Top.Mail.Ru
? ?

Partners wiki

We have recently started a Partners section on our wiki for those who are working together with the OpenVZ project in one way or another. Our intent is to build this over time to serve as a resource. And it already works -- a couple of companies have added their profiles recently.

If you have created virtual appliances that use OpenVZ, or provide support services, or qualify in some other way, feel free to edit the page and add your profile there. If you have any questions, just go ahead and e-mail me, kir@openvz.org.

Just a note that this section is quite different from the 2006 Contributions section on the Wiki to acknowledge those people who contributed to the OpenVZ project last year.

Can you say mainline 2.6.24 kernel?

Cool. Two familiar names (Pavel Emelyanov and Kir Kolyshkin) contributed an article to this week's Linux Weekly News Kernel page. The article in question is entitled PID namespaces in the 2.6.24 kernel. Obligatory quote:
One of the new features in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel will be the PID namespaces support developed by the OpenVZ team with the help of IBM. The PID namespace allows for creating sets of tasks, with each such set looking like a standalone machine with respect to process IDs. In other words, tasks in different namespaces can have the same IDs.

This feature is the major prerequisite for the migration containers between hosts; having a namespace, one may move it to another host while keeping the PID values -- and this is a requirement since a task is not expected to change its PID. Without this feature, the migration will very likely fail, as the processes with the same IDs can exist on the destination node, which will cause conflicts when addressing tasks by their IDs.


It is good to see quite a bit of the work done by OpenVZ developers going into the mainline Linux kernel!

Virtuozzo in China

Ok, so this blog entry isn't about OpenVZ... but it is closely related since it is about SWsoft's Virtuozzo. According to an article entitled, SWsoft tries to virtualize China before VMware speaks the language, it appears that Virtuozzo uptake in China is doing quite well. I wonder what the uptake for OpenVZ is in China? Obligatory quote:
Chatting with Beloussov is one of the more refreshing experiences for a technology journalist. This feisty Russian has yet to attend sugar-coating school.

For example, Beloussov harbors a bit of resentment for the attention XenSource receives. According to our sources, XenSource will make about $8m in revenue this year versus more than $100m for SWsoft. XenSource, however, receives far more press.

"Even though Xen is very popular with the media, we just don't see them in deals," he said.
One of the goals of OpenVZ project is to integrate containers functionality into the mainstream Linux kernel. As you know, most of the new kernel code goes through Andrew Morton, the right hand of Linus Torvalds.

I just came across the video of Andrew speaking at the LinuxWorld Expo 2007. Among the other topics, he tells what is going to be in the kernel in a year or so. It is quite interesting to see what he thinks of containers -- to see that part, scroll to 40:58.

Update: here's the transcription of the relevant part, provided by dowdle.

The one prediction I am prepared to make is that over the next 1 to 2 years there'll be quite a lot of focus in the core of the Linux kernel on the project which has many names. Some people call it containerization, others will call it operating system virtualization, other people will call it resource management. It's a whole cloud of different features which have different applications.

It can be used for machine partitioning, to partition workloads amongst one machine, otherwise known as workload management.

Server consolidation. Well, you have a whole bunch of servers which are 30 percent loaded -- move all those things onto one the machine without having to tread on each others toes.

Resource management. A number of people in the high end numerical computing want this; numerical computing area want resource management. Other people who are running world famous web search engines also want resource management in their kernel. In fact, the major, central piece of the whole containerization framework is from an engineer at Google. It's in my tree at present and I'm hoping to get it in at 2.6.24. It's just a framework for containerization. A whole lot of other stuff is going to plug in underneath it, which is under development at present.

So an example of resource management is you might have a particular group of processes, [and] you want to not let it use more than 200 MB of physical memory, and a certain amount of disk bandwidth, network bandwidth, a certain amount of CPU -- so you can just have this little blob and give it maximum amount of resources it can consume, let it run without letting it trash everything else which is running on the machine. So that is a resource management application. People also need this feature for high availability... and I'm still not really sure I understand why.

