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Monday Mar 30, 2009

Sun xVM Hypervisor (Part I - Basic Installation)

The Sun xVM hypervisor is based upon the open-source Xen virtual machine monitor developed at the University of Cambridge and work done by the OpenSolaris Xen community. It's a core component of our forthcoming xVM Server product and is readily available today from the OpenSolaris online network package repository.

Sun started in the academic community and has always fostered a close relationship with researchers in academia. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin collaborated with Sun, other universities, and the open-source community to build and support a High Performance Computing (HPC) system (called Ranger) comprised of 3,936 servers and 15,744 processors — the most capable HPC resource for scientific research in the nation runs the xVM hypervisor.

In a recent entry, I posted a screen shot of my workstation running Windows XP (32-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit), both virtualized within unprivileged guest domains (aka DomUs). Let's examine how to install the hypervisor and bring up an OpenSolaris 2008.11 control domain (aka Dom0) in 4 easy steps!

At the completion of this procedure, your system will be running the xVM hypervisor and an OpenSolaris 2008.11 Dom0 for control and mangement of the virtualized environment. In future installments, we'll explore how to provision and deploy DomUs.

Contents

Assumptions

  • Reader has a basic understanding of virtualization on the x86 architecture.
  • Reader possesses basic UNIX system administration skills.
  • The target system has a freshly installed copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 and a NIC driver capable of supporting Virtual NICs (VNICs).
    • You can quickly test to see if your NIC driver supports VNICs using the undocumented vna utility:
        • /usr/lib/vna interface [ MAC_address ] 
        
$ pfexec /usr/lib/vna nge0 fe:00:11:22:33:44
vnic0
$ dladm show-link
LINK        CLASS    MTU    STATE    OVER
nge0        phys     1500   down     --
bge0        phys     1500   up       --
vnic0       vnic     1500   unknown  nge0
$ pfexec /usr/lib/vna vnic0
$ dladm show-link
LINK        CLASS    MTU    STATE    OVER
nge0        phys     1500   down     --
bge0        phys     1500   up       --
$

Create A New Boot Environment

Clone a new boot environment, name it xvm, and mount it to /mnt/xvm with the beadm utility. The new boot environment will consume approximately 2.6 gigabytes of storage.

$ pfexec beadm create -a -d 'Sun xVM Hypervisor' xvm
$ pfexec beadm mount xvm /mnt/xvm

Install The Packages

Install the xvm, xvm-gui, SUNWxvmhvm, SUNWvdisk, SUNWxdt, and SUNWvncviewer packages onto the new xvm boot environment using the pkg command.

$ pfexec pkg -R /mnt/xvm install xvm xvm-gui SUNWxvmhvm SUNWvdisk SUNWxdt SUNWvncviewer
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Indexing Packages                            554/554
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                  11/11     643/643     9.17/9.17

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                                905/905
Reading Existing Index                           9/9
Indexing Packages                              11/11
$ pfexec beadm umount xvm
$ beadm list
BE          Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
--          ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
opensolaris N      /          6.33M static 2009-03-28 08:30
xvm         R      -          2.56G static 2009-03-28 09:28
$

Modify The GRUB Configuration File

When beadm created the new boot environment, it also added a new default entry to the GRUB boot loader configuration file /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Sun xVM Hypervisor
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
splashimage /boot/solaris.xpm
foreground d25f00
background 115d93
bootfs rpool/ROOT/xvm
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=graphics
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

Edit the new entry as appropriate for your system configuration. At a minimum, you must modify the highlighted line above and add an additional line for the hypervisor. It should resemble the following:

title Sun xVM Hypervisor
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/xvm
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=text
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

Reboot the system.

$ pfexec shutdown -y -g0 -i6

Shutdown started.    Sun Mar 29 23:40:56 PDT 2009

Changing to init state 6 - please wait
Broadcast Message from root (pts/2) on discovery Sun Mar 29 23:40:56...
THE SYSTEM discovery IS BEING SHUT DOWN NOW ! ! !
Log off now or risk your files being damaged

$

Start The xVM Services

Enable the virtd and domains services. Display a list of all defined domains with the virsh command.

$ pfexec svcadm enable -r xvm/virtd
$ pfexec svcadm enable -r xvm/domains
$ pfexec virsh list
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  0 Domain-0             running

$

Other Resources

  • [1] BigAdmin System Administration Portal: Sun xVM Hypervisor Overview
  • [2] System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System (Chapter 37, Sun xVM Hypervisor System Requirements)
  • [3] Sun BluePrints Online: Understanding the Sun xVM Hypervisor Architecture
  • [4] OpenSolaris xVM Documentation
  • [5] What's New in OpenSolaris 2008.11
  • [6] Getting Started With OpenSolaris 2008.11

Posted at 12:32AM Mar 30, 2009 by Paul Telles in Solaris  | 

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