Virtualization

[beardo]

Hi There,

I have gotten a Dell SC420 standard issue, but with 2gb ram.

What I want to achieve is thus;

I have some static IP addresses from my ISP and effectively want to create a couple of virtual lamp servers for development projects and a virtual print server for the office.

I tried a xen setup last night on a ubuntu installed ok but resulting vs was clunky and slow and the machine itself was a bit clunky (might have been ubuntu 8.04?!).

My query is really what would be the most suitable virtualization to use on fedora and had I better get another 2gb of ram! Also would a previous fedora release be better than 9?

Thanks for absolutely any advice!

[scottro]

I just put up a page with my own experiences on this at
http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/vmcomp.html

NOTE WELL!!! It is only my experience. Brief recap--if you have a VM enabled processor, KVM seems to work better (for me on my machine) with other Linux distros, VirtualBox gives the impression, at least, of being better with Windows. VMware does out of the box bridged networking (which is what you want for static IP addresses, whereas with the other two, you have to set it up. It's not that difficult.)

Stevea on these forums has been kind enough to make and post results of some quick benchmarks. He found that KVM could be a wee bit faster than native and VirtualBox a wee bit slower.

I would also, if you did try VirtualBox, recommend against using the latest 1.6. Its bridged networking is a little iffy right now, though that should be fixed in the next version.

As for the RAM question, as they say, you can never have enough money or enough RAM.

[gja2]

Hi There,

I have gotten a Dell SC420 standard issue, but with 2gb ram.

What I want to achieve is thus;

I have some static IP addresses from my ISP and effectively want to create a couple of virtual lamp servers for development projects and a virtual print server for the office.

I tried a xen setup last night on a ubuntu installed ok but resulting vs was clunky and slow and the machine itself was a bit clunky (might have been ubuntu 8.04?!).

My query is really what would be the most suitable virtualization to use on fedora and had I better get another 2gb of ram! Also would a previous fedora release be better than 9?

Thanks for absolutely any advice!

I am running a Dell Insprion 530 with an Intel Q6600 and 3.9 Gib.

I have been running a qemu full virtual machine and found it very slow until I restricted it's processors to two of the four available. It is reasonable now. My theory was the the swap of processor context was overloading the system.

[beardo]

thanks for the reply. much appreciated. I think i need to do more research!

any idea how to tell if my processor is vm ok?

[scottro]

Yes, the link I gave you gives the commands.

egrep 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo

If you just get back a command prompt, then it's not enabled. If you get back a line with lots of stuff it is enabled.

The first line might look like

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce

and a lot more. :)

[beardo]

Balls, I just get back a prompt! Does this mean that there is no solution that will work for me? I think it has a celeron @ 2.53ghz...

Thanks for the help!

[scottro]

No, it just means that KVM-qemu isn't the answer for you. In that case, I'd recommend VMware server 1.x (NOT the 2.0 beta) or VirtualBox.

Both are pretty easy to install and remove, so you can test each one.

[beardo]

Ah I see. thank you. I will try this weekend as the weather is not so good. thanks again!

[AltGrendel]

Yes, the link I gave you gives the commands.

egrep 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo

If you just get back a command prompt, then it's not enabled. If you get back a line with lots of stuff it is enabled.

The first line might look like

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce

and a lot more. :)

Thanks for the info, scottro. That explains why I couldn't get Xen running. Processor is not compatable.

[brunson]

Xen can run without hardware support in the cpu.

[stevea]

I am running a Dell Insprion 530 with an Intel Q6600 and 3.9 Gib.

I have been running a qemu full virtual machine and found it very slow until I restricted it's processors to two of the four available. It is reasonable now. My theory was the the swap of processor context was overloading the system.


Possible but ... plz be certain to load the current kvm module and don't use the very old one that comes with the kernel. The standard kernel include kvm-21 (IIRC) and the qumrat website is up to kvm-69. The kernel distro is like cd to a directory for this and .....

p_kvm = http://downloads.sourceforge.net/kvm/kvm-69.tar.gz
wget $(p_kvm) -O - | tar -xzvf -
(cd kvm-*; ./configure --enable-alsa)
make -C kvm-*
sudo make -C kvm-* install
--
This puts kvm.ko in the kernel modules tree and installs updated qemu for kvm in /usr/local/bin. Yo uwant to use /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 even for 32 bit guests.
"modinfo kvm" should look like
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.24.7-92.fc8/extra/kvm.ko
license: GPL
author: Qumranet
version: kvm-69
srcversion: 64922C034EBFEE480BF7E14
depends:
vermagic: 2.6.24.7-92.fc8 SMP mod_unload