On 31 August 2016 at 09:01, Jason Shaw <grazer@gmail.com> wrote:
-- snip -- On Aug 26, 2016 10:38 AM, "Giles Orr via talk" <talk@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.
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@gmail.com