Also the OpenVZ product, which comes out of the development team in Russia -- that's a mature project that is mainly for web server virtualization, having lots and lots of different instances of the web server on one machine, not have one excessively taking resources away from another. They've been working very hard and very patiently, and with great accommodation on this project. I hope slowly we'll start moving significant parts of the OpenVZ product into the Linux kernel in a way in which it's acceptable to all the other stake holders, so that those guys don't end up carrying such a patch burden.

SLES10 based OpenVZ kernel update

Here is good news for SLES users. I'm happy to report that the OpenVZ team resumed working on the SLES10-based OpenVZ kernel a few months ago, and we now have pretty stable SLES10 OpenVZ kernel. I encourage all SLES users to try it out.

The SLES10 kernel itself is based on the Linux kernel 2.6.16, and until SLES11 comes out, it remains the most "enterprise" (read stable and supported) kernel coming from Novell/SUSE. So, what we did is we took that kernel and ported our OpenVZ patchset to it. The only feature missing is I/O priority support, which is because the disk CFQ scheduler used in 2.6.16 is way too old. Other than that, it's a pretty decent kernel, and while we haven't declared it as stable yet we will do so really soon.

Here is a summary for all the other branches we develop/support as of now, with download links:
Stable: 2.6.9 (rhel4 based), 2.6.18 (rhel5 based), 2.6.18 (vanilla based). SLES10 will be added to this list soon.
Development: 2.6.22 (vanilla).
Last week I went to Cambridge, UK with my colleague Pavel Emelyanov to take part in the LinuxConf Europe and the containers mini-summit, as well as the Linux Kernel Summit session devoted to containers. Pavel, who works in the OpenVZ kernel team, is now working on integrating our technology into the mainstream Linux kernel. To his credit, the memory controller and the PID namespace patch (see my recent blog post), which were integrated into -mm recently, are mostly due to him.

The first event in Cambridge was LinuxConf Europe, where we both presented our talks on containers -- mine was a general introduction to virtualization, containers, and OpenVZ, while Pavel described some intimate details of memory controller (read "beancounters") implementation.

The next day we had to skip the LinuxConf to take part in the containers mini-summit. This was an event for all the containers shareholders to discuss what and how to present the containers topic at the Kernel Summit. Unfortunately, Eric Biederman (Linux Networx) and Paul Menage (Google) came later, and Balbir Singh (IBM) was buzy with VM mini-summit, so we did this mini-summit in two rounds. First round was with Pavel (OpenVZ), Cedric Le Goater (IBM), Oren Laadan (of Zap -- a checkpointing and live migration project), Kamezava Hiroyuki (of Fujitsu Japan, mostly interested in resource management), and Paul (who joined us over Skype). The second round was with Eric, Paul, and Balbir -- the next day in the hall. The results of this mini-summit are a few threads on containers@ mailing list, plus a few documents here.

Finally, there was 30-minute topic on the Kernel Summit devoted to the containers. Paul and Eric have summarized what we have done so far, and what are we going to do next. There was not much discussion, which I think is healthy because now everybody knows about containers and why they are needed. Slides from the talk are available here. Jonathan Corbet (of Linux Weekly News) also provided a summary of the topic (this is still subscriber-only content, but since I'm a subscriber I can share a free link with you).

It feels like we are making good progress and are on the right path to a containers implementation in the Linux kernel. You can see some people helping to make this happen in this photo. Click the image for larger version.
In case you haven't seen it yet, dowdle (Scott Dowdle) has done an interview with me on montanalinux.org. Here's the piece I like most:

ML: Can you update us on the current status of OpenVZ integration into the mainline kernel? Do you expect anything to happen in the near future regarding integration?

Kir: Most notable is the addition of the PID namespace patchset by Pavel Emelyanov into -mm (Andrew Morton's) tree -- it means the code will be in Linus' kernel in a few months. PID namespaces is a feature that makes it possible to have different sets of PIDs in different containers. The code was mostly developed by OpenVZ's Pavel Emelyanov, with some pieces from IBM's Sukadev Bhattiprolu. With the first version sent back in May, it was rewritten a few times to incorporate comments, suggestions and feature requests from everyone who was interested.
Read more...Collapse )

The interview is quite long; see the rest at montanalinux.org.

