[ale] Headless, Consoleless, DVDless, NetInstall? was: Fedora NetInstall via USB Drive

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 17:29 -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:

> I gotta put in a plug for my favorite, OpenVZ.  It's sort of a super 
> chroot, but really more.  It's a smaller footprint for each VE.  The 
> only drawback I see is that it only supports Linux distros.  I have a 2 
> Gb system here with 15 OpenVZ VEs, some running Ubuntu some running 
> Centos, one running FC5.  There is only one kernel and it serves all the 
> VEs, rather than each VE having its own kernel.  You can get more bang 
> for your buck if you only run Linux VEs.  It's well supported and there 
> is a pretty nice web based control panel to control it.  Migrating from 
> one computer to another is a breeze as is cloning.  I've been very happy 
> with it so far.

	I have to concur with this.  If it's Linux on Linux, this is, IMNSHO,
the way to go.  It's very light weight.  I've got almost 3 dozens VM's
running on one host node with almost 800 processes without freaking the
load average out.  With vzmigrate, you can move a machine from one chunk
of iron to the other as demand dictates.  OpenVZ is the OpenSource side
of the Virtuoso product, so if you want to go with something
"commercial", you've got that to back you up and they've got some pretty
tools to work with.  I've made a few minor contributions to the OpenVZ
project myself.

> openvz.com

> It's in the Centos repo, so I suspect it's in RedHat and Fedora.  
> They've just recently (last year) started supporting a Ubuntu hardware 
> node kernel.  In the past they only had a RH derivative.  One nice thing 
> about the OpenVZ community is that a lot of the mods they made to their 
> custom kernel, they've contributed back into the mainstream kernel.  
> Virtually all of them have been accepted.  I ran Xen for a while but 
> there are some real pricks hanging around the support forum and it got 
> tiring reading all the flaming aimed at the new comers.  There was one 
> guy in particular I filtered out to see what he had to say.   Only about 
> 1 in 10 of his resonses were helpful, the rest were name calling and/or 
> flames aimed at clueless newcomers. 

	One little caveat to the comments here.  The contributions from the
OpenVZ gang into the mainline kernel are for the LXC Linux Containers.
The Linux Vserver group (a similar parallel group) are making similar
contributions and are participating.  One would argue that they are both
working themselves out of a job.  The LXC containers will be the
mainline inheritor of those projects.  This will be the Linux equivalent
of Solaris Zones and BSD Gaols/Jails.   You can make it work now but
it's not plug and play quite yet, so I'm sticking with OpenVZ till LXC
is ready for prime time.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lxc-containers/

> Jim.

	Regards,
	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 307 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20090417/a67d79f4/attachment.bin