La vie s’en va de nous

Maar eigenlijk te vaak.

I’m working on doing some tests to compare different virtualisation technologies. Whilst those tests are far from finished, I got some numbers this afternoon who give a quick first impression.

What is being tested here?

• Running some specific processes
• Timing how long they run
• On a virtual guest (1 for now) on different platforms

Host environment?
Five servers, each running a different virtualisation platform, running on a machine with 2 quad cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz with 12GB RAM. One 160GB SATA 2.25″ 5400RPM disk per server, of which around 120GB is used for the guest disks (LVM).

The 5 different platforms are:

1. VMWare ESXi 4.0
2. Red Hat / CentOS 5.4 with Xen 3.0
3. Red Hat / CentOS 5.4 with KVM 83
4. Debian Lenny with Xen 3.2
5. Ubuntu Karmic with KVM 0.11

Guest environment?
All the guests are running Debian Lenny, in a vm with 512M Ram, with 2 virtual processors. And a file system of around 6GB. Virtual disks are LVM logical volumes on disk on the server host. Xen guest are runnig in paravirtualisation mode with the domU kernel available in Lenny, KVM guests are configured with virtio hardware. VMWare emulates Intel(R) PRO/1000.

There are 20 clients deployed on each server. So far I ran tests on 1 concurrent guest only. The dual concurrent client tests are running whils I write this, I’ll hope the scripts will keep running during the weekend

A quick peek in the test logs showed me following numbers. The items should speak for themselves, tthey are noted as

platform-test=time_in_seconds_to_run

A smaller number means better performance.

Lame
Converting 10 wave files to mp3

debxen-lame=44
ubukvm-lame=45
vmware-lame=45
rhtkvm-lame=47
rhtxen-lame=53

Unzipping a kernel tarball
debxen-zip=78
vmware-zip=78
ubukvm-zip=81
rhtkvm-zip=83
rhtxen-zip=94

Untarring the tar archive
vmware-untar=25
debxen-untar=27
rhtxen-untar=27
ubukvm-untar=30
rhtkvm-untar=40

Compiling that kernel
ubukvm-kernelcompile=3789
vmware-kernelcompile=3879
rhtkvm-kernelcompile=3918
debxen-kernelcompile=3999
rhtxen-kernelcompile=4906

The biggest thing to note would be a lesser performance of Redhat + Xen when it comes to processor load, but keep in mind that this is an older version of Xen. On the other hand The respective older version of KVM on Red hat plays rhather well. I expect Xen to perform better when it comes to disk access.

There are other tests being processed also (iperf, iozone, tbench, dbench) but I can’t give a quick overview of those as the time to run is irrelevant for those.

More to come.

Actually, this was triggered by clicking a mailto: link, whilst I hadn’t fixed Gnome’s default behaviour of launching evolution, so I just closed the mail dialog Window, but evolution seems to insist on staying running persistently.

But I don’t even use this freaky program. I only configure my Google Calendar to have it show up in the date app in gnome-panel. I may have an IMAP account configured too, but I don’t really use that.

I can understand that having an IMAP account with several gigs of data on the server end might trigger some indexing magic, but why evolution insists on permanantly using half of my physicical memory is beyond me.

This behaviour has actually been very persistent since several years/releases. Even deleting al .evolution related data in $HOME doesn’t fix that, so it’s not some left over garbage from an old installation.

How to reproduce? Clean install. Configure a calendar. Configure an imap account. Rince & repeat.

How such a piece of junk manages to stay the default client of choice in Gnome, and hence lots of distributions, is beyond me.

Being a proprietary tool, VMWare has a problem in common with Windows: it’s full off proprietary API’s you have to go through to be able to pull a backup. Also, whilst VMWare (ESX, but in practice also ESXi) has a unix/Linux like management environment, you don’t get all the tools you’d want to do your thing. Rsync to name one.

Of course, I you walk the line, buy sufficient licenses and extra software, you get to use VCB and can interconnect with “Supported” software like Symantec Backup Exec and the like.

But here and know, all I wanted, next to regular backups, was being able to easily pull backups to a Linux backup server (just a host with plent of disk space, and all the standard software I wanted.) Now, I found it hard to find the right solution to do that. Lots of custom scripts, but nothing that quickly worked. Often ugly scripts or hacks.

So far, the best solution i sticked to is the GhettoVCB script. Add a an NFS export from the Linux backup server to VMWare as a Datastore, and after a simple config, just run the script.

Downside of this approach, when used for a full ESX with SAN environment, is that you have to run in on the virtual host machines themselves, you can’t grab it over a separate VCB host which can haz its own SAN connection.

It works, but I still feel it’s awkward, not sure why. Anybody other suggestions for plain and simple backup tools for vmware?

Gezien het risico om als Twitteraar (nvdr: marginale internetmens) slechts de in-crowd te bereiken, geef ik liever voorkeur aan de in-crowd alhier – ik denk graag dat het hier minder marginaal is.

Dus, bij deze, hierna mijn less-than-140-chars – handig excuus om er niet te veel over te moeten zeveren:

De mening van ne slimme mens: http://bit.ly/viKRR

I have a good internet connection here

• You can play sound with aplay -D hw:0 /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
• When pulseaudio is running, use pasuspender /usr/bin/aplay — -D hw:0 /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
• You can play sound with paplay /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
• You can play sound with gst-launch audiotestsrc \! autoaudiosink

Can we please start providing better documentation on how building blocks interact?

Hacking dhclient.conf won’t help, as the classic ifup ifdown scripts don’t touch this. Configuring extra search domains through Network Manager itself is no-go also, as you then need to configure static ip’s or at least static all of the dns entries which don’t get your dns server, domain name and search domain configured by dhcp also. What I needed, was adding search domains to resolv.conf.

Long story short, just add an additional search stanza line to /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/tail.

Getting Network-Manager to do what you want isn’t allways that flexible, and configuration options are limited when you hand over control to the nm daemon. but so far I manged to let it do most of what I needed, which isn’t all that special actually. I you wan’t to avoid NM taking control of you interface, just be sure to add an iface entry to /etc/network/interfaces, Network Manager takes only control of the interfaces which only have an auto line.

Zeer rustig gelegen hoeve te huur Stuiver, 9950 Waarschoot.
Woonst met garages en berging, twee ruime bedrijfsgebouwen (stal met opslagplaatsen en voormalige melkerij). Ruime voortuin (binnenplaats) en achtertuin. Kippenren; bijhorende weide, geschikt voor een 2-3 paarden. Gelegen op een totaaloppervlakte van ongeveer 8.000m².

Ligging, foto’s en contactinfo.