[Gllug] Constrained virtual machines

[paul at ma1.se]

Jim Bailey wrote:
> On Dec 01, 10:57, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>> Richard Huxton wrote:
>>> James Roberts wrote:
>>>> Karanbir Singh wrote:
>>>>> does vmware-server ( also, like vmware-player, free to download and 
>>>>> use ) not meet your requirement ?
>>>> I think he has got that already. He wants fine-grained cpu and other 
>>>> resource control for testing. vmware-server only offers very crude cpu 
>>>> control (1 processor, 2 processors...) although the memory allocated 
>>>> can be fine-grained.
>>> Yeah - what I'd like to be able to do is have a virtual-machine limited 
>>> to e.g. the speed of a 1GHz P4 with 512MB RAM and something that looks 
>>> like a single IDE disk. And then change all those parameters on the next 
>>> test run. And it needs to be *all* of them, otherwise the tests will be 
>>> unbalanced.
>>>
>> you are not going to get such exact throttling controls anywhere ( that 
>> i am aware of ), but your closest match is going to be Xen.
> 
> I would say that OpenVZ and its big commercial cousin Virtuozzo can give
> you almost all the control you need. The sticking point I guess being
> disk IO.
> 
> A proc file will give you output like this so you can watch it die.
> 
> You can also manage CPU throttling network rate limiting and other bits
> and bobs from the hardware node.  Also vzstat give a very nice running
> commentary on the state of your box.

Yes I thought that and suggested OpenVZ at the outset of the thread, 
though vzstat is not part of OpenVZ (only available as commercial 
Virtuozzo).

vzstat is a utility included with Virtuozzo bit it will work on OpenVZ 
though a bit naughty I suspect without a valid Virtuozzo Licence.

Anyway there are other ways of reading the output of 
/proc/user_beancounters using shell scripts for instance.

As for disco I/O its all quota based with OpenVZ/Virtuozzo simfs/vzfs 
filesystem, the VM isn't mounted on file or disc image so I would have 
said that coupled with the fact you are only running one 
(OpenVZ/Virtuozzo) kernel it was as close to "bare metal" as possible in 
terms of performance.

The developers of OpenVZ are very helpful on the forums and mailing 
lists - www.openvz.org

regards


Paul Lee
www.ma1.se
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