[OmniOS-discuss] kvm / zones

[Paul B. Henson]

Under SmartOS, every kvm instance is created in a dedicated zone. With 
OI/OmniOS, is that also considered a best practice, or are people for 
the most part just running qemu in the global zone?

A separate zone provides a little more isolation and separation of the 
vm from anything else, and an extra buffer in case of any qemu security 
issues that allow a vm to inappropriately interact with the host. As I 
understand it, there are also some resource restrictions that can only 
be applied to zones, which one could not avail of with a vm in the 
global zone.

On the other hand, the joyent branded zone in SmartOS is a sparse zone 
(with basically the read-only OS image lofi mounted from the global 
zone), which is pretty low overhead. Sparse zones under OI/OmniOS aren't 
currently supported (I'm not sure if there's any work underway to change 
that?) so it would be a higher cost to create them for your vm's.

On another note, vmadm seems fairly powerful and useful for managing kvm 
instances, more so than trying to do everything by hand. It is a bit 
SmartOS centric though, I don't know if it would be useful to try to 
port to other illumos-based distributions. libvirt seems fairly popular 
to manage kvm under Linux, has anyone tried to get that working under 
illumos?

Thanks...