[ale] Xen / Virtualization and minimal Linux guest installations

[Jeff Hubbs]

FWIW, I had good success running Gentoo under Gentoo via Xen.  Pretty 
much Just Worked (tm).  Gentoo and the Gentoo Xen docs make it pretty 
straightforward.

Ty Connell wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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.
>
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