One of the things I like about my job is that I get to play around with stuff and make use of the technologies we work on in my teams. Sort of my own little playground. It allows me to study the products in great detail and put them to use in ways that individual product teams don't always intend them to be used for :) but that makes it fun. I have a lot of this set up at home because... work is sort of hobby and I just like to tinker with it.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was looking at my sun ray rig at home and how well 3D works. Google Earth and some basic opengl tests like glxspheres combined with virtualgl. It resulted in some very cool demos recorded with my little camera (sorry for the crappy quality of the video :-) :

OVDC (soft client) on my mac
Sun Ray 2FS

Never mind the hickups during zoom, that's because I was using the scrollwheel on my mouse and I can't scroll uninterrupted :) Anyway, this is quite cool !

The setup for this was the following :
Sun Ray on LAN, Sun Ray Server 5 latest installed on OL5.5 inside a VM running on Oracle VM 2.2 (hardware virt, with a virtual network (vif)) and the virtualgl rendering happened on another box (wopr5) that runs linux on a little atom D520 with an ION2 gpu.

So network goes from Sun Ray to Sun Ray Server to wopr5 and back. Given that this is full screen 3D it puts a good amount of load on the network and it's pretty cool that SRS was just a VM :)

So, separately, I had written a little blog entry about using sriov and oracle vm a while back. link to sriov blog entry

Last night when I came home I wanted to do some more playing around with SRIOV and live migrate. To do this, I wanted to set up a VM with 2 network interfaces, one virtual network (vif) and then one that's one of the SRIOV virtual functions from my network card.
Inside the guest they show as eth0 and eth1, and then bond them using a standard linux bonding device (bond0 here) with active active links.

The goal here is that on live migrate, we would detach the VF (eth1 in guest in this case), the bond would then just hum along on eth0 (vif) we can live migrate the VM and then on the other server after the migrate completes we re-attach a VF to the VM there and eth1 pops up again and the bond uses both eth0/eth1 to do its work.

So, to set this up, I figured, why not use my sun ray server VM because the 3D work generates a nice network load and is very latency/timing sensitive.

In the end, I ran glxspheres on my sunray server (vm) displaying on my sun ray 2 fs and while that was running, I did my live migrate test of this vm (unplug pci VF, migrate, reconnect vf) and guess what, it just kept running :) veryyyyyy cool. now, it was supposed to, but it's always nice to see it actually work, for real.

Here's a diagram of it.

No gimics - just real technology at work !

enjoy :)