[OmniOS-discuss] FiFo on OmniOS

[Heinz Nikolaus Gies]

Hi everyone,
some of you might already noticed by some tweets flying around but Dan and us have started working making OmniOS a possible hypervisor for Project-FiFo, or if you want to put it the other way around make Project-FiFo an possible management system for OmniOS.

We’ve had some great success so far and the feedback to the tweets was excitingly positive so it is time to get the community involved! That means the lot of you!

I want to give a rough idea of the plan and current state and the pitfalls. Given I know FiFo better then OmniOS this is from the point of view of a FiFo user, if a point is not clear please let me know and I’ll elaborate


- (nearly) full manageability of zones, create, start, stop, reboot, delete
- support for snapshots
- support for the zone console
- SMF support (starting, stopping, viewing services of a zone)
- ‘FiFo native feel’ (read: it should make little difference weather one deployed a ipkg zone or a joyent zone from the workflow)
- metrics and performance graphing

There are some things that are on the ‘nice to have’ list but might not land in a first version:

- resizing (changing memory/disk/etc)
- adding/removing nics

And some things that pretty sure will not happen any time soon (due to too much difference from the current way it’s done on SmartOS):

- KVM

There are some things that are a bit problematic and will probably work but not be exactly the same as they are on SmartOS

- NIC management, SmartOS seems to have some custom code to bring up nics and how to handle them so we’ve to be creative here.
- SSH key management in zones, Dan has build libzdoor (used for SSH key management in SmartOS) but so far it’s not tested
- packaing chunter (the service running in the GZ) and tachyon-meter (the service collecting performance metrics) run flawlessly in the GZ, they are packaged as tarballs and can simply be extracted however there are only pkgin packages for the other components. They will pretty guaranteed just compile on OmniOS given a new enough Erlang version (R17+) exists but there are currently no packages provided for that. (read: need to install from source of have a SmartOS zone around)
- it does not look we can get the exact same amount of lock in for zones (mostly for nic management) so a first release will probably required trusted tenants.


What is working so far:

- creating (with resource control but no networking configured, ipadm acts a bit freaky for me, probably a local issue)
- starting / shutting down / halting (commands are all issued but zones tend to hang in shutting_down for me, probably a local issue)
- metering (at least the hypervisor itself)
- SMF services should be working
- the Zone console should be working


What can you do?

If anyone wants to help, any kind of discussion is great, there are surely things we simply missed and having a more diverse group of people pondering the problem will make for a better result in the end. There will probably be some questions of how to best do things on OmniOS that I would greatly appreciate help with figuring out (see problems with ipadm and shutting_down zones). For brave soles who want to give the current status a spin be warned it is part of the development branch of fifo so things are rather experimental, but, time permits, I’ll try to walk anyone interested though setting it up.

---
Cheers,
Heinz Nikolaus Gies
heinz at licenser.net



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