[COLUG] VMware (could be February Meeting solicitations)

[Stephen Nordlund]

Sounds like there is a bit of interest n this.


Why don't we just do an open forum, white board Virtualization topics
meeting.  A round table discussion about everyones experiences good/bad
with virtualization, and lessions learned.



> 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/
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-- 
Stephen Nordlund