james wrote:
The Use Case I am trying to achieve:
1. I have an AMD X4 with 4GB ram that is the central server. Given the
level of horse power it has the server does multiple roles, email, web
server, mythbuntu backend and file server.
The base/host OS is Ubuntu 8.04 using standard packages so I am using
KVM-62. While I am prepared to uninstall this and move to a self
compiled KVM-70 I want to determine if that move is worth it based on
my target outcome, or if I need to move to an alternative VM solution.
2. The desire is to get the file server role moved from running LVM to
ZFS raidz to allow "easy" upgrades of disk size on a disk by disk
basis (not available as an option under normal raid 5). e.g. pull out
a single 320GB disk and put in a 500GB or 750GB disk into the raidz
and it all "just works" still with the extra storage being available.
3. Looking to achieve this move by using a VM running either
OpenSolaris or Nexenta. The idea being to have the VM as a NAS setup
to be using the disks directly as block devices. So the setup is to
have a a boot img (can be IDE) and 4 other direct access block devices
(need to be SCSI as there are not enough IDE devices available). Not
these are all 64 bit installs based on the advice that ZFS needs a 64
bit OS to behave well.
4. Options tried:
a] I have tried using FreeBSD 7 using ZFS under this VM model. However
when put it under load I get scsi errors an the VM segment
faults/core-dumps. This is
b] I have been trying to get OpenSolaris and Nexenta (basically the
same at the core) working but neither recognise the KVM scsi
controler. It seems to coming through as id PCI1000,12 which is a
LSI53C895A PCI to Ultra2 SCSI Controller which is supposed to use the
symhisl driver. Now from good old Google I have found that there are
supposed to be problems with this driver and it will not be ported to
64 bit. Indeed looking at the OpenSolaris /etc/driver_aliases this
driver to PCI mapping has been dropped.
5. So the questions are:
a] How stable/robust is the scsi implementation under KVM? i.e. are
there known weaknesses here that moving to higher KVM versions will
address such that using FreeBSD 7 will be a viable option.
It hasn't been tested much (if at all) with the FreeBSD 7 drivers. In
fact, I don't think there's been much testing at all of FreeBSD as a
guest in KVM.
b] It would appear that KVM has a general exposure in the SCSI space
for OpenSolaris and its variants. Due to dropped driver support the
current SCSI implementation on KVM will no longer work with
OpenSolaris (at least in its 64bit variant). Or is this resolved in
later KVM versions (after KVM-62)?
I don't quite following what you are saying. Are you saying that
OpenSolaris no longer supports the SCSI card we emulate? That seems
unfortunate on their part. I would also be surprised by that since the
same SCSI implementation is used by Xen and Sun is heavily invested in
OpenSolaris for Xen at this point.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
All help and suggestions gratefully received.
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