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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. Physical layout

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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

12. Lab Log week description 1 Installed OVM on our two original computers2
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

13. 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.

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

15. 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

16. 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

17. Questions ???