mlatimer

The virtualization team's automated testing has a long history. It was born in the old Novell Integration Test framework. The virtualization lab ran an instance of this framework for many years. Over time, those who knew the framework left the company, taking their knowledge and leaving little documentation behind. As our testing needs increased, we found the old framework insufficient, but saw little value in improving it given the available open source CI frameworks.

The libvirt qemu hypervisor driver has long supported protecting disk devices from concurrent use via libvirt's lock manager interface. Xen used to support the same functionality in the old xend toolstack, but dropped support in the new libxl toolstack. The Xen community decided, rightly so, that this functionality is best provided by a higher-level management tool, e.g. libvirt.

Needing to learn git, I thought it would be a good time to clean up the code and create a git project for it.

In previous Hackweeks, we've gone to warp speed in our virtualization CI testing through:

A normal Xen server today has many single points of failure. Those can be reduced by disaggregating Dom0 into multiple domains (xenstore, driver domains, admin domain). Following this path to it's logical end will lead to a setup where the running domUs won't be depending on Dom0 any more, so Dom0 itself can be made restartable.

openvswitch is used by cloud infrastructure (e.g. OpenStack) and software defined networking stacks, often in conjunction with KVM and Xen compute resources. When creating workloads on KVM compute resources, orchestration services can specify the openvswitch interfaceid and port-profile of the workload's virtual interface(s). E.g. orchestration can create workload configuration containing

Most large workloads such as SAP HANA require special, highly optimized configuration to run in a virtual machine. Virtual resources such as memory and CPU must be carefully configured to ensure optimum performance of the virtual machine workload. Default VM configuration created by tools such as virt-install are not optimized and often result in poor performance of large workloads due to memory access latencies and incorrect/incomplete information available to the VM's task scheduler.

SUSE Manager can do some virtual machines management, but needs a lot to be complete. This project is about investigating more on that topic.

The next release of Ceph (Octopus) will be delivered via containers.

take my existing buildit.sh script (https://github.com/dmbyte/SES-scripts/blob/master/clusterbuilder/) and enhance it to be more of the installer experience needed.