[GTALUG] Setting up a VM host

Mike el.fontanero at gmail.com
Fri Aug 26 14:33:10 EDT 2016


On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org
> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
I second the vote for qemu-kvm.  It seems to be the swiss army knife.  The
only thing I've wanted to do with it that I haven't been able to is to boot
1994 Yggdrasil Linux.

I liked the libvirt environment I tried out a year or so ago, but abandoned
it because it seemed to use about the same amount of memory that my ~4G VM
did. I can't imagine why it is so enormous.

Cheers,
Mike
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