KVM Management Tools

[Dark Shade]

Hello all,

Our company is looking to move to the KVM platform as Xen is getting long in the tooth and is not supported anymore in EL6+. We haven't begun to move to KVM as of yet (The plan in by mid-year), but I am playing with KVM on my colocated server now to get myself used to it. While virt-manager is handy, I'm looking for something more robust to manage several dozen servers.

I've looked at http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools to find an easy-to-use, web-based management tool, and found several, but all have flaws; most notably, they each have their own OS-image, and I don't care much for that. I simply want something like Webmin to manage my virtual servers, something that runs in Apache or on the host OS, not some special image of a host OS just for management tools, or preferably not a separate VM either, just something that runs on the host OS that I access.

Are there any KVM users/converts out there that can suggest a quality management system? Or is there this gigantic hole to be filled for the 'already-have-KVM-setup-and-don't-want-to-reinstall-a-host-OS-just-for-management-tools' systems?

 

[danswartz]

If you want KVM-based setup, have you looked at proxmox? Pretty nice GUI. I use ESXi now, but not because of issues with proxmox...

 

[Dark Shade]

Yeah I took a look at Proxmox, but its major flaw (for my setup) is that I'd have to reinstall my entire virtualization environment for it to work. I'd rather stick to CentOS 6 as my host/baremetal OS and run a management tool inside of it, for security, in-house Linux management and compatibility concerns.

Ones that had promise, until I realized they were baremetal or separate VM installs:
Proxmox
oVirt
ConVirt
OpenNode
Karesansui

 

[danswartz]

Ah, okay. IMO, the fact there is no GUI that meets your needs might indicate a lack of interest in this (yourself aside, of course.) Is there a reason you are stuck on running a host-based hypervisor using EL? Not criticizing, it's just really restricting your choices...

 

[Dark Shade]

We need compatibility with our iSCSI SANs that will be running the disks that the VMs will be utilizing, which is a baremetal OS requirement, and I'm not sure if the KVM management hypervisors support any type of network-based storage, even if they do, we would need some specs on performance. Also, it's easier to maintain identical host-to-guest OS (we run CentOS for host and CentOS for guest)

Also, we know our host-based hypervisors are completely compatible with our hardware, the last thing we want to run into is an incompatibility on production hardware that crops up later that would have been avoided if we stuck with our current infrastructure.

 

[danswartz]

Hmmm, dunno about proxmox or any other, but ESXi is certainly iSCSI capable, but you'd have to migrate all of your VMs (then again, you might need to do that to go from xen => kvm?) I'm not sure I understand why the OS on the host has anything to do with the guests?

 

[InternationalHat]

Archipel, Ganeti?

 

[Dark Shade]

Yeah VMWare's licensing is ludicrous for our environment, it's a hard sell to pay for something we do for free now to the executives.

The host OS is what manages the iSCSI disks through multipath. If proxmox or any other baremetal hypervisor can't do multipath then it's certain they won't work with our environment.

What we're doing with our xen guests is simply recreating them in kvm with identical configurations in the guests, or if by the time we do this, there's an easy converter (from what I've researched, you simply need to create a bootloader on a new disk and dd the xen disk over, kvm start) but I may be oversimplifying it

 

[danswartz]

I'm used to the limits that work with free ESXi. If you need features and such that exceed that, I guess that's a bummer. If you don't mind saying, what ARE your environment specs? It's hard to comment much more without some idea...

 

[Dark Shade]

We're moving to a disaster recovery site and at the same time, beginning our transition to KVM at the DR. We're provisioning about seven servers with a minimum of 32 cores and 256GB of RAM on each server (one has 512GB and 40 cores). Two will be running postgres on baremetal, and the rest will be running at least fifteen virtual machines each for our staging environment.


InternationalHat: I'm checking out Ganeti but it says it's CLI-based, is that right? And I'm looking at Archipel but its a huge pain in the ass to install. I'll research it further

 

[danswartz]

Wow, so these are big servers then. Yeah, if you're going the totally free route right now, I can see how ESXi would not be pleasant to think about. Do you pay for any kind of maintenance contract for priority support if you run into bugs?

