KVM is the manly way to do VMs - Hardware & Software

Virtualbox is for girly men. Real men use KVM. KVM is built into the Linux kernel for hardware accelerated virtualization. It's more or less become a replacement for Xen, especially after Red Hat replaced Xen with KVM in RHEL. You can install your VMs to real partitions with real file systems, which is great. It's much faster than using a file in your file system. Having a file system on top of another file system doesn't make much sense. All you have to do to load up partitions from your hard drive is: [code] sudo qemu-kvm -hda /dev/sda [/code] And you can boot straight into that partition without using KVM if you want, assuming it isn't Windows which I'll get to later. KVM requires hardware virtualization, so if you have a newish AMD (AM2 and up pretty much) you're good, or if you have an Intel you better pray to Zeus that you got lucky and have hardware virtualization. My Core2 T6400 in my laptop does not have it, but my AMD Athlon II X4 620 does. If you don't have hardware virtualization, plain old Qemu would be pretty much the same, it'll just be slower. My FreeBSD VM running on /dev/sda4 (/dev/ad0s4 in FreeBSD) [img]http://imgur.com/nRwUC.jpg[/img] I tried installing FreeBSD to a file in the filesystem, but it took forever, using a partition only took a couple minutes. This is when I tried to boot Windows: [img]http://imgur.com/mAPH7.jpg[/img] I think it has to do with drivers. Windows is shite that can't figure out what to do when it finds completely different hardware. :colbert: It can boot the Recovery thingy and display a GUI, but it can't figure out what to do. And Safe Mode doesn't work (same bluescreen) God damn Windows.

Last time I tried KVM, I inadvertently found a bug that crashed the host system after executing 2 consecutive 16 bit instructions. Not cool.

Cool

[QUOTE=PvtCupcakes;22173457]You can install your VMs to real partitions with real file systems.[/QUOTE] So i can install a OS of my choice that uses a filesystem not supported by linux, and give it direct access to spare harddrives??

[QUOTE=Van-man;22214576]So i can install a OS of my choice that uses a filesystem not supported by linux, and give it direct access to spare harddrives??[/QUOTE] Yep. My FreeBSD VM uses UFS2, and I can't even mount it in Linux because it doesn't know how to use UFS2. [code] gentoobox ~ # mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/bsd mount: unknown filesystem type 'ufs' [/code]

[QUOTE=PvtCupcakes;22214734]Yep. My FreeBSD VM uses UFS2, and I can't even mount it in Linux because it doesn't know how to use UFS2. [code] gentoobox ~ # mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/bsd mount: unknown filesystem type 'ufs' [/code][/QUOTE] I should probably install a lightweight version of linux with Freenas and a scraped down Winxp in KVM then, instead of my botch-job of a Opensolaris & Virtualbox Installation on my server then. I like ZFS, but I'm not as comfortable with *Solaris and *BSD as i am with Linux.

Mmm I wonder if I can virtualise multiple instances on my vps...

[QUOTE=blankthemuffin;22253723]Mmm I wonder if I can virtualise multiple instances on my vps...[/QUOTE] You mean a virtual machine, in a virtual machine? [img]http://jamiedubs.com/fuckflickr/data/xzibit-yo-dawg/xzibit-happy.jpg[/img] But seriously, if your virtual machine's running on something like OpenVZ or Xen, you won't be able to use KVM in it because KVM requires a kernel module, the same as kernel-qemu does. You could probably run a normal QEMU instance on it (completely user-mode execution) but it would be slower. Also, does anyone have a good guide on setting up bridge networking for virtual machines? I have a couple of spare IPs I want to dedicate to virtual machines on my dedicated box... but if I mess it up and break networking, my dedicated goes down until someone in the datacenter reboots it... I only have remote access to it.

[QUOTE=TehDoomCat;22254886]You mean a virtual machine, in a virtual machine? [img]http://jamiedubs.com/fuckflickr/data/xzibit-yo-dawg/xzibit-happy.jpg[/img] But seriously, if your virtual machine's running on something like OpenVZ or Xen, you won't be able to use KVM in it because KVM requires a kernel module, the same as kernel-qemu does. You could probably run a normal QEMU instance on it (completely user-mode execution) but it would be slower. Also, does anyone have a good guide on setting up bridge networking for virtual machines? I have a couple of spare IPs I want to dedicate to virtual machines on my dedicated box... but if I mess it up and break networking, my dedicated goes down until someone in the datacenter reboots it... I only have remote access to it.[/QUOTE] Get a KVM-over-IP so you don't have to worry.

KVM is excellent, I can't wait for the KVM shit Red Hat is putting in 6. I've played with it in the beta and its absolutely phenomenal!

[QUOTE=Hexxeh;22256601]Get a KVM-over-IP so you don't have to worry.[/QUOTE] That would be helpful, but if JaguarPC charge $10/month for 'Remote Reboot', I'm betting it's going to be too expensive for me to rent KVMoIP on my box. I'm going to send them a support ticket asking. I made myself a shell script that just reboots my server if it can no longer ping google. Should suffice for now.

How much would that help if the network configuration is fucked?

It's like VMware but shittier