Super Fast Local Workloads with LXD, ZFS, and Juju

http://www.jorgecastro.org/2016/02/12/super-fast-local-workloads-with-juju/

by mitechie • 10 years ago

96 31 10 years ago

LXD is great. It lowers significantly the mental burden of running something in containers because they behave essentially like a VM. That being said LXD and juju are very Ubuntu things. LXD needs wide adoption for it to be attractive as a serious workload.

marcoceppi3• 10 years ago

There are LXD images for Ubuntu, CentOS, Gentoo, Plamo, and other Linux operating systems. So you can really boot most any Linux as you would a VM. Between that and it's use as a hypervisor in OpenStack it gets flexed pretty heavily. Though I agree, more people should be using it!

tyingq5• 10 years ago

Lxc itself is a bit hobbled on distros other than Ubuntu if you want unprivileged containers or containers running systemd based distros.

https://www.flockport.com/lxc-and-lxd-support-across-distrib...

LXD is more often associated with a VPS style container, versus docker style containers. So, at the moment, it does have a distinctly "only runs right on Ubuntu" feel.

pekk2• 10 years ago

If you like LXD, why can't you just use it and not care whether Redhat is using it?

unethical_ban2• 10 years ago

Many organizations use RHEL, and individual workers cannot just spin up Ubuntu for their bank database servers.

tyingq5• 10 years ago

In it's current state, you can't (in a practical way) run LXD on a host os other than Ubuntu. So, using LXD means migrating away from whatever host os you are using, and switching to Ubuntu. That's not trivial.

Over time, as each distro catches up with the same patches/kernel version/etc choices ubuntu made, this problem will go away. For now, however, LXD means Ubuntu as the host os.

hoistor• 10 years ago

I don't think the author of this post really understands ZFS.

Is that a 4 disk mirror? You'd be much faster using a raid10 there.

ZFS 'cache' devices are't for write cache either, you'd want a log device for write perf reasons if that's your constraint... Even then it's unlikely to make a difference on a workstation workload with 16GB of memory..

justinsaccount2• 10 years ago

Yeah.. it is a subtle difference between

  zpool create home mirror a b c d cache e

and

  zpool create home mirror a b mirror c d cache e

dr_zoidberg• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate on the semantics of "cache"? I do understand the mirror keyword, but I know next to nothing about ZFS and don't really get what "cache" means, considering bouth your and OPs comment.

abrookewood• 10 years ago

Correct me if Im wrong, but he just built a pool with 3 layers of parity right? The first drive with three drives mirroring it? Where as the later is effectively RAID10, a stripe across 2 mirrored vdevs.

ochoseis• 10 years ago

I think he might just be glossing over some details? At any rate, from what I understand ZFS has a 'zil' write cache for small log writes, and a l2arc for common reads that don't fit into memory. This is just a dev setup, but for real work I think you'd want your zil to also be mirrored so you don't lose writes if an ssd goes bad. For anyone interested this link has a few more details: http://www.45drives.com/wiki/index.php/FreeNAS_-_What_is_ZIL...

markramm• 10 years ago

This is a great development experience for distributed software. I'm really looking forward to Ubuntu 16.10 -- a lot of things seem to be coming together there.

sparkiegeek• 10 years ago

Oh? I'm sure 16.10 will be great but there's a bunch of things coming in 16.04 which have me excited!

cm3• 10 years ago

Seeing how much it's used there, I wish ZFS would land in linux(-next/-staging) already :-).

marcoceppi3• 10 years ago

We'll, it'll be in Ubuntu 16.04 :)

pritambaral• 10 years ago

This is because of Debian's recent announcement about packaging ZFS, right? Or is more work involved in getting ZFS into Xenial?

smartbit2• 10 years ago

For those interested, please find here [1] the recordings of Juju sessions (day 2 & 3 only) at Config Management Camp. Mark Shuttleworth's keynote is also recorded [2]. Recording of James Page's presentation [3] "Building a private cloud with the OpenStack charms" (day 1) might be available on the Ubuntu youtube channel [4] next month.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzSGDpUWtiotngRgVqpa8...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp_Re8Mx9xk#t=1h8m15s

[3] http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/schedule/speakers/JamesPage.html

[4] https://www.youtube.com/user/celebrateubuntu

smartbit2• 10 years ago

James Page's presentation came available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGeSxIB3KzY published at [4] https://www.youtube.com/c/jujucharms

z3t4• 10 years ago

LXD looks sweet, and seem to have many advantages over Docker. The only issue I got with it is the network settings where I miss a configuration that let me isolate the containers from the LAN, while still giving them Internet access.

tyingq5• 10 years ago

The default setup for LXD is to create a NAT bridge which is what you seem to be asking for.

Maybe something went wrong with your install?

roozbeh18• 10 years ago

if you want to try LXD Demo https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/try-it/

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_vRmItDORo

Super Fast Local Workloads with LXD, ZFS, and Juju

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