Virtualization with Parallels Server Bare Metall (PSBM) - exploiter notes, part 0
When the conversation about IAAS (simplified server virtualization) begins, the mantras " VMware , Hyper-V , XEN , OpenVZ / Virtuozzo , KVM , Jail " immediately sound.
Each of these technologies has its apologists, has its own positive and, of course, negative sides. In principle, all solutions can be divided into 2 groups according to consumer properties:
However, in our industry, rarely anyone remembers the existence of a very interesting solution - Parallels Server Bare Metall .
At its core, PSBM is a deeply reworked version of 64-bit Cloud Linux on kernel 2.6.32 and software-compatible with RHEL6.
A unique feature of this product, in my opinion, is the ability to use both the flexibility of the hypervisor and the speed of the containers.
Therefore, in PSBM 2 entities are distinguished - “containers” and “virtual machines”. And depending on what is required at the current time, the administrator can create:
The question is - what kind of virtualization can PSBM be attributed to?
Well, if everything is clear with the container mode, then technologically in the hypervisor mode, it seems to me, PSBM cannot be attributed either to pure hardware virtualization or to a purely paravirtualization model. When a “virtual machine” is running, the processes access the processor directly, but the rest of the hardware is virtualized.
So it turns out that PSBM is a mixture of all three principles of virtualization in general. And, in my opinion, this is the strong feature that distinguishes PSBM from competitors.
Of the obvious consumer cons of the product (compared to at least XEN) for SMB is its chargeability. On the other hand, the price is quite reasonable for business. However, now you can get a full-featured test license for 1 month in Parallels, which so far can be renewed every month for another month.
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PSBM can be controlled in three ways:
Here is another relative consumer inconvenience - the lack of a unified management utility, both in containers and in “virt. Machines”. On the other hand, SSH has not been canceled.
I have been using PSBM recently - only 4 months. It virtualized copies of working servers for developers and testing of new services. So far, 14 Linux servers have been virtualized. In the near future plans to create 7 more Linux and 9 Windows servers.
In the next articles, I plan to talk about the PSBM installation process, PVA setup, how the virtual machines and containers are managed, conduct a kind of synthetic PostgreSQL performance comparison test in the XEN virtual machine / PSBM virtual container / PSBM container.
So ask questions - maybe something else I will check and test.
Each of these technologies has its apologists, has its own positive and, of course, negative sides. In principle, all solutions can be divided into 2 groups according to consumer properties:
- container virtualization (at the operating system level) —which operating system is used in the physical server — you can create such virtual machines in it (Linux-Linux, Windows-Windows, xBSD-xBSD) —homogeneous virtualization
- hardware virtualization and paravirtualization - on a physical server with one operating system, you can create virtual machines with other operating systems (Linux-Linux, Linux-Windows, Linux-xBSD, Windows-Linux, Windows-Windows ...) - heterogeneous virtualization
However, in our industry, rarely anyone remembers the existence of a very interesting solution - Parallels Server Bare Metall .
At its core, PSBM is a deeply reworked version of 64-bit Cloud Linux on kernel 2.6.32 and software-compatible with RHEL6.
A unique feature of this product, in my opinion, is the ability to use both the flexibility of the hypervisor and the speed of the containers.
Therefore, in PSBM 2 entities are distinguished - “containers” and “virtual machines”. And depending on what is required at the current time, the administrator can create:
- “Fast container” for a Linux server
- "Virtual machine" for Windows and FreeBSD
The question is - what kind of virtualization can PSBM be attributed to?
Well, if everything is clear with the container mode, then technologically in the hypervisor mode, it seems to me, PSBM cannot be attributed either to pure hardware virtualization or to a purely paravirtualization model. When a “virtual machine” is running, the processes access the processor directly, but the rest of the hardware is virtualized.
So it turns out that PSBM is a mixture of all three principles of virtualization in general. And, in my opinion, this is the strong feature that distinguishes PSBM from competitors.
Of the obvious consumer cons of the product (compared to at least XEN) for SMB is its chargeability. On the other hand, the price is quite reasonable for business. However, now you can get a full-featured test license for 1 month in Parallels, which so far can be renewed every month for another month.
')
PSBM can be controlled in three ways:
- command line console
- Parallels Management Console (PMC) - a special program (GUI) that has separate implementations for Windows and Linux, and comes bundled with PSBM - designed to manage virtual machines (those that are under the hypervisor)
- Parallels Virtual Automation (PVA) - a software package, part of which is installed in PSBM, as a separate special virtual machine - designed to manage containers through a browser
Here is another relative consumer inconvenience - the lack of a unified management utility, both in containers and in “virt. Machines”. On the other hand, SSH has not been canceled.
I have been using PSBM recently - only 4 months. It virtualized copies of working servers for developers and testing of new services. So far, 14 Linux servers have been virtualized. In the near future plans to create 7 more Linux and 9 Windows servers.
In the next articles, I plan to talk about the PSBM installation process, PVA setup, how the virtual machines and containers are managed, conduct a kind of synthetic PostgreSQL performance comparison test in the XEN virtual machine / PSBM virtual container / PSBM container.
So ask questions - maybe something else I will check and test.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/128995/
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