November 2009 Archives

The xvm-3.4-source tree has obviously reached 3.4.2, as there is no more "pre", "rc..." or other suffixes in the version number.

After a svcadm enable milestone/xvm (and a reboot if you don't already booted the Xen Hypervisor) all daemons are coming up, it seems to work.

Windows 2008 R2 in a HVM identifies the BIOS as "3.4.2-xvm" (click on the picture on the right to enlarge it).

Windows 2008R2 and Sun Xen xVM? Yes it works. In Testsigning-Mode with the free GPL Xen drivers. Flawlessly. Performant.

To the right you see the result (click for original size).

The Xen Block volume (zfs volume in Dom0) is shown as "XEN PV DISK SCSI Disk Device", the virtual network interface as "Xen Net Device Driver".

To install Win 2008 R2 on Sun xVM begin to create a zfs block volume to hold the Windows boot disk:

The free GPL Xen driver files (which are perfect for Sun xVM) which can be found on

http://www.meadowcourt.org/downloads/

have changed their naming scheme.

XP drivers are named gplpv_xp_version.msi

2003 32bit drivers are named gplpv_2003x32_version.msi; actual version number is  0.10.0.138.

They'are also gplpv_Vista2008 (for Vista, 2008 and 2008R2 (only 64bit)).

A side note: To be able to use 64bit driver code on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 you have to turn testsigning on. Type as Administrator on the command line:

bcdedit /set testsigning on

reboot, install the 64bit drivers and your DomU Windows system will accept them.

With Nevada 128 you'll get zpool/zfs version 22 with new features.

A noticeabe new feature is named "deduplication" which means that identical blocks are only kept once on disk reducing real storage use.

pascal@denver:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool   135G  63.7G  71.3G    47%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
xvm     135G  29.3G   106G    21%  8.52x  ONLINE  -

The pool "xvm" has some nearly identical block volumes (zfs zvol) for Xen/xVM use and the result is noticeable.

Don't forget to allocate enough RAM to your Dom0-kernel when using Sun xVM.

In case your OpenSolaris snv_128 kernel does simply hang (replies to icmp echo requests but does not do much more than that...) after destroying a snapshot, a block device or a file system there's a simple solution:

Add RAM to your box resp. increase Dom-0 memory usage. In my case I had 1 GB Dom0 memory which was not sufficient.

With 2GB the pool mounted properly again. ZFS with deduplication needs RAM. Sad that there's no warning message including an abortion of the pool import in that case.

The United States in Germany: Two typical products from the United States often bought here in Germany:

Qualatex Latex Balloons (Q24 in this picture, very nice, shining, robust, fun) and Ernest & Julio Gallo Wines from California.
My preferred wine from California however is the Fetzer Barrel select Cabernet Sauvignon, I have some 2002 and 2003 bottles left.

Behind there are typical products from Germany:

A W48 telephone from 1951 and a spacey lamp from the 70ies which is lighted by a stove (!) bulb.

Enjoy the picture and the scene :) Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Picture (c) 2009 Pascal Gienger, you may use it with name of author (my name) given as credit.

[Update:]
Sun xVM 3.4.2 is available via source. The version below is outdated, please look at
http://southbrain.com/south/2009/11/sun-xvm-342-dom0-min-mem.html



The result of the Mercurial source tree snapshot from opensolaris.org from Oct 06, 2009 built as non-debug packages - can be found here:

http://southbrain.com/software/xvm/3.4.2-rc1-xvm/

Be sure to remove the OpenSolaris packages with the same name before.  :)

Take this "AS-IS" without any warranty of any kind. I am not endorsed to Sun nor I take any responsibility for these packages. I used the OpenSolaris xvm-3.4 gate from Oct 06,2009. Xen version is 3.4.2-rc1-xvm.

It works well with snv_126.