[COLUG] VMware (was February Meeting solicitations)

[Scott Merrill]

Jeffrey Tadlock wrote:
> Scott Merrill wrote:
>> The intent is to run low-resource services in virtual machines to make
>> it easy to manage / migrate / recover.  
> 
> What are you plans for recovery?  Will you be backing up the actual
> virtual machine files or just the guest as if it was sitting on a
> physical host?  If you are planning on backing up the actual virtual
> machine files, do you have plans on how to make hot copies of them yet?

The free Server product doesn't offer as much fancy recovery or
migration, so we'll need to keep that in mind as we go.  I really
haven't pursued this in-depth yet.  Since the VMs are intended to run
pretty specific functions, we have several choices.  One choice is to
make a "master" image, which is basically a stock Debian install.  This
base image could be deployed on host machines, updated with whatever
software was necessary (hooray fot apt-get) and then the data files
could be restored (or mounted via NFS).  This is clearly the least
efficient choice.

I've been making small virtual disks for my Debian instances, so that
they can be backed up to plain ol' DVD for easy transportation /
reloading.  I'd like to back up the images (and any snapshots), but
don't know if that's the best way to go.

> I asked in another post, but since it looks like you are running all
> Linux based hosts and guests - did you look at Xen before choosing
> VMware products?

I looked at Xen for a little bit, but was turned off by the requirement
for a custom kernel on the host OS.  I sheepishly admit that Xen looked
harder, so I took the path of least resistance.  ;)  It's my
understanding that Xen uses less host resources while running the VMs,
so it's certainly something I'd like to keep in mind.

I plan to further investigate these utilities:
   http://www.xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/
   http://www.xen-tools.org/software/xen-shell/

I haven't looked at the new KVM kernel virtualization at all yet.

-- 
GPG 9CFA4B35 | skippy at skippy.net | http://skippy.net/