[Cialug] vm on top of xen?

[Matt Stanton]

Yeah, Linode doesn't expose virtualization instructions to their guests.  Interestingly enough, though, DigitalOcean does (vmx).  The problem with DigitalOcean is that they do not allow you to choose your bootloader... their hypervisor (they use KVM) specifies the kernel image to boot and acts as bootloader itself.  You have to choose one of a couple of possible options for kernel images given the distro you chose to install, which means you don't even get to do your own kernel configurations or security updates.  I would imagine that this precludes using xen or kvm inside your VPS (though vbox might work?).  You would, of course, have to choose a decent VPS with enough virtual cpus to be able to distribute some to your nested VMs.

-- Matt (N0BOX)

Sent from my ASUS Transformer

-----Original Message-----
From: "Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley at drake.edu>
To: cialug at cialug.org
Sent: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 11:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Cialug] vm on top of xen?

I believe what you are asking for is called "nested virtualization".

Generally it is not supported because the base virtualization layer 
(Xen, in your case) does not pass the virtualization extensions to the 
guest. Run this in your guest, and if you get any output then hardware 
virtualization will work, but if not, then it won't:
    $ egrep 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo
Note that that command is Linux-specific; what you are really searching 
for are whether virtualization extensions of the CPU are exposed to the 
guest OS.

If you *really* want to do nested virtualization, it might be possible 
with some restrictions about what guest operating systems you can run. 
To learn more, i recommend search terms like these (i got results from 
Google that seemed applicable):
    xen without hardware virtualization
    virtualbox without hardware virtualization
    xen paravirtualization


On 2013-10-04 at 11:24:53 jim kraai wrote:
> can I run xen on xen or vbox on xen?
> 
> wanting to fiddle with craziness on a linode vps
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
__
Daniel A. Ramaley
Network Engineer 2

Dial Center 112, Drake University
2407 Carpenter Ave / Des Moines IA 50311 USA
Tel: +1 515 271-4540
Fax: +1 515 271-1938
E-mail: daniel.ramaley at drake.edu

_______________________________________________
Cialug mailing list
Cialug at cialug.org
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug