Virtual Machines working group

Meetings

Kick-off <date> agenda minutes

Open Issues

• Network Address Translation - What is the load?<br\>
• Virtual Machine Isolation - Prohibit internal network connectivity with IPTables.<br\>
• Image repository - Storage Area Network or distributed over worker nodes.<br\>
• Policy document<br\>

Infrastructure

I am setting up a testbed to investigate technical issues related to virtual machine management.

Hardware and Operating Systems

• Two Dell 1950 machines, dual CPU, 4 cores per CPU
  • One machine has a Centos-5 installation
  • One machine has a Debian-squeeze installation

Software

• CentOS-5 comes with Xen 3.0
• Debian-squeeze comes with Xen 3.3
  • Debian-squeeze Xen packages have a problem with tap:aio.

Fix:
ln -s /usr/lib/xen-3.2-1/bin/tapdisk /usr/sbin
echo xenblktap >> /etc/modules

• Opennebula has been installed on CentOS-5 following this guide
  • A few additional staps were needed:
    • Install rubygems and rubygem-sqlite3
    • Opennebula has to be added to the sudoers file for xm
    • Sudoers should not require a tty

wget ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/EPEL/5/x86_64/rubygem-sqlite3-ruby-1.2.4-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
wget ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/EPEL/5/x86_64/rubygems-1.3.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh rubygems-1.3.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm rubygem-sqlite3-ruby-1.2.4-1.el5.x86_64.rpm 

In /etc/sudoers (on all machines)
opennebula ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/xm
#Defaults    requiretty

• Installed iSCSI target and client software for shared image repository
  • Howtos: Debian, Centos
  • Maybe test later with encrypted iSCSI
  • Two new machines ordered with the required iSCSI offload
• Image repository consists of LVM volume groups
  • Performance of LVM is better than file based images
  • Each logical volume contains an image
  • This allows easy creation/deletion of new images
  • VMs can run from cloned (Copy-On-Write) images