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Actualy, Salvatore does the heavy lifting, I only help here and there.
However, the ping is not the result of the changes we did. The network is roughly the same as last month and 2 months ago, while we constantly do optimizations, no big changes happen, at least, not intentionally as the network is mostly optimized for italian customers, it is more likely a change at your end.
The big improvement is the speed of deploying vms. Before in KVM zone, I had to wait 5 or even more minutes to deploy an instance. And the network is a bit better, I had in November speeds of 50 download and 25 upload with the same ping (testing server Otenet.gr, the biggest provider in Greece).
yeah, this is what i saw myself, no deployment over a minute.
This used to be the case witht he older zone too, but the myriad of small volumes did not help, and the storage got bogged down in constant optimizations, snapshotting, migrations, that went on for days, even. That storage model was clearly not suitable for this, as well as one huge zone, albeit more economical, as the spares were fewer in theory (but not in practice because the failures we had involved multiple nodes).
All in all, it is coming together as a mature product, developed in house, there are plans to continue to implement functions int he simplified interface, offer VMs directly in the cloud and replace solus with local storage (mostly SSD) offers with hourly billing and all.
It may take 1-2 years, though.
@Maounique
Would you mind sharing your reasons for being such a XEN fan?
Well noted, I'm by no means anti-Xen, I've just come to find KVM the slightly better one of the two good ones. So, this questions isn't a flame trap but honest interest in your reasons for favouring XEN, based on practical experience at a provider I'd assume.
@Maounique
+1. And I assume this is Xen HVM and not PV, if you're comparing to KVM?
@aglodek
Not even that. My question was quite open-ended. I mean, we can find pro and contra either one all over the internet but I don't care much about the blabla of fanboys.
Maounique, on the other hand, is practically working with both, KVM and XEN (I assume in all its incarnations) for some time and would have come to his view based on experience and actual usage.
And btw I assume the he is not at all against KVM the same as I'm not at all against XEN. We just happen to consider one to be somewhat better suited to our respective scenarios and he's more on the providers side while my view is more formed by a clients perspective.
I'm also perfectly willing to concede that XEN has a major advantage in running on more platforms while KVM is limited to linux.
So, let's hear what an experienced provider guy has to say ...
@bsdguy said:
Agreed, we're on the same page here. Not being a Prometeus client (yet), just wanted to be sure what @Maounique meant by "Xen".
@aglodek It's Both on Iwstack I believe, I think some of the older servers are PV only.
I asked that question earlier in the thread and @Maounique responded.
Edit: http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/921264/#Comment_921264
edit: misread; I think KVM runs on FreeBSD though (or rather, has been ported).
edit2: Xen doesn't seem to run on any more platforms than KVM though -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen#Hosts
Theory. Actual situations is that it's next to useless. Documentation is between old (virtually everything incl. "official" FreeBSD documentation) or highly experimental.
Example: There is no more kvm kernel module.
So it basically comes down to running qemu (snail w/o kmod).
And that's even understandable because FreeBSD is working hard on their own thing called "Bhyve" which is to be something like a FreeBSD's KVM version. And no, that's no case of "Why do they waste time rolling their own thing?". It's actually a case of "Lots of linux stuff sh-tting on standards and lots of linux stuff made full of linuxisms and such being next to useless on other unices".
So, Bhyve is actually a good thing and clearly demonstrating that FreeBSD sees the importance of virtualization and wants it be done properly.
There is nice progress, there are tests and beta versions and I expect it to be available in FreeBSD 11, probably also backported to 10.2.
P.S. I for one care about that because I consider most linux installations unsecure. FreeBSD with Bhyve would considerably enhance the situation. That said, it won't change much, I guess, because most hosters are basically linux copy shops and, sad to say, because FreeBSD doesn't care that much about business usage while linux pretty much whores and bends over and is largely driven by large corps nowadays, no matter what the happy penguin fans blabber about democracy and ruling from the bottom.
On the other hand Bhyve might open a business opportunity for some really know-how driven companies who might create tools or offer safe hosting etc.
There is no such thing and there wont be anytime soon.
I use Xen in production since some 10 years or perhaps more. I run it on multiple flavours of linux from debian to suse and centos. It never let me down.
KVM I run in Proxmox. I used XCP but since I need to give VMs and access to other people, proxmox is easier for that.
HVM vs PV performance is a thing of the past, actual HVM recent implementations are faster. The latest hybrid mode has a lot of future in it.
KVM is unstable, for my taste. It has also been proven with this latest powerfailure. Xen (all of them), came back unscathed, including the IWStack zone. KVM has issues still. And, besides iwstack, we have way more Xen than KVM nodes. The PV implementation we use is old and will have to be upgraded, though, this is why we plan to give the next generation of Xen offer under IWStack umbrella with XenServer.
