[GTALUG] Setting up a VM host

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 10:37:37AM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
> If I wanted to set up a host for a bunch of headless VMs, what's the
> OS/Hypervisor to run these days?  I'm doing this out of curiosity and
> for testing purposes.  I don't exactly have appropriate hardware - an
> i5 with 16GB of memory - but it should be sufficient to run 5-10 VMs
> for my very limited purposes (private network, none of the VMs will be
> public-facing).  QEMU/KVM looks like the best choice for a FOSS
> advocate?  Other recommendations?  I could particularly use a good
> HOWTO or tutorial if anyone knows of one.  Thanks.

I certainly like kvm.  Works well.  Finding examples for how to start if
isn't hard.  I am personally NOT a fan of libvirt and the associated
crap it provides and much prefers just making a shell script to pass
the right arguments to qemu myself.

As long as you have VT support (Most if not all i5s do, as long as it
is on in the BIOS/UEFI), I would think that should be fine.  16GB would
certainly allow you 10 1GB or 5 2GB VMs without any issue.  Creative
people would try and use KMS (kernel memory sharing I think it is),
to merge identical pages between VMs to save some resources.  It's a
neat feature.

Depending on what you intend to do with them and put in them, some people
might use containers instead (like lxc and such).  It has its own
limitations but uses less resources.  If you are looking to run different
OSs though, then containers are not what you want.

-- 
Len Sorensen