What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?
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@fateknollogee Companies switch from various hypervisors for their own reasons, especially big ones (when you can get specific hardware from Intel, you are in a Top10 hardware user in general).
But there is also companies switching from KVM to Xen (eg Gandi, a relatively important hosting company): https://news.gandi.net/en/2017/07/a-more-xen-future/
So, as you can see, it's not binary. Xen is also very popular in embed world (automotive etc.), and China is also a powerful player now.
I'm not telling Xen is better. It's different: this is a microkernel that boot before Linux, with the good (sec, isolation) and the bad (less easy to understand/manage by default). It's also the oldest open source hypervisor!
So in the end, having multiple hypervisors is a good thing. Frankly, I don't care about the "bare" hypervisor market "behavior", it's already a commodity.
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@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
I'm not telling Xen is better. It's different: this is a microkernel that boot before Linux, with the good (sec, isolation) and the bad (less easy to understand/manage by default). It's also the oldest open source hypervisor!
Oldest period (that went into production) for IA32. It predates ESXi.
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@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@fateknollogee That's not that simple. And you can't compare apple to carrots.
You can compare KVM and Xen. You can't compare XS and KVM.
In terms of "full stack" API, there is no "standard" for KVM. Everyone is doing is own stuff. That's not what I call a success
What exactly are you looking for with KVM? There are lots of ways to fully manage KVM... the best way is with CLI "virsh", and virt-manager.
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@scottalanmiller To be fair I had IBM mainframes in mind ^^
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@tim_g said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@fateknollogee That's not that simple. And you can't compare apple to carrots.
You can compare KVM and Xen. You can't compare XS and KVM.
In terms of "full stack" API, there is no "standard" for KVM. Everyone is doing is own stuff. That's not what I call a success
What exactly are you looking for with KVM? There are lots of ways to fully manage KVM... the best way is with CLI "virsh", and virt-manager.
Something like XAPI, but for KVM. Eg the get order of magnitude effort to add KVM into Xen Orchestra for example.
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@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@tim_g said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@fateknollogee That's not that simple. And you can't compare apple to carrots.
You can compare KVM and Xen. You can't compare XS and KVM.
In terms of "full stack" API, there is no "standard" for KVM. Everyone is doing is own stuff. That's not what I call a success
What exactly are you looking for with KVM? There are lots of ways to fully manage KVM... the best way is with CLI "virsh", and virt-manager.
Something like XAPI, but for KVM. Eg the get order of magnitude effort to add KVM into Xen Orchestra for example.
They should call it KAPI.
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@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
Do you know any valid API that can be called remotely and doing also network and storage operations?
I can't figure why I can't find this.
Maybe checkout the libvirt api?
From the guide:
2.1 Object model
The scope of the libvirt API and the Python libvirt module is intended to extend to all functions necessary for deployment and management of virtual machines. This entails management of both the core hypervisor functions and host resources that are required by virtual machines, such as networking, storage and PCI/USB devices. Most of the classes and methods exposed by libvirt have a pluggable internal backend, allowing support for different underlying virtualization technologies and operating systems. Thus, the extent of the functionality available from a particular API or method is determined by the specific hypervisor driver in use and the capabilities of the underlying virtualization technology.2.3. Remote management
While many virtualization technologies provide a remote management capability, libvirt does not assume this and provides a dedicated driver allowing for remote management of any libvirt hypervisor driver. The driver has a variety of data transports providing considerable security for the data communication. The driver is designed such that there is 100% functional equivalence whether talking to the libvirt driver locally, or via the RPC service.In addition to the native RPC service included in libvirt, there are a number of alternatives for remote management that will not be discussed in this document. The libvirt-qpid project provides an agent for the QPid messaging service, exposing all libvirt managed objects and operations over the message bus. This keeps a fairly close, near 1-to-1, mapping to the C API in libvirt. The libvirt-CIM project provides a CIM agent, that maps the libvirt object model onto the DMTF virtualization schema.
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@scottalanmiller Exactly. That's very strange that a new fresh project like Kimchi is made on 1:1 basis. It baffles me.
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@romo I did a bit ago, but it was very incomplete: no network or storage management.
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DigitalOcean's apparently using their own built go-qemu and go-libvirt which they opensourced
https://blog.digitalocean.com/introducing-go-qemu-and-go-libvirt/
Maybe that could help as well, they mention they are not fully stable but they are using them in production.
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@olivier said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@scottalanmiller Exactly. That's very strange that a new fresh project like Kimchi is made on 1:1 basis. It baffles me.
It doesn't baffle me, but that's not KVM's fault. That's up to the Kimchi-project devs.
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@romo said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
Maybe that could help as well, they mention they are not fully stable but they are using them in production.
Um.... lol
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@romo said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
DigitalOcean's apparently using their own built go-qemu and go-libvirt which they opensourced
https://blog.digitalocean.com/introducing-go-qemu-and-go-libvirt/
Maybe that could help as well, they mention they are not fully stable but they are using them in production.
Thanks for the precious hint! I'll take a look
(right now, if I had to build something on API level, I would do it in Rust, but that's just my 2 cents) -
About LibVirt:
The libvirt project strongly recommends against talking to the RPC interface directly. They consider it to be a private implementation detail with the possibility of being entirely rearchitected in the future.
Great.
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still I do not find the opened source of RHEV
maybe this ovirt page refers to the same but you just need the api. if ovist is the source then you had to deal with the http wrapper around VDSM on top of libvirt on top of qemu/kvm.
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That's what I feared
edit: thanks for the links!
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kimchi has always been a single server solution. In the beginning it was ubrellaed (<-?WTF?) by ovirt as web gui for their nodes. eventually it has been replaced by cockpit.
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@matteo-nunziati said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
still I do not find the opened source of RHEV
Who said that RH had to open source everything?
@matteo-nunziati said in [What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?]> maybe this ovirt page refers to the same but you just need the api. if ovist is the source then you had to deal with the http wrapper around VDSM on top of libvirt on top of qemu/kvm.
How else would you access the API without http? Something has to listen.
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@jaredbusch said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
@matteo-nunziati said in What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?:
still I do not find the opened source of RHEV
Who said that RH had to open source everything?
Not they have to. Simply they have worked a lot to open source their virtualization infrastructure. Ovirt was born by the rewriting of the original orchestration tool written by the KVM company.
@matteo-nunziati said in [What is KVM Best Management Tools in 2017?]> maybe this ovirt page refers to the same but you just need the api. if ovist is the source then you had to deal with the http wrapper around VDSM on top of libvirt on top of qemu/kvm.
How else would you access the API without http? Something has to listen.
http is not the issue here. VDSM is. very complex beast. written in java.
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When I start to read "java", I got a gag reflex
