On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 01:53:25PM -0600, Renich Bon Ciric wrote:
Hello guys!
I'm in direct contact with the guys @ CloudSigma.
I've asked them to support CPU, RAM and HDD hot swapping and they say
their system is capable of this but that linux (particularly, Fedora)
isn't.
They agree to do some testing on the subject but, honestly, I don't
consider myself to be sufficiently knowledgeable to lead this.
Is there anybody here interested on this?
Anyway, their lead dev told them this:
"Libvirt doesn't do any of this stuff itself (hot swapping). What it
does include is
an ability to use the virtio balloon driver. This essentially allows you to
give a guest a large amount of ram, with it then voluntarily lending some of
that memory back to the system. It requires a degree of cooperation and
trust between host and guest that isn't appropriate (or easy to bill) in a
public cloud, but it's a useful hack on private VM deployments in the
absence of proper memory hotswap in qemu-kvm."
That is correct. The live memory adjustment for KVM/QEMU via
libvirt is ballooning, not memory hotplug. Likewise for Xen
and VMWare. Real memory hotplug is a future RFE.
Yep, CPU hotplug is available for KVM/libvirt, but support among
common guest OS is flakey. It doesn't work at all for Windows,
and for Linux only hotplug works, but not unplug. Xen however
did allow hot-unplug because it was using a different mechanism
IIUC.
For KVM, HDD hotplug already works for virtio disks, or SCSI
disks, or USB disks. It doesn't work for IDE disks. For Xen
hotplug works for xen paravirt disks.
For KVM, NIC hotplug also works, and in general any kind of
emulated PCI device can be hotplugged. For Xen, again their
xen paravirt NICs could be hotplugged.
Daniel