[et-mgmt-tools] Re: Hello! I have been testing the latest version of virt-p2v

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Lester M. wrote:
> Quick question, are fedora users able to do paravirt migrations with fedora
> 8 currently? I noticed that for fedora 8 in particular there is no xenU
> kernel package or update, so when a system is migrated it is as a full-virt.

For paravirt-to-paravirt you can do an ordinary migration, like this:

   virsh migrate [--live] guest xen://otherhost/

But I'm guessing you mean P2V, and converting the physical machine into 
a paravirt guest (rather than as at the moment into a fullvirt guest), 
and the answer to this is _yes_, but not as far as I know in Fedora.

For RHEL you can install the PV drivers after doing the P2V.  The 
eventual plan for virt-p2v is to be able to do this automatically during 
the P2V operation.  Hence I added the RHEL PV binaries to virt-p2v in 
preparation for this:

http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virt-p2v--devel?cs=bc808b3656fb

Fedora policy prevents these drivers from being included in Fedora, 
because they are not part of the Linus tree.  You'd have to compile them 
yourself and maintain them (or help get them upstream ...)

BTW, installing these drivers doesn't make the guest completely 
paravirtual.  The guest will still look like a fullvirt guest, 
particularly w.r.t. how it handles the CPU & memory.  However they do 
improve the important things -- disk and network -- which means you get 
almost all of the performance benefit of paravirtualization.

> Oh, another thing, a cool feature would be to have a select choice of which
> type of virtualization to use (para or full.). Its a nice feature to have,
> but with the current "state of xen" I guess the biggest hurdle which may add
> "bloat" to the iso image would be to include xenU kernels. :-(

See above - yes this in the eventual plan for virt-p2v.

> I remember reading *somewhere* about fedora being behind with xen based
> kernels and backporting changes, would that impact that idea somewhat?

Yes.  The latest Linux kernel supported by XenSource is something 
ancient, and Red Hat devotes some developer resources to forward-porting 
Xen to newer Linux kernels, but even so we are still a bit behind.

> I have not tried a rhel 5 system yet (I will today) I am guessing by default
> they will be a full virt migration right?

See above.

Rich.

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