Re: NetBSD and xe or libvirt?

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2014, Dustin Marquess wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Aaron J. Grier 
> <agrier%poofygoof.com@localhost> wrote:
> > I currently run NetBSD-6 / xen 4.2.3 (from pkgsrc) Dom0 on multiple
> > systems in my "private cloud."
> >
> > I have been migrating DomUs between Dom0s by moving partition contents
> > and configuration files between systems, and manually modifying the
> > config files to account for partition and host (CPU pool) changes.  I'm
> > looking for better (more automated) ways to handle this before I start
> > rolling my own migration scripts.

By migrating, I assume you don't mean "live migrating".

> > Is XE supported with a NetBSD Dom0?  I see sysutils/xe-guest-utilities
> > in pkgsrc, but that's for DomUs.
>
> I've been thinking for a while now that having XAPI running on
> NetBSD/Xen would be amazing, but sadly never had the time to work on
> it.  It would probably require a lot of work to get it to function
> though.

Yes, as Dustin says, there are two major dom0 toolstacks for Xen. XAPI is 
used by XenServer (and is now completely opensource meaning Xen Cloud 
Platform is no more) and is controlled by the xe command. This makes 
certain assumptions about the capabilities of the dom0 w.r.t. storage, 
etc. that NetBSD cannot yet deliver on. Would be great to see how far a 
xapi port would get.

The other stack is the familiar xend/xm/xl system in sysutils/xentools*

> > similarly, is libvirt avaialable under NetBSD Dom0?  even if it's only
> > partially-featured, my understanding is that it could allow for
> > aggregate monitoring across multiple Dom0s.
> >
> > Are there any commercial providers using NetBSD for production Dom0?  Is
> > NetBSD just a portability proof point?

I used it for a long time with NetBSD iscsi-target and iscsi-initiator 
providing the shared storage, but eventually I just gave in and switched 
to XenServer when it became opensource due to things like multipathing and 
snapshotting.

--
Stephen