On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org
wrote:
On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 10:37:37AM -0400, Giles Orr via talk 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 HOWTO or tutorial if anyone knows of one. Thanks.
I certainly like kvm. Works well. Finding examples for how to start if isn't hard. I am personally NOT a fan of libvirt and the associated crap it provides and much prefers just making a shell script to pass the right arguments to qemu myself.
As long as you have VT support (Most if not all i5s do, as long as it is on in the BIOS/UEFI), I would think that should be fine. 16GB would certainly allow you 10 1GB or 5 2GB VMs without any issue. Creative people would try and use KMS (kernel memory sharing I think it is), to merge identical pages between VMs to save some resources. It's a neat feature.
I second the vote for qemu-kvm. It seems to be the swiss army knife. The only thing I've wanted to do with it that I haven't been able to is to boot 1994 Yggdrasil Linux. I liked the libvirt environment I tried out a year or so ago, but abandoned it because it seemed to use about the same amount of memory that my ~4G VM did. I can't imagine why it is so enormous. Cheers, Mike