[OpenIndiana-discuss] KVM and Xen support in OpenIndiana

[Albert Lee]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Nikola M <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lukas Laukamp wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> at the moment I am search for alternativ OSes than linux which have
>> KVM and Xen support. beside NetBSD and Illumos I also want to look at
>> OpenIndiana.
>>
>> For KVM I found a port at github which semm to work but is in a
>> testing/development state.
>>
>> For Xen I couldn't find that much so for me it's not clear if there is
>> Dom0 support in OpenIndiana or whether there are plans to implement
>> Dom0 support.
>>
>> When someone know more about that themes it would be great to get a
>> reply with more information.
> Hi to All new to Solaris and Illumos based, Openiniana :)
> I hope you will find many benefits in using Solaris / Illumos based
> systems but you
> _really get to know what you will get with it's benefits_ and where it
> shines comparing to other platforms.
> If you know it, I hope choosing it would be more easy, primary from
> Sysadmin perspective
> that wants to have a life more easy and safer in a sense of doing your
> work like you expect.
> List of Illumos distributions:
> http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions
>
> Those benefits include open source engineered Kernel with ZFS on the
> upstream, Light virtualization with Zones, network virtualization with
> crossbow, KVM integration, DTrace for live server debugging, better
> hardware scalability, binary compatibility of applications between
> releases, stable driver ABI, boot environments/snapshots,IP2
> mutipathing/Load balancing, role based access control, etc.
>
> Openindiana is Illumos based distribution, with IPS packaging as
> continuation of Opensolaris and is made of mostly same user space
> packages as Solaris11, plus OI additional IPS publishers/repositories.
> It is available both in text-only install (server) and with Desktop, as
> the truly Opensolaris continuation.
>
> http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/1.+Introduction
> https://hg.openindiana.org/
> http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Package+Repositories
>
> KVM for Illumos is made for SmartOS (Joyent company made it for a cloud)
> and is now available in Openindiana.
> Officially, KVM for Illumos supports Intel CPU's with EPT instruction set.
>
> http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/KVM
>
> Illumos KVM is used in production in Joyent for large scale
> virtualization for real-world customers and is available in Openindiana.
> Version for AMD CPUs and Intel without EPT is in development and need
> community backing.
>
> http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Hardware+Requirements#HardwareRequirements-KVMRequirements
> https://github.com/jclulow/illumos-kvm/
>
> Illumos distributions and Openindiana support running as domU .
> Xen (dom0) support was available in Opensolaris 2009.06 till Opensolaris
> snv_134 , but
> aether Oracle ditched it from source before renamed it to it's closed
> source product on Solaris11,
> and Illumos does not have it in the code tree, because it was removed
> from OS/Net before Oracle forked it to closed source and Illumos
> established itself.
>
That is incorrect. Xen dom0 support is still in illumos, and OI still
ships a (semi-) working Xen dom0 implementation.

-Albert