Virt SIG Roadmap

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As promised, in preparation for next week’s SIG meeting, here’s a kick-off discussion about the Virtualization SIG roadmap.

I’m mainly tossing out ideas here — see this is an invitation to discussion.

Key things I think should be on the roadmap:

* Release process
– General cadence
– Estimate of the next release (if any)
* Specification of targets
– Right now, mainly xen4CentOS
– What packages?
* “Backlog” of work items
– Updates (mostly suggested by Pasi)
– Items caveats from Russ P‘s CentOS talk

== Release process =
I don’t have any real opinions on this — KB / Johnny, did you guys have a vision for what the release schedule for any of the SIGs would look like? Are we going to have specific releases, or just continue to do rolling updates? If so, how frequent should the updates be?

Obviously estimates for releases will need to wait until all the infrastructure has been set up, and we’ve discussed cadence / targets,
&c.

== Targets =
Targets will depend on community support. I’ll be committing to extending the Xen4CentOS project. There was talk of having an OpenVZ
variant, but that would require someone to actually step up and do the work to integrate and support it.

== Backlog =
Most of the items below are from the discussion Pasi started in February; a couple are from Russ Pavliczek‘s slides at a talk given recently.

* Pull in updates f/ XenServer
> Suggested by dvrabel in http://marc.info/?l

5 thoughts on - Virt SIG Roadmap

  • At our bi-weekly meeting today, we talked about what the general approach to releases has been.

    For Xen, major updates to packages will happen when the upstream releases. The plan at the moment is to do this every other release;
    so we would update to 4.4, but probably not update again until 4.5.

    Between those times, we will generaly be pulling in bug fixes by consuming point releases when they happen. Security updates will of course be pushed out immediately, as will bugs that affect a significant number of users.

    We didn’t discuss this, but I would expect that libvirt might be similar to Xen.

    For Linux, the plan is to consume one of the LTS kernels. At the moment, that’s 3.10. In general, the plan is to update to a new LTS
    kernel every 2 years. However, whenever there is a major release (for example, with RHEL 7 coming out soon), we may consider moving to a newer kernel for CentOS 6 sooner, so that the Virt SIG can maintain only a single kernel version across all CentOS releases.

    The initial target for the Virt SIG will be to update the packages inherited from xen4CentOS to Xen 4.4 and libvirt 1.2.2.

    We’re currently in the process of brainstorming a “backlog” of work items that might be a good idea. Some things we’ve come up with so far:

    * CentOS 7 testing branch

    * Making a useful Xen CD image
    – Live CD?
    – With pre-made CentOS guest images?
    – Ready to be set up as an OpenStack node?

    * Getting some kind of automated testing infrastructure set up

    KB / Lars / Johnny, anything I missed / didn’t get quite right?

    -George

  • At the moment we’re not sure about posting the dial-in info publicly;
    so until we get that sorted out we’ll have to have a list of people who may want to join, and send the dial-in info to them.

    Shall I put you on the list? :-)

    Yes; actually, I think the version I would really *like* to use is libvirt 1.2.3, which will have live migration support. But Ubuntu
    14.04, which is an LTS (I believe), is using 1.2.2; so in the balance between “being the only one on 1.2.3” and “backporting the migration to 1.2.2”, the second it probably preferrable, if possible.

    -George

  • Yes please :)

    Yep. I guess we’ll just have to get started, first with Xen 4.4 rpms, and then see how it goes with libvirt..

    — Pasi