Funny enough, for more than a year now, I’ve been using a Macbook Pro. Didn’t want Parallel or VMWare, heard about VirtualBox and tried it. It’s been surprisingly usable. I can exchange vmdk’s back and forth with VMWare.

I know Sun sells it on their servers as an alternative to VMWare and Xen.

The thing about automatic init scripts is… well, it’s automatic script and things can go wrong. I supposed for true production servers, you can have multiple failovers and load balancing, so you can take one down and work on it without affecting the rest.

Let me know if you try out KVM. I am moving things to EC2, time to roll up my sleeves and write a bunch of automation scripts. What they have there…. need work.

For the host:

#!/bin/bash

#
# config-vmware Reconfigures the VMware modules after kernel upgrades as needed
#
# chkconfig: – 09 09
# description: Reconfigures the VMware modules after a kernel upgrade as needed

# Reinstall the VMware modules as needed
if [ ! -e /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc/.vmware_installed ]; then
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl –default EULA_AGREED=yes
touch /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc/.vmware_installed
fi

For the VMs themselves:

#!/bin/bash
#
# config-vmware-tools Reconfigures the VMwareTools modules after kernel upgrades
#
# chkconfig: – 09 09
# description: Reconfigures the VMwareTools modules after a kernel upgrade

# Following lines auto-recompile VM Tools when kernel updated
VMToolsCheckFile=”/lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc/.vmware_installed”
VMToolsVersion=`vmware-config-tools.pl –help 2>&1 | awk ‘$0 ~ /^VMware Tools [0-9]/ { print $3,$4 }’`

printf “\nCurrent VM Tools version: $VMToolsVersion\n\n”

if [[ ! -e $VMToolsCheckFile || `grep -c "$VMToolsVersion" $VMToolsCheckFile` -eq 0 ]]; then
[ -x /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl ] && \
printf “Automatically compiling new build of VMware Tools\n\n” && \
/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl –default && \
printf “$VMToolsVersion” > $VMToolsCheckFile && \
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
depmod -a
modprobe vmxnet
fi

I fixed the vmware-config issues here by writing some init scripts to run it automatically as needed.

I’m leaning towards KVM over Xen now because it is clearly where RH is going with their support.

The thing I like most about Xen is kernel updates come with compiled drivers, so I don’t have to run vmware-config everytime. I can’t count the times my SAs reboot a system and forgot to re-run vmware-config, then the VMs are down for hours.

KVM is good, but the important thing to look at is the supporting tools.

VMware Server 2.

I’m looking at KVM for the longer term. VMServer2 has unfixed problems such as creeping CPU load requiring the VMs to be stopped completely and restarted periodically and Glibc version incompatibilities. VMware seems to have unoffically orphaned VMServer2 in favor of ESXi.

I looked at ESXi, but it is too finicky about supported hardware and is really just a loss leader for them to get you to buy the expensive management tools.

I have a bunch of VMs, but only for small stuffs. Our production eats memory for snack.

“Feed me Seymour!”

I’m running Nixsys branded Supermicro stuff with CentOS 5.4 for the most part. But only at single board server densities. Lot’s of VMs though.

Yeah, I have so much Dell hw here… legacy and all that. I am experimenting with Supermicro’s (Silicon Mechanics branded) servers. Their 4-in-1 2U systems are sweet. Essentially miniblade servers.

Heh, all my servers are CentOS 5.4, except for some legacies that are still at 4.x.