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> I have two iSCSI Targets. I want to pull a LUN from each, and mirror on the KVM Host system, exposing the mirrored disks for my guests. Compared to using ZFS

by wazoox 15y ago

> I have two iSCSI Targets. I want to pull a LUN from each, and mirror on the KVM Host system, exposing the mirrored disks for my guests. Compared to using ZFS on OpenSolaris with Xen 3.1, this process is incredibly cumbersome and unreliable. I don't see the relation with KVM. There is nothing special in the way it uses open-iscsi or mdadm to access iSCSI targets and set up mirrors. Maybe you're unfamiliar with these Linux-specific tools and mistakenly attribute to KVM your difficulties which are really Linux problems. > Plus I just don't get the need for libvirt. I don't use libvirt; I wrote a couple of scripts that allow me to do what I need with KVM. libvirt is useful only if you need to manage a whole lot of VMs.

ssmoot 15y ago
No, I'm aware they're Linux problems. It just seems the mind-share is on KVM these days so I generally consider Linux Host Virtualization == KVM. You're absolutely correct though. It's not really KVM's fault. It's the Linux iscsi, software RAID, and volume management capabilities that are so lacking. It just happens that that makes using KVM much less appealing. I want: 1. Reliable Snapshots and Replication 2. Simple Volume Management 3. Human readable device names 4. Consistency of volumes/devices between reboots 5. An "uncorruptable" FS backing the guests 6. Reliable Virtualization OpenSolaris is the only platform I know addresses these concerns. Linux doesn't come close despite it feeling like it's virtualization options are more mature. FreeBSD may be a good fit with VirtualBox, but VBox on OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana was unstable for me at least. I'd like to give FreeBSD a try sometime. On libvirt, that's about what I expected. I guess I just wanted to complain about it in general. ;-) sudo xm new /my/config/file sudo xm start my_guest sudo xm shutdown my_guest sudo xm delete my_guest What's going through my head: "I need a tool that I haven't seen a decent one page explanation on to wrap that why?" :-)

by wazoox 15y ago

ssmoot 15y ago

No, I'm aware they're Linux problems. It just seems the mind-share is on KVM these days so I generally consider Linux Host Virtualization == KVM. You're absolutely correct though. It's not really KVM's fault. It's the Linux iscsi, software RAID, and volume management capabilities that are so lacking. It just happens that that makes using KVM much less appealing. I want: 1. Reliable Snapshots and Replication 2. Simple Volume Management 3. Human readable device names 4. Consistency of volumes/devices between reboots 5. An "uncorruptable" FS backing the guests 6. Reliable Virtualization OpenSolaris is the only platform I know addresses these concerns. Linux doesn't come close despite it feeling like it's virtualization options are more mature. FreeBSD may be a good fit with VirtualBox, but VBox on OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana was unstable for me at least. I'd like to give FreeBSD a try sometime. On libvirt, that's about what I expected. I guess I just wanted to complain about it in general. ;-) sudo xm new /my/config/file sudo xm start my_guest sudo xm shutdown my_guest sudo xm delete my_guest What's going through my head: "I need a tool that I haven't seen a decent one page explanation on to wrap that why?" :-)