The Good,The Bad,And The Ugly: Working with OVM By Paul Brennan, Zachary Clark, and Joseph Vandermaas

OVM overview review Oracle Product (Oracle Virtual Machine) Based on Xen Supposedly adds improvements to the Xen Hypervisor Redesigned interface with industry centric design Focuses on central management of large clusters Ease of use in mind (+ enterprise support) Integrated with other Oracle Products WebLogic Oracle 11g Java

Our general opinion In reality the product is kind of sloppy Java based manager Leads to obfuscated errors Oracle likes to obscure certain elements No official support for command line usage Limitations due to intended data center use Strict deployment requirements Bug ridden and awkward scripts ex: unsanitized inputs

Our Current Testing Environment Two hosts running OVM 3.1.1 Oracle's modified Xen Hypervisor Oracle Enterprise Linux Dom0 One manager Runs Oracle Enterprise Linux Weblogic Server (web access) 11g XE database (recommended SE or EE) Central Storage NAS or SAN highly recommended

Physical layout

Full Featured Manager Their Manager seems to be the greatest asset, and the greatest problem Centralizes usage to single web portal Manage servers, pools, VMs, networking, and storage access Queues tasks and introduces locks to prevent conflicting tasks Sometimes buggy, and not very helpful when buggy Limits advanced usage

Detailed investigation OVM uses the general Xen configurations in order to start up virtual machines Xl commands are present on dom0 All Oracle improvements on the OVM server are python scripts

OVM Storage Easy to connect to NFS server Positive Negative Easy to connect to NFS server Directory tree is structured relatively well Can not specify share on NFS server to connect to Local storage is a pain Thin provisioning does not work with NFS Lack of snapshots

Vulnerabilities in OVM stack Web logic CVE# Remotely exploitable CVSS risk score CVSS access complexity yes 4.3 Medium CVE-2013-1504 CVE-2013-2390 Oracle db 11g has had major security vulnerabilities in the past Java has had a long history of security issues

Claims Oracle's World Live Migration and HA Thin Disk provisioning If the manager goes down your environment stays up Fast Cloning Real World This works! Seems to require OCFS on SAN or local disk Maybe? No full tests, but doesn't look promising Not Really. Took a while to copy the disk. Might be better on OCFS

Lab Log week description 1 Installed OVM on our two original computers 2 We reinstalled OVM because we received new machines, and decided to try to install the manager on dom0 3 Attempted to install OVM manager on dom0. This failed. It also failed to install on our third machine. 4 Finally installed the OVM manager correctly, and readied our setup for virtual machines 5 Installed our first virtual machines 6 We tested virtual machines live migration. It worked well. We also experimented issues after the network switch was replaced. This day we also tested cloning and high availability

Lab log(cont) week description 7 Had issues because of network upgrades. The only way to fix the issues was to reboot the machines. We also did live migrations 10 Started exploring OVM. The dom0s still have xl commands and they also are using normal xen configuration files 11 Installed bench marking utilities, recompiled FreeBSD for pv, and started installing lsusb to the OVM dom0s 12 Continued to try and get pv drivers working in gentoo. Started to try and install lsusb manually. The machine would crash though every time one library was replaced. 13 Bench marking using, iperf, we also timed things in our manager such as suspend, resume, stop, and start times.

Virtual machine list Windows XP hvm Windows XP hvm with pv drivers CentoOS hvm with pv drivers FreeBSD hvm

Iperf network tests OS Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Window (HVM) 138 Mbps Windows (PV) 659 Mbps 657 Mbps 652 Mbps FreeBSD (HVM) 555 Mbps 576 Mbps 544 Mbps CentOS (PV) 930 Mbps 933 Mbps 931 Mbps

Operation times OS Suspend Resume Migrate 1 Migrate 2 Migrate 3 Stop Start Window (HVM) 29s 6s 26s 1s 2s Windows (PV) 44s 27s 32s FreeBSD (HVM) 35s CentOS (PV) 46s 36s

Questions ???