I'd also like to add that just a few days ago the memory controller patchset was also accepted into -mm tree. It does things similar to user beancounters in OpenVZ. So far, the accepted code only provides group-based RSS and page cache accounting, plus a generic infrastructure to add another accountables. The code was developed by Pavel Emelyanov and Balbir Singh (of IBM) in close collaboration.

With that in place, today Pavel already sent the first version of kernel memory controller. The code is not aimed for inclusion yet -- it is mostly aimed at spiking the discussion and trying to determine the needs.

OLS'07 wrap-up

Back in July, me and a couple of colleagues (Pavel Emelianov and Denis Lunev, both from the OpenVZ kernel team) were in Canada for the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

OLS is a pretty big event and probably the biggest conference that I've seen. Unlike all the previous years, this time it was detached from the Linux Kernel Summit (that will be in Cambridge, U.K. next week). Being detached seemed to have little impact on the event -- it is still large and somewhat kernel-oriented. The facilities for talks and BoFs included one big and five smaller rooms , all named after different species of penguins (the big one is of course named Emperor).

We also had our talk there, presented by Pavel and covering some non-trivial aspects of our resource management solution: the beancounters, which is part of OpenVZ kernel. The paper (PDF, 156K, 9 pages) and the slides (ODP, 89K or PPT, 474K) are available. In short, this is what he was talking about:
Current Linux accounting and limiting mechanisms (setrlimit() and some global stats counters) are not enough as they do not provide any task group-based counters and limits. OpenVZ's beancounters address this issue, implementing per-group accounting and limiting for about 20 different properties, like kernel memory, user space memory, physical memory, network buffers etc. Some specific implementation details (like shared RSS accounting, kernel slab accounting etc) are described.

Here is the list of talks and BoF sessions devoted to various aspects of containers:
* Paul Menage, Resource Control and Isolation: Adding Generic Process Containers to the Linux Kernel
* Pavel Emelianov, Resource Management: Beancounters
* Balbir Singh, Containers: Challenges with memory resource controller and its performance
* Marc Fiuczynski, Linux-VServer: Resource Efficient OS-Level Virtualization
* Dave Hansen, Linux Checkpoint/Restart BoFS

It's good to see the high level of interest to containers this year. As in any conference, though, a lot of networking is done away from the formal proceedings. For example, we (I mean everybody who's interested in containers) all had a breakfast in nearby Starbucks to discuss containers, resource management, network virtualization and other subtle aspects of what we do. About half of the famous Blackthorn Party for us was devoted to the same discussions (while the other half is surely about the beer).

It was a successful event, and I'm looking forward to take part in the next Blackthorn Party Linux Symposium in Ottawa.

Andrew Morton on OpenVZ

Andrew Morton was giving a keynote on a recent LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco. A fair portion of his talk was devoted to the need of testing new kernels, but also about what will appear in the kernel soon. A couple of slides were specifically about containers, including OpenVZ.

A nice recap of what he said is at zdnet.com, here's the quote: Additionally, and contrary to popular thinking, the debate over whether open source virtualization engines will fragment the industry is null and void since the kernel supports and will support all open source solutions – be it Xen, KVM, OpenVZ or VMware, Morton said.

Tags:

OpenVZ Live MIgration Demo Video

I've been playing around the last day or two with installing GUI desktop environments and applications into a VPS. It can be a little tricky keeping a stock distro udev package from overwritting the vzdev package but I figured out a way around that... at least on Red Hat based distros. Anyway, I thought I'd use my new GUI VPS to demonstrate live migration.

You can find it here:

http://www.montanalinux.org/openvz-live-migration-demo.html

That page has an embedded flash video that is sized down to 800x600 (from 1024x768) at 500Kbit/sec video. The flash version isn't as clear as I'd like it to be but I do provide a link to the original video that is a 1024x768 .ogg video that is excellent quality.

Anyone have any suggestions for future videos? Do you prefer with sound/commentary... or the "type in an editor" window format?

Latest Month

July 2016
S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Comments

Powered by LiveJournal.com
Designed by Tiffany Chow