The document discusses the evolution and trends of hypervisors in OpenStack from 2011 to 2013, highlighting KVM's dominance, VMware's growing presence, and the limited use of containers. It outlines both the opportunities and challenges associated with multi-hypervisor environments, including performance tuning and feature support for various systems. The analysis includes performance metrics and compatibility issues relating to OpenStack across different hypervisors.

1. Does Hypervisor
Matter in
OpenStack
Greg Elkinbard
Senior Technical Director
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2. Outline
• Brief History of Time: Hypervisor Requests
• 2011, 2012, 2013
• Trends in Different Segments
• Opportunities and Challenges
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3. 2011
• Hypervisors
• XEN
• Default choice given Rackspace and Amazon use
• KVM
• Bleeding edge users
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4. 2012
• Hypervisors
• KVM
• Emerges as the lead
• XEN
• Loses momentum
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5. 2013
• Hypervisors
• KVM
• Maintains lead (around 90%+ for Mirantis)
• Vmware
• Emerges as a surprising second choice
• Containers (LXC, Parallels, Docker)
• Web Hosting and SAS focused
• Xen and HyperV
• Infrequent requests
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6. Trends
• Telco/ISP public clouds
• Single hypervisor
• KVM
• Internet focused companies
• Single hypervisor
• KVM
• Web Hosting and SAS sub-segments
• Single or multi hypervisors
• Containers (LXC, Parallels, Docker)
• KVM
• Enterprise
• Multi hypervisors
• KVM and vCenter/ESXi
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7. Opportunities and Challenges
• Multi-hypervisor use cases
• Advantages and Issues
• KVM
• vCenter/ESXi
• Containers (LXC, Docker, Parallels)
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8. Multi Hypervisor Use Cases
• Existing virtualization infrastructure
• Extend instead of replace
• Provide a common API
• Hedge bets against bugs and vendor pricing
• Utilize additional features
• Virtual appliances not supported by other platforms
• Advanced features not directly supported by OpenStack
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9. KVM
• Currently about 90%+ of requests, 95%+ of
deployments
• Type 2 hypervisor
• Relies on a distro
• Relatively easy to add new devices
• Easy to tune to get good performance
• Flexibility creates speedup opportunities
• Mellanox e-switch
• Intel DPDK vswitch
• Few issues
• Mostly distro related
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10. KVM Tuning
• We use KVM for HPC and NFV
• Extensive set of tunings
• Short Summary
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BIOS to max performance
Enable huge pages
On RHEL tune for virtualization
Libvirt configure host pass-through for CPU flags
Increase TCP buffers and processor input queue
Congestion control to htcp
Enable jumbo frames
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11. KVM performance results
• KVM with OVS
• With tuning 7-8 Gbits/s VM throughput (jumbo frames)
• KVM with Mellanox
• Throughput host to host: 19.4 Gbit/s
• VM to VM on same host: 13.9 Gbit/s
• VM to VM on different hosts: 23.1 Gbit/s
• KVM with Intel OVS DPDK
• Alternative to dedicated hardware
• Good performance even for small packets
• 7Gbit/s for 64 byte packets
• 9.6Gbit/s for 512 byte packets
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12. KVM Features and Issues
• Widest set of OpenStack Features
• https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix
• Issues
• Difficult to transfer images from other hypervisors
• Older versions of QEMU in RHEL/CentOS require virtio
drivers
• SCSI emulation in Ubuntu
• Updated CentOS with latest QEMU
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13. VMware ESXi
• Currently about 8-10% of requests, 5%+ of
deployments
• Primarily vCenter
• Type 1 hypervisor
• Does not need a linux distro
• VMware controls the code, 3rd party packages must be
signed.
• VMware is supporting both ESXi and vCenter
APIs
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14. VMware OpenStack Compatibility
• Good compatibility with OpenStack Features
• https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix
• Pause, Un-Pause and Resize missing
• Caveats (Grizzly)
• Network integration
• Nova-net no security groups
• Neutron requires Nicira commercial plugin
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Glance integration inefficient
Only a single datastore is supported
With Cinder only iSCSI type volumes are supported
Only linked clones are supported
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15. Vmware OpenStack Havana
• Linked and Full clones are supported
• Multiple VC clusters can be managed by a single
driver
• Config drive support
• Cinder support for VMDK based Volumes
• vShield Edge Driver support for NVP plugin
(FWaaS, LBaaS)
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16. VMware Networking
• Nicira NVP/NSX
• Cisco 1000V (future)
• Accelerated Options
• NVP using STT
• VN-Tag, SR-IOV & Cisco Switches (VM-FEX)
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17. Containers
• Currently about 5%+ of requests, 0 deployments
• Low overhead alternative
• Hundreds of guests
• All Apps belong to a single tenant
• Fragmented space
• LXC
• Parallels
• Docker
• Limited OpenStack support but interest is growing
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18. LXC OpenStack Support
• VM – only launch, reboot and terminate
• Networking – basic VLANs
• Possible to get Neutron/OVS to work
• Volumes – officially no Cinder support
• Possible to hack something
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