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cayenne
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Joined: 17 Oct 2002
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Location: New Orleans
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 Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 6:05 pm Post subject: What is best VM to start to experiment with on Gentoo? |
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Hello all,
I have recently gotten a box that I was told would be good to start experiment with VM's. It is a Dell precision 470..dual Xeon processors...it might be a little low in RAM (2G), but, is a starting place.
Anyway, of course Gentoo linux is my main OS, but, I'd like to experiment with putting different instances of Linux, and yes, even windows xp (I have to have QuickbooksPro)...
Which is the best way to go? Xen? I thought I'd read that VMware sever is now in portage? What about VirtualBox?
Any other suggestions?
Can you give me some examples of what you've tried, and the pros/cons of each?
with my current setup, how many VM's could I comfortably run? I'm thinking of running MythTV backend as a VM on this box too maybe?
Thanks in advance.
cayenne 
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Hu
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Joined: 06 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 1:40 am Post subject: |
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If you have VT support in the CPU, app-emulation/kvm can be a good choice. You can check for VT support by running grep vmx /proc/cpuinfo. If you get a match, you have VT support. VT can be disabled in the BIOS, and some Dell BIOSes do this. If so, you need to boot into the BIOS and reconfigure it to allow virtualization. A quick check does not show VT support in Xeons, but I did not do an exhaustive search.
KVM is the only one I use regularly, and works fine for both Windows XP and console Linux guests. I never tried preparing an X server in the VM, as I preferred to display its X clients back on my host X server. |
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Bill Cosby
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Joined: 22 Jan 2005
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Location: Aachen, Germany
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Letharion
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Joined: 13 Jun 2005
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Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Wed May 20, 2009 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Bill Cosby wrote: | | I recommend qemu |
Is there a reason to use qemu if the computer has VT support? |
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cwr
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Joined: 17 Dec 2005
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| Posted: Fri May 22, 2009 9:10 am Post subject: |
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I use VirtualBox quite a bit, on a system with dual-CPUs, 2GHz and 2G of RAM, without
hardware virtualisation. Generally I don't give the VirtualBox VMs more than 512Mb,
and since I don't run more than one VM at once they are more than fast enough.
I net the VMs using a bridge to the underlying machine's eth0, but I think networking has
changed with recent versions of VirtualBox. You do need the guest extensions, to get
seamless mouse movements.
Will |
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MaximeG
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Joined: 15 Apr 2008
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Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Fri May 22, 2009 10:37 am Post subject: |
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Hi,
To experiment, just choose something really easy to get running then => VirtualBox is a good candidate here, but there are others.
You don't really need fancy stuff if it's just "messing around with/discovering gentoo" that you want.
Regards,
Maxime
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cayenne
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Joined: 17 Oct 2002
Posts: 945
Location: New Orleans
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| Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 8:27 pm Post subject: guess not? |
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| Hu wrote: | If you have VT support in the CPU, app-emulation/kvm can be a good choice. You can check for VT support by running grep vmx /proc/cpuinfo. If you get a match, you have VT support. VT can be disabled in the BIOS, and some Dell BIOSes do this. If so, you need to boot into the BIOS and reconfigure it to allow virtualization. A quick check does not show VT support in Xeons, but I did not do an exhaustive search.
KVM is the only one I use regularly, and works fine for both Windows XP and console Linux guests. I never tried preparing an X server in the VM, as I preferred to display its X clients back on my host X server. |
I've just booted the box with a 2007 gentoo install cd...the grep mentioned above returned nothing...so I guess I don't have VT support?
The processors listed are Xeon 2.80Ghz. cpu family 15 model 4 stepping 10
This is a dual processor box...interestingly enough, the boot cd shows it as a quad processor box...this is due to hyperthreading on the cpus?
So, right now, my options are the qemu or the virtual box, correct?
TIA,
cayenne
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cwr
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Joined: 17 Dec 2005
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| Posted: Sun May 31, 2009 10:18 am Post subject: |
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Recent Xeons have hardware virtualisation support, older Xeons don't. If your
BIOS configuration doesn't mention it, the machine probably doesn't have it.
However, VirtualBox is pretty effective; I've just been using it to see how
Bind/DDNS are set up, and it made life pretty easy. (Be aware that 2.2.0
seems to have problems - I ended up updating to 2.2.2, bin not OSE.)
Will |
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