Xen is in use by IT Pros world over, but that might be related to a certain age as people grew with it as myself, so let's not count this as an argument, but it is one for me and for prometeus which tries to attract more pro people which need advanced features and freedom, rather than hobists with a seedbox where OVZ is more than enough. Not that we have anything against those as long as they keep it legal, but pro people need less tickets, have larger budgets and are looking for a stable, not a cheap partner, so it is as a business decision.
For me, personally, Xen is the old and dependable desktop you can change and upgrade as you wish, KVM is a mysterious (albeit atom/x86) tablet which will break if you open it, has weird quirks, but is more versatile in some areas and it a fashionable thing for most other people in the street. Now, that a Xen tablet will come to market, it will be like those i7 tablets running windows with keyboard and touchscreen but which can be converted into a laptop anytime (really,if I could afford I would have bought one of these: http://leader112.com/p2208/product) and offers the best of both worlds, big versatility on a known and proven platform, a real workhorse for people which need the functionality and stability.
Any BSD solution, to keep the analogy, would be the iOS or MacOS of these days, better in some aspects, worse in others, but less compatible and a different animal. They could squeeze an extra 1% out of the hardware and be 1% more stable and 10% less hackable, but we are catering for the masses, not for a select few.
Besides, there will be a time when the Linux large scale adoption and hackability by less pro people will make it the instrument of choice in fighting the new dark ages in the world of politics, cults, business and wars, by spreading the truth to the people in spite of the efforts of the "elites" to hide it. BSD is elitist thinking, same is MacOS and iOS, from my point of view.
So, here you have it, I am not afraid to say what i think, no matter how controversial and nobody should be, but we live in twilight times, the sunset of freedom and advent of terror.
Thanks, @Maounique,
for the look into the professional side of a provider.
As for the political part of it, oh well, there isn't much to discuss with someone holding the view that BSD is "elitist" (unless one defines "elite" as the absence of gross idiocy).
One point, though: The super duper democratic blabla linux "revolution" has brought lots of good things - and lots of bad things. Probably the worst of the bad things is that linux today is largely controlled by corporations and - digest that! - a major security implementation comes from nsa. Unfortunately the masses are so dumbed down and linux fanatic that they believe every democracy fairy tale because they want to believe in the goodness of linux.
Whatever, as for KVM/XEN I'm more than ready to jump from KVM to XEN once XEN is widely available and has founds its model (HVM/PV/hybrid). For now I'll stick with KVM simply because I feel it to be the opposite of an OpenVZ pig farm (see! Elitist again **g)
Thanks to your perspective I will have a closer look at XEN again. Thanks.
@Maounique can the emulated NIC in the XenHVM environment be changed?
I was going to try to image one of the KVM guests across to see if it behaved itself after switching KVM > Xen but it seems the livecd I would normally use can't see the NIC which makes that a tad tricky.
It should see the NIC, the emulation is more conservative than in KVM which most likely uses virtio.
If you have to convert it, download the disk image to your pc, convert it to xen HVM and upload it.
The NIC emulation is depending on the template used, you can test other templates, close to your distro, or the plain "other which should work with everything being very conservative, but will have lower performance.
NOTE; we were not able to determine what problem affects pm63. If your VM is among the few which keep rebooting at random on pm63, please tell us to move you elsewhere. We will be doing a clean reinstall of pm63 when there will be less pressing issues, but, in the meantime, we will move out the affected VMs which are not many at all, maybe a handful so far we know about.
@Maounique there's still something to fix. I sent you a pm.
But at least for me, when this (i hope) last issue is set, everything is fine again.
We are currently moving all people which signal problems with reboots on pm63, have been some 5 so far. Because the issue is unknown, reinstalling is not sure to solve it, had a similar problem on iwstack but the fix we applied there did not work here.
down ;(
What is down? My services with them are working fine.
all my servers on iwstack Milano DC2, also the prometeus client area
i moved to XEN because maonique said it was more stable than KVM, now all my KVM is up and XEN is down....It seems DC2 is totally down and their client area database is linked to that. I am unable to stop the instance in cloudstack as well. DC1 is not affected
FYI: My Prometeus VPS is working.
Edit: I'm on KVM
Solus control panel online and both my KVM and OVZ online (pm19 & pm38). It seems "only" XEN and IWstack are affected then.
after 1 hour not a single feedback on twitter/forum, i don't even know if they are on the problem.
i like their services but it's becoming really hard to handle this situations for me
@Maounique
My stuff on Iwstack/KVM seems to be up.
yes definitely only the Xen zone (and the client area database...)
Mine (on DC2) is down as well. @Maounique What's up?
Hi @Maounique i'm also affected, as other people, only on XEN DC2. Since personal area is offline i do not have any clue on what is going on
thank you
S.
DC2 Milano is affected, there seems to be some broken links between both DC's in Milano, affecting DC2. It's possible that it's a fibre cut. Uncle and the engineers are on it of course.
thanks! fibre cut doesn't sound very good...