Tagged “virtualbox”

1. OmniOS and Vagrant September 2012

   <3 ZFS

   I've recently gotten religion about ZFS, and as a result, I've been looking hard at the various systems that offer you the ability to use ZFS and other amazing tools from the Solaris lineage (now being developed freely under the Illumos moniker after Oracle's unceremonious murder of OpenSolaris.)

   My data's backed up on an 8 TB FreeNAS, but there's also an amazing trend of Illumos-based distributions on offer that offer KVM virtualization, which was ported to Illumos by Joyent for their SmartOS distribution. Theo Schlossnagle recently gave a talk at the NYC DevOps meetup about their Illumos-based OmniOS distribution. OmniOS is a bit more than a JeOS - it aims to provide just enough packaged software to let you build the Illumos kernel and several other important tools like tmux and screen, and then get out of your way. Like SmartOS, it provides both lightweight zones-based virtualization and KVM for full hardware virtualization, but OmniOS is designed to be permanently installed on a machine, as opposed to SmartOS's focus on USB or PXE booting and ephemeral global zone configuration.

   OmniTI also makes a larger set of packages that their Managed Services team uses at http://pkg.omniti.com/omniti-ms/en/index.shtml.

2. CentOS 6 and VirtualBox (VBoxHeadless CPU Usage Fix) August 2011

   TL;DR: Add "noapic" to your kernel line if your VBoxHeadless process uses far too much CPU.

   I've been working on making space-efficient CentOS 5.6 and 6 images for VirtualBox recently. I'm building the images as part of a pilot program to start using the Vagrant gem to allow our developers to test the Drupal code they write on the real production OS before pushing it to the dev server. (I'm also learning Puppet, both for this project and as a way to more easily re-use tested configurations as we launch new sites.)

   The CentOS 5.6 images I made worked like a charm, but ran into a problem wherein the VBoxHeadless process that hosted my CentOS 6 image would always use 25% CPU on my MacBook Air (one full core) despite the guest OS showing between 98% and 100% idle.

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