[GTALUG] Setting up a VM host

Alvin Starr alvin at netvel.net
Fri Aug 26 14:42:18 EDT 2016


Virtual-manager that's part of the libvirt package is functional enough 
for most use.

I use Virtual-manager backed by xen to run between 5 and 10 VMs on a 
couple of machines.

If you have the hots to setup a complete server you could download 
xenserver.

You could put RDO on a system and install OpenStack.

Openstack has a nice GUI and management environment but is a bit 
heavyweight to just put up a few VM's


On 08/26/2016 01:55 PM, David Thornton via talk wrote:
> I've used proxmox . It got me up and running with a gui quick.
>
> But I've also use virtual box ( oracle : yuck ) and that also got me 
> up and running quick.
>
> "professionally" I sit in front of a lot of vmware, but that's closed 
> / for pay / proprietary / expensive. ( but feature rich )
>
> (I've not used libvrt / rhev / kvm so my perspective is limited)
>
Proxmox is KVM based.

> David
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Lennart Sorensen via talk 
> <talk at gtalug.org <mailto: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.
>
>     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
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-- 
Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (905)513-7688
Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
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