[GTALUG] Setting up a VM host

Giles Orr gilesorr at gmail.com
Wed Aug 31 11:05:43 EDT 2016


On 31 August 2016 at 09:01, Jason Shaw <grazer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> -- snip --
> On Aug 26, 2016 10:38 AM, "Giles Orr via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> 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
>>
>
> I've had great success with Vagrant and VirtualBox. Not the most FOSS
> friendly, but it makes for a good way to programmatically define a network
> of virtual machines. It sure beats manually spinning up a dozen vms.
>
> https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/

I love VirtualBox, but I've come to think of it as better for running
local graphical virtual machines rather than remote headless ones.  As
I've mentioned, I've seen VirtualBox consume a lot of CPU cycles just
sitting still (ie. guest machines idle) both on Mac OSX and on Linux:
this doesn't seem like a good quality in a hypervisor.

I've also developed a dislike of Vagrant, probably unjustified.  Let
me explain: I tried Vagrant, created a box, modified it.  Rebooted,
modified it again, rebooted ... and found that it had reset to the
base box - all my mods gone.  I suspect this stems from their idea
that a Vagrant box is a local representation of an immutable remote
deploy - but I wish they'd make up their minds and go full read-only
like Docker.

My other problem with Vagrant in this context is that its meant for
internal use - just on the local machine.  I'm trying to set up a
bunch of VMs that are usable on the local network and behave
essentially like remote cloud-based machines (I don't think I
specified that clearly, my apologies).

Docker, KVM, and Xen could all use further investigation ... but I'm
not sure my life is long enough when I've found a solution that does
nearly everything I need in the form of Proxmox.  KVM or Xen might be
better general solutions.  Docker might be better for just
containerized stuff: although I don't like the limitation to the local
kernel, and the read-only aspect of it is limiting (and makes basic
setup more time-consuming) even if the resource use is considerably
less.

So I'm good for now.  Thanks!

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com


More information about the talk mailing list