[ale] Xen / Virtualization and minimal Linux guest installations

Ty Connell ty.connell at gmail.com
Sat Dec 5 17:09:18 EST 2009


I like virtual box - I run it on my desktop as a sandbox area, and have even
gotten a Gentoo distro running under it.  I have noticed some stability
issues with it since my last upgrade.

I started futzing around with Xen under CentOS 5.3 on Friday, and didn't
have much luck with it.  I haven't patched the CentOS box, so a Xen upgrade
may help.  I was unable to get Xen to recognize several loopback mounted iso
distro files (CentOS 5.3, Ubuntu 9.10).  Extracting them under a local http
directory similarly failed.  I'm probably doing something *really* stupid.
I'll be upgrading Xen on Monday to see if that helps.

I will definitely look at Thincrust.

Stay tuned...

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Jim Lynch <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com>wrote:

> Brian Pitts wrote:
> > On 12/04/2009 01:00 PM, Ty Connell wrote:
> >
> >> Greetings,
> >>
> >> I'm wading into the Xen waters, and I'm interested in testing
> >> lightweight / small footprint Linux guest distros.  Kind of what I'm
> >> looking for is:
> >>
> >> 1.  A distro that supports a gui or menu driven installation to the
> >> guest "space" (forgive my terminology).
> >> 2.  Installs only what's necessary for booting and networking, and
> >> 3.  Supports some kind of package manager installation.
> >>
> >> I don't really want to get into the loop of download source, compile,
> >> and configure.  Something that works is OK.  For example, I'd like to
> >> setup a guest OS that has nothing but linux, and the stuff to run
> >> postfix.  Another guest would run nothing but DNS.  Similarly for
> Apache.
> >>
> >> Test box is older hardware thus limiting what I can do with it.
> >>
> >> I know there are a number of small footprint projects out there -
> >> looking for some advice on culling that herd.
> >>
> >
> > If you liked Read Hat or Fedora, check out Thincrust. One part of that
> > project is an "Appliance Operating System"; basically a minimal Fedora.
> > Thincrust is one of the many virtualization-focused projects that are a
> > part of Red Hat's Emerging Technology project.
> >
> > http://www.thincrust.net/
> > http://et.redhat.com/page/Main_Page
> >
> >
> And I have to bring up two others of mention.  I've been running OpenVZ
> for a while now.  Advantages over most of the others including Xen and
> VMware is that it is very light weight.  With those other two you carry
> around a copy of the kernel for each virtual machine or container,
> whichever term you prefer.  This guy,
> http://www.montanalinux.org/openvz-experiment.html put over 600
> containers on a single system.   Sure it had 32Gb of memory and dual,
> quad core processors, but that might give you an idea of how many the OS
> will support.  The biggest limitation on OpenVZ is that the containers
> are limited to Linux only.   There are templates for many of the distros
> in use today.  Some of them quite small.  I was very frustrated trying
> to make Xen work.  I was never successful at building a working kernel,
> though the one in the distro worked, but was old.
>
> The all time simplest virtual OS I have used was the Sun VirtualBox.  It
> installed easily and I was able to bring up XP and Ubuntu 9.10 without
> any problems.
>
> Jim.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20091205/aec8286d/attachment.html 


More information about the Ale mailing list