[wellylug] Server virtualisation

[Callum Grant]

The main intention is to have one distro as a game server, one as a LAMP
server which I can easily reinstall when something goes wrong and another as
an Ubuntu repository for my house (not really that useful but I plan on
using a lot of capacity and I have unlimited bandwidth;-) Also it would be
neat to hav another as a dedicated filesharing server that can be set to
download ditros and do video conversion etc.
I will ensure that the server has plenty of ram and it will get a quad core
phenom processor + some extra network cards if I need them (in rackspace).

Regards,

Callum


On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Jethro Carr <jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com>wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 00:02 +1300, Callum Grant wrote:
> > Hi all,
>
> > I've recently come to the conclusion that since I need to run many
> > different linux operating systems at once, I need to build a beefy
> > virtualisation machine. Can anyone recommend an open source virtual
> > machine tool that I could use( not something like virtualbox though,
> > e.g. geared to having at least 3 machines going at once).
>
> hi Callum,
>
> What's your intended use? That will affect the recommendations people
> can give you. :-)
>
>
> For server deployments and using virtualisation for production systems,
> Xen is ideal.
>
> I have used Xen quite a bit with CentOS/RHEL systems and it's a
> fantastic piece of software - Redhat have integrated it with their OS to
> make it easy to deploy out-of-the-box and my experiences with it have
> found it to be extremely reliable.
>
> The number of virtual machines will simply be limited by how much free
> RAM and CPU that you have. Rather than emulating fake hardware like
> other VM products, Xen uses paravirtualised guests which don't require
> all the slow x86 emulation features which reduces overhead.
>
> Paravirtualisation may cause you some problems - all the Xen guest OSes
> need to be running a linux kernel compiled to run on Xen, which will
> make it an unsuitable option if you are wanting to run various distros
> of different ages, or for testing.
>
> This can be avoided with new CPUs that support hardware virtualisation
> on the CPU, which allows you to run almost any OS, including Windows
> using Xen.
>
> Do a bit of googling and you will find plenty of information on Xen. (I
> would have explained a bit better, but I need sleep) :-)
>
>
> regards,
> jethro
>
> --
> Jethro Carr
> www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog
> www.amberdms.com
>
>
> --
> Wellington Linux Users Group Mailing List: wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz
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>
>


-- 
Callum Grant
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