu hit... but 90% cpu hit makes it 
pointless...

One thing that occurs to me is xen system migration is logically similar 
to OM process migration if you squint your eyes and consider xen a 
process. I was considering building an OM cluster then running xen on the 
OM nodes. It would not be able to migrate on it's own... but then I could 
roll a userspace daemon to examine the OM node ultization stats and poke 
xen instances to move around. I think I read the 2.6OM moved the balancing 
logic out into userspace anyway. If I'm going to do all of that I could 
technically drop OM as part of the design... but I have other uses for the 
OM migration on these boxes outside of the virtual systems.

Dave Pippenger


On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, [email protected] wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Trevor Warren wrote:
>
>> Hey Guys,
>>
>>   At work we areplaying around with quite a few virtualised environments. I
>> should admit that our benchmarks have prooven that Vmware has huge
>> performance overheads and is an overkill for critical-cpu_io intensive
>> applications. But the vmware suite of tools is the most complete as compared
>> to other vendors.
>
> QEMU supports tun/tap for solid network support and since it will run in
> userland (w/o the accelerator), it may migrate on an openmosix cluster.
> Can someone see if they can boot a few linux floppy images or something
> and migrate them?
>
> -Eric
>
>
>
>> On 1/12/06, Dave Pippenger <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> In my searches for an answer I turned up this old post
>>>
>>> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=9719541
>>>
>>> It refers to a magical ftp site that no longer seems to have the
>>> advertised content. The poster was not the creator of the content and the
>>> email address protection prevents me from asking the poster if he still
>>> has the content. So does anyone have a copy of the howto docs and custom
>>> source that used to live at
>>>
>>> ftp://ftp.bpa.gov/downloads/software/openMosix/
>>>
>>> Dave Pippenger
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Dave Pippenger wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> If anyone is curious about my reasoning for wanting to do this, I have a
>>>> number of dev systems running on VMs. Each server uses different levels
>>> of
>>>> CPU at any given time depending on the development cycle of each group.
>>> It
>>>> ends up being a very large pain to manage 100 or so of these VMs spread
>>>> across 30 dual proc boxes and keep two people from butting heads with
>>> the cpu
>>>> on a given box. OM seemed to be a pretty good answer to my issue
>>> allowing me
>>>> to just provision everyone on the master node and have OM
>>>> deal with the cpu/memory distribution. My VMs are all linux, so I'm not
>>> tied
>>>> to VMware if anyone knows of another project that works well with OM. I
>>>> didn't see any interesting hints that bochs or plex86 would work, and I
>>> know
>>>> due to kernel hooks UML is pretty much not an option.
>>>>
>>>> The FAQ and vague reports from other users on the list running VMware
>>> under
>>>> OM is what inspired me to believe it was a workable setup.
>>>>
>>>> Dave Pippenger
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>  Dave,
>>>>>
>>>>>  On 5 January 2006 at 14:05, Dave Pippenger wrote:
>>>>> |  I read through the FAQ and came across the entry for VMware that
>>>>> |  indicated
>>>>> |  openmosix owuld load balance several instances of VMware. When I
>>> tried
>>>>> |  to
>>>>> |  do this using vmware-gsx I was faced with the VMware processes being
>>>>> |  locked on the home node with these flags (monkey, mmap_dev,
>>> clone_vm,
>>>>> |  direct_io). I tried altering the VM config by removing devices like
>>>>> |  floppy
>>>>> |  that could have lead to locking, but in the end I was unable to get
>>> any
>>>>> |  level of success.
>>>>> |
>>>>> |  I'm running a 2.4.27 based om kernel using the migshm patches. My
>>> VMware
>>>>> |  is somewhat dated being version 3.1.0 but I have seen no indication
>>> of a
>>>>> |  particular version that was better at migration than any other. If
>>>>> |  anyone
>>>>> |  who has had positive experience with this could let me know what
>>> kind of
>>>>> |  config they were using it would be of great assistance.
>>>>>
>>>>>  I can't offer much help. I tried something similar recently using the
>>>>>  newer
>>>>>  VMware Player, but didn't get the 2.4.27 oM kernel to migrate
>>> processes
>>>>>  between the two instances I was running.  I posted a few notes on the
>>>>>  quantian-general list about that.
>>>>>
>>>>>  So if anybody has pointers or leads on openMosix inside VMware, I'd
>>> like
>>>>>  to
>>>>>  hear them too.
>>>>>
>>>>>  Regards, Dirk
>>>>>
>>>>>  --
>>>>>  Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
>>>>>                                                   -- Thomas A. Edison
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>          ___________________________________
>> ( >-   /  Scaling FreeSoftware & OpenSource        \   -< )
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>> An eye for an eye will soon turn the world blind - MKG
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