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Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

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Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#71
post #53
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I load config files as JS (not JSON). And only use JSON for data serialization. In plain JS you can have comments and dont have to put quotes around properties. Not saying everyone should have a full JS parser for their config files, but its really nice.

So you're running eval on your config data? Not feasible for external data.

In module context. Then

    var config = require("settings.js");
My reasoning is that if you have access to change config or source code, all bets are off.

Or you could parse the config in a separate vm and import the result as JSON.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#72
post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

That's awesome, thanks for the share.

For my homelab I use proxmox on a couple of machines and it works great for managing containers (in terms of LXC containers that would be more of a traditional VM) and it works great. Most people/companies don't need the complexities that come with Kubernetes or other tools like that.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#73

I couldn't understand this: "Domain is an instance of an operating system (or subsystem in case of container virtualization like OpenVZ and lxc) running on a virtualized machine provided by the hypervisor" So the domain itself is a virtual machine? What makes it different from other guest virtual machinse?

I've never used libvirt in combination with OpenVZ or LXC, but when I read that I interpret it as "a domain is a VM or a container" with some kind of VM running on the system to facilitate containers.

The article is seven years old, so I can imagine that this was how the project once ran containers, but it doesn't anymore. Reading the documentation[1] I don't the VM is relevant anymore for containers, at least. The docs say libvirt manages LXC container directly through the kernel API, so there's no VM to speak of there. The OpenVZ docs[2] also mention that the containers run on the host, not in a VM.

[1]: https://libvirt.org/drvlxc.html

[2]: https://libvirt.org/drvopenvz.html

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#74
post #61
post #3

While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…

i'm looking at jinja-templated YAMLs with awe: how can anyone think it's a good idea? and yet, this insanity is everywhere nowadays. XML is verbose, hard to write manually and has many ways of representing the same thing, but it's actually designed compared to YAML which seems to be a hodgepodge of features, half of which need to be disabled in the safe variant.

Embedded Ruby (erb) templated yaml is nice. Not perfect, but nice.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#75
post #72
post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

That's awesome, thanks for the share. For my homelab I use proxmox on a couple of machines and it works great for managing containers (in terms of LXC containers that would be more of a traditional VM) and it works great. Most people/companies don't need the complexities that come with Kubernetes or other tools like that.

cockpit has many "applications" including cockpit-podman to manage containers :

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman

This is the Cockpit user interface for podman containers.

It is being actively developed and has not yet reached feature parity with cockpit-docker. For now you can do basic image and container tasks for both system and user containers.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#76
post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

I gave it a shot, and it was able to see my running libvirt VM's although it could not create one due to an obscure error of not supporting the "custom" CPU type. The running VM's are running in full virtualization so it is probably just a minor bug in Cockpit, seeing that it is after all just a libvirtd frontend in this regard. Aside from that, Cockpit looks fairly stable and it has potential, but keep in mind it is very simple.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#77
post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

Red Hat really has gone all in on cockpit as well. It is very polished and pretty full featured, and continues to improve. Also very easy to setup on RHEL installations. When you login the MOTD actually has instructions on how to enable cockpit, that's how hard they're pushing it.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#78
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, please name and shame the [de]serializer that was silently converting a string to a boolean.

Not sure about JSON, but YAML has the Norway problem: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why/implicit-typing-removed/

JSON does not, because JSON is explicitly typed:

   - "... - string
   - 14, 14.5 - number (problematic)
   - false, true - bool
   - {... - object
   - [... - array
   - null
No cute abbreviations.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#79

I couldn't understand this: "Domain is an instance of an operating system (or subsystem in case of container virtualization like OpenVZ and lxc) running on a virtualized machine provided by the hypervisor" So the domain itself is a virtual machine? What makes it different from other guest virtual machinse?

It's unfortunate that when libvirt was originally started (2005) it was a wrapper around Xen, and in Xen a VM is called a domain.

Re: Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)

#80
post #31

We're currently migrating from VMware to libvirt, we discovered the cockpit project and cockpit-machines to manage VMs: https://cockpit-project.org/ cockpit-machines is available in a recent version in debian backports, installing it is trivial, no configuration, https://hostname:9090/ and just works. RedHat announced that cockpit will be the long term successor of virt-manager: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/managin…

One thing to note is that Cockpit is very tied to systemd. Doesn't work with alt inits.
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