JDPFu.com 2025

Eucalyptus Cloud – Epic Fail

• I’d planned to install the Eucalyptus Cloud, but it wouldn’t get thru the installation. I tried multiple times and even changed the boot loader and file system (I’ve seen problems with that previously on other installs). In the end, I gave up and installed a minimal 9.10 x64 server with just ssh to start.

KVM Text, then GUI

• Next, I was after KVM, a virtualization method. I created a new network bridge for the VM to leverage. No NAT inside the host/VMs or slow user mode networking used. I used virsh, since I didn’t want to install a GUI. I was able to get a KVM VM running, but never able to connect to it consistently via VNC. After a few host + VM reboots, the networking did come up on an internal IP so I could SSH into the VM. I installed Apache2 and a few other server-type packages. The VM felt sluggish compared to both Xen and VirtualBox experiences, that was to be expected since I hadn’t attempted to optimize anything.

Here’s the VM creation script that I used. Sorry about the cross-out font, this is part of the publishing system. Copy and paste will show it perfectly. Some settings were ’x’ed out.

vmbuilder kvm ubuntu -suite=karmic —flavour=virtual —arch=amd64 \

—mirror=http://192.168.×.x:9999/ubuntu -o —libvirt=qemu:///system —tmpfs= \

—ip=192.168.×.xx —part=vmbuilder.partition —templates=mytemplates —cpus=2 \

—user=xxxx —name=xxxx —pass=yyyyyyyyyyyyy —addpkg=vim-nox —addpkg=unattended-upgrades \

—addpkg=acpid —firstboot=boot.sh —mem=768 —hostname=vm1 —bridge=br0

That cmd creates a qcow2 file. These are certainly less than optimal since they are write on change and compressed. My storage isn’t fast enough to make that method fast enough currently. Maybe in the future.

• Finally, after multi-minute waits for a simple `ls` command to complete, I decided to try the other KVM setup method, the virt-manager GUI. GUI means I needed to load X/Windows. Boo. I don’t want a GUI on a server wasting resources. My Xen servers don’t have a GUI and run really, really nicely, though they are paravirtual VMs.
  I worked through the new VM creation wizard and it created an .img file under /var/lib/libvirt/. Further, the VM seems to run faster, but it appears to be a full VM image file, like I use on Xen, not sparse or compressed+expanding-as-needed. It still slows down occasionally, but not so much that a server wouldn’t work well enough.

VNC Client – No Geometry Control or Remote Access

• After loading and starting the VM under virt-manager, I open ed it. It has a limited VNC client built in. I’d like to change the default VNC geometry – 800×600 kinda sucks. I could use a hint, please. Further, remote connections aren’t possible without setting up an ssh tunnel first because the default VNC listener is on 127.0.1.1 – localhost to the KVM host. I guess being paranoid about security is good, but nobody places a new server directly on the internet immediately after an install. I don’t. See, the VNC server runs on the host, not the client VM. I’m certain it is a small change. I suppose changing the VNC server to listen for connections on the internal network is a small change in the vm.xml file.

Alfresco Installation

I’ve been running Alfresco 2.9b under Xen about 18 months for a corporate client.

• Just for fun, I installed the Ubuntu packaged version of Alfresco 3.2. It dealt with the dependencies perfectly, but it didn’t set the necessary JAVA_HOME environment in /etc/environment or ~root/.bashrc or ~userid/.bashrc. Starting the tomcat server didn’t fail and the /opt/alfresco location isn’t used either. No connection to http://localhost:8080/alfresco or http://localhost:8080/share worked like normal Alfresco installs support.
• A day later, JAVA_HOME set (I’m a little slow), VM rebooted and Alfresco appears to work. The administrative console and all other parts are working until I tried to add users to the internal DB using the web GUI. Then it failed. Alfresco was never fast under Xen, but it is even slower under this KVM instance on much quicker hardware. I’d hoped the Alfresco GUI would include a way to connect to LDAP authentication. It doesn’t. You’ll have to make that connection in java property files using an editor, just like with the older installation.
• At some point, I’ll have to upgrade the company version to 3.2.x or 3.3. Until KVM performance improves, I simply don’t know what to do.

Manual Start of VMs

The default location that the GUI places the KVM image file is non-optimal, there is probably a template file that will control that placement. I want to start the VMs manually with virsh or a simple kvm VM start after I relocate the .IMG file(s) to the external array. I only gave the server 20GB of storage on /, so leaving the VM files there isn’t an option. Initial attempts to start VMs manually with qemu-x86_64 and kvm have not worked. They appear to start, but never actually boot. I’m certain I’ll figure that out.

VNC Resolution

I really want to fix the VNC resolution. According to KVM/Qemu man pages, passing -vnc -g 1280×1024×15 with the startup should change the geometry. It doesn’t work. An error is returned for the -g option. I ended up installing a VNC server inside the VM, setting the geometry to my liking and bypassing the Dom0/Host VNC server completely. You know, it would be really great if libvirt or virt-manager had a global setting per user that controlled the default VNC geometry.

Summary

So, KVM is working … just not too quickly. I need to research methods to improve KVM performance before there’s any hope of migrating from Xen to KVM. Heck, even the ESXi installation runs blazingly fast in comparison and that system is performing full hardware virtualization like KVM will. Neither are anywhere near Xen performance with paravirtualization, but Xen is going away from both Red Hat and Ubuntu support. Xen has problems when you deploy paravirtualized VMs.

Anyway, watch the comments for how I overcome each of the issues.