xVM experience so far

I recently configured xVM on Solaris - HVM (hardware-assisted virtual machine) and PV (Paravirtualized) guest (domU) domains. I could easily install Solaris 10 Update 5 as HVM domU, boot, configure network interface and assign IP. The plan is to have multiple domU as testbed having Solaris 10 and Solaris Nevada. This would cut down on machines and sanity checks can be done quickly as I don't have to install/boot OS every time. I can easily run functional tests if not performance benchmarks. The performance of Solaris 10 as HVM domain is not as good as Solaris Nevada (PV domU) and especially when there are more than one VCPUs but I guess it's being worked. I think the performance would drastically improve when we have PV (Paravirtualized) drivers for Solaris 10. I'll soon experiment installing xVM on my laptop and configure Windows XP as HVM domain.

Here's a small demo describing my experience so far with xVM :-

For installing the Solaris PV domuU, I used this sample script.

bash-3.2# cat snv.1.py<>name = 'solaris-pv'
memory = '1024'
vcpus = 4
# for installation
disk = [ 'file:/var/tmp/solarisdvd.iso,6:cdrom,r', 'phy:/dev/zvol/dsk/snv-pool/vol,0,w' ]
on_poweroff = 'restart'
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'preserve'

In 'disk', you will see 'file and 'phys' and they specify what kind of media it is. Once you have specified the location in 'disk', you also specify the type of access like read (r) or write (w).

Once you run '#xm create script.py', you will see OS installation screen and once the installation is completed, I used a similar script but removed solarisdvd paragraph from 'disk' (mentioned in the .py file).

name = 'solaris-pv'
memory = '1024'
vcpus = 4
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/zvol/dsk/snv-pool/vol,0,w' ]
on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'preserve'
vif = [ 'mac=0:14:4f:2:12:35, ip=10.5.63.98, bridge=nge1' ]

With the 'vif' property you can specify what network interface you want. You can also set 'config/default-nic' property in xvm/xend service if you want to override the NIC. Finally, once you have booted guest domain, you will see the interface as rtls0. You can run 'dlmadn show-dev' to see if network interface is really configured or not and run ifconfig(1m) to plumb the interface.

You can see the resources of each as follows.

bash-3.2# xm list
Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 4973 4 r----- 4019.6
S10U5HVM 8 2056 1 r----- 40.8
solaris-pv 10 1024 1 r----- 5.0



I also found following links to be very helpful as I learnt how to configure domU.
Write-up from Chris Beal
Write-up from mbrowarski