 

[CEpeep]

Xen has much better standalone management tools than KVM. It's also quite a bit more mature from a feature and stability standpoint. Redhat's reasons for dropping it are mostly political and have little to do with its age or feature set. (They own the company that made KVM, whereas Xen is owned by Citrix and used heavily by Oracle.) It works perfectly fine on RHEL 6/CentOS if you set it up yourself (you should only have to do this once per kernel version since you can just build an RPM). If you need solid GUI-based management tools, I'd recommend staying with Xen in the short term. Don't let community bickering force you and your customers into a solution that doesn't support your needs.

This isn't to say that KVM is bad, it's just that it's more difficult to manage right now due to lack of solid tools. If you use a canned distro like Proxmox where the GUI is baked in, KVM becomes a solid option. If you use an off-the-shelf distro where you select and install your own packages, Xen is still king.

 

[Dark Shade]

Wow, so these are big servers then. Yeah, if you're going the totally free route right now, I can see how ESXi would not be pleasant to think about. Do you pay for any kind of maintenance contract for priority support if you run into bugs?

We used to have Red Hat support, which ended up being a joke, so we do our own maintenance in-house using CentOS instead of RHEL. We always test our systems in staging before we send them out to production using identical hardware configuations.

Xen has much better standalone management tools than KVM. It's also quite a bit more mature from a feature and stability standpoint. Redhat's reasons for dropping it are mostly political and have little to do with its age or feature set. (They own the company that made KVM, whereas Xen is owned by Citrix and used heavily by Oracle.) It works perfectly fine on RHEL 6/CentOS if you set it up yourself (you should only have to do this once per kernel version since you can just build an RPM). If you need solid GUI-based management tools, I'd recommend staying with Xen in the short term. Don't let community bickering force you and your customers into a solution that doesn't support your needs.

This isn't to say that KVM is bad, it's just that it's more difficult to manage right now due to lack of solid tools. If you use a canned distro like Proxmox where the GUI is baked in, KVM becomes a solid option. If you use an off-the-shelf distro where you select and install your own packages, Xen is still king.

Yeah I understand what you mean. I think virt-manager will be 'sufficient' for us as we don't use any type of Xen management at the moment besides nagios monitoring and virsh. Whoever creates an easy-to-use web-based KVM management system that runs on top of a Linux host OS will most likely have my business.

 

[CEpeep]

Yeah I understand what you mean. I think virt-manager will be 'sufficient' for us as we don't use any type of Xen management at the moment besides nagios monitoring and virsh. Whoever creates an easy-to-use web-based KVM management system that runs on top of a Linux host OS will most likely have my business.

Ah, I figured you were used to Web UI tools like Citrix provides. If you're coming from virsh, you'll find KVM fits right in with how you already work, since you can use most of the exact same commands.

If you can get over the hurdle of installing it, Archipel is great for managing a large number of VM hosts of almost any type, including mixed environments. It uses XMPP, so you can even issue commands to your cluster over Google Talk/Jabber. Much more convenient than ssh-ing in, and faster than pulling up the web interface if you're using a mobile device. Ganeti has a GUI that can be installed separately from its custom distro, but I'm not sure how well it works on Redhat.

 

[Dark Shade]

Thanks for the input, I'll have to look into Archipel further

 

[/dev/null]

If you want something "centos" based, try Citrix Xenserver or Xen Cloud platform. Both are based on centos & have nice working GUI's. Lots of features for free on Free Xenserver (and you can upgrade later with a license key if you need an additional featureset). XCP to xenserver is kind of like fedora:RHEL.

 

[levk]

Since noone has mentioned it yet, RedHat wants you to buy their Enterprise Virtualization. Pictures look pretty, but I haven't used any of it myself.

 

[madrebel]

have you looked at cloud stack? it is a bit more than a simple management tool but is pretty powerful and works with KVM (and xen, vmware .. etc). you will need VMs to handle all the cloudstack VMs though.

*edit* pretty sure virt-manager handles KVM too.

also, xen isn't long in any teeth, they just released 4.1. have you tried using Xen cloud platform? This gives more of an esxi environment. citrix and oracle are both pushing xen it is a LOT more mature than KVM.