On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 5:54 PM, Matthew Monaco <dgbaley27@verizon.net> wrote:

On 11/22/2010 11:41 AM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:

...

fellow patrons,

i am moving my company's in house platforms off of a mix of deprecated soft virtualization solutions like openvz and bare metal installs -- i have decided on using libvirt + kvm (in conjunction with cgroups for qemu and possibly other uses).

i'm trying to use Arch for the host/hypervisor setups, for a couple reasons:

) very easy to roll custom initramfs builds ) shooting for a<  128MB 100% in-RAM diskless image (RHEV-H or ESXi) ) host is changed infrequently, and all-at-once (no need for ongoing/stable repo support) ) i'm very familiar with Arch's initramfs setup, and with Arch in general

the other possibility i'm considering is Gentoo, but it's been quite some time since i've used it :-/.  neither arch nor gentoo will be used for guests (likely debian/ubuntu here).

does anyone have any experience/insight here?  the comparable technology for RHEV-H for redhat, or ESXi for vmware.  i am looking into the `archboot` setup for inspiration on a custom initramfs build system.

primarily i'm just look for any pointers/information anyone may find useful, not only on the image itself but also management and configuration techniques.

thanks,

C Anthony

How important is the stability of your system? Will you be able to build custom versions of packages when security updates are released so that you don't have to start upgrading everything?

well since these are the host images, i pretty much want them to be as rock solid as possible. there is not much need for packages/updating; the host systems will be network booted (or booted from a small flash... maaaaaybe CDROM as last resort), and are a completely self contained image -- kernel + initramfs. everything inside the image will be hand picked and stripped down -- no docs/etc. only the necessary kernel modules, only the bare minimum services needs to run VMs, diagnostics, and metrics. kernel will be hand tuned. the idea is that with a couple host machines in place, and a distributed block layer (undecided... LVM + iSCSI or something else...), VMs can be migrated off a host, and the host is simply rebooted to run a new, updated image. VMs can then be moved back without downtime. i'm not too concerned with host security (guests are a diff story...); the host images are totally inaccessible except for SSH, and via a built in host key. we might allow TCP + TLS connections, but unlikely. so yes, we will be doing many custom packages and builds; i'm trying to see if anyone has done custom initramfs work like this, beyond the archboot tool (which is great :-). C Anthony