seeking more information about KVM
We are using VMWare for several environments and I am looking for an alternative because of the cost of VMWare and VSphere's lack of reliablity and support for linux.
Can anyone tell me about how KVM compares to VMWare for host environment and remote management? We have to manage systems remotely and at times across a stressed VPN. VSphere fails miserably in both environments.
Things I am wondering include:
- Does KVM run as the OS in the host, like VMWare does, or do I just choose a base OS for the host then run it as an app (like vbox?)
- What is the remote management like? Does it have a local GUI client like vsphere, if so does it run on linux and not suck like vsphere does? Is there a cli option for painful vpn sessions?
- is it reliable and mature enough to run in a production environment?
hmm... between this and another kvm forum, it doesn't look like a very active or large user base. *crickets*
zlib,
To answer some of your questions and concerns.
1. kvm runs as a kernel module in the host OS but i/o is processed in userspace but default using emulated devices. You can optimize i/o using paravirtual drivers and there is also relatively new technology allowing devices direct access via DMA. However paravirtual devices is currently preferred as the DMA technology is still very new.
2. For remote management you have options of command line as well as GUI tools. There's a management layer to kvm ( and other technologies ) called libvirt. Most GUI tools use this layer but not all. For a list of gui tools see the following link at the wiki. http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools .
3. kvm technology is already being offered as an enterprise solution by Red Hat and many are running it in production already.
I installed qemu-kvm (different from qemu) on Gentoo linux. The documentation that I've found via Google is out-of-date/irrelavant. I know that there is a "kvm" command, and typing "qemu{TAB}{TAB}" gives me...
qemu
qemu-io
qemu-system-x86_64
qemu-i386
qemu-kvm
qemu-x86_64
qemu-img
qemu-nbd
Of the 9 commands, only qemu, qemu-img, and qemu-nbd have man pages. So RTFM becomes a little harder. Are there any up-to-date central locations for qemu-kvm documentation?
To add to my wishlist, are there any reasonably up-to-date 32-bit Gentoo guest disk images available?
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