Amahi Guest OS - XEN Source

[nuclear216]

Hi Folks!

first I'd like to thanks the developer and the community behind Amahi, I just found it and it looks great, I was searching for something like this since a long time!

moving one to my little network setup dilemma:

I want to VPN between two places and connect to a backup/ampache/torrentflux server (an Atom 330/2GB/D94GCLF2D, no CD drive!), Amahi seems perfect for that but I also need it to act as a gateway/firewall for the local network in the place that physically hosts the server (which happen to be my house, the other one is my brother's house)

The question is:

do I use my crappy ADSL wireless router (a Siemens Gigaset SE567 unstable as a drunken monkey) as Gateway/Firewall and install Amahi on the atom board or do I install Xen Server or some virtualization OS, add the second ethernet and virtualize a gateway OS and Amahi?
from a network perspective this looks great because I could connect Amahi to a virtual network being the DMZ for the Gateway OS, running all the server there separated from my home computers looks secure and strong.

The system could run both smoothly enough as they wont serve many user (max 2-3), and gateway OS can be very small, on the other hand it looks like a painstakingly long setup while setting up the router it's easy and clean.

Do Amahi plays well as virtual Guest?
I mean, the whole fedora 12 is not needed but striping it down would be long and I don't have much experience with Red-Hat/RPM like linux flavor.

do you have any suggestion guys?

[moredruid]

Buy a decent router and don't go virtual?

All kidding aside, with the cost of DSL routers starting at $36/€25 it's a no brainer. Unless you value your time very low (sayyyy $12/€10 an hour) it would mean that you would need to set the other stuff up in around 4 hours or less to be economically viable.

Of course I didn't count the knowledge you would gain in the process by going the DIY route (not insignificant).

That said, Amahi does play nice in a virtual environment. Lot's of the devs/testers here have it set up that way.

[kdoswald]

I run amahi under esxi, along with pfsense as my router. Works as a great setup. I have amahi on my main network, and web server on my virtual DMZ network works great.

But that atom seems a bit underpowerd to run everything under virtual pc's. It might work out well though. Could get a netgear/linksys and have it manage the internet and dedicate the atom to amahi.

[cpg]

i second moredruid. i got a deal on a linksys 802.11n router for $29 ... not worth the time to mess with a firewall (in my case).

[nuclear216]

After giving it some thoughts I went for virtualization setup with Xenserver as the only real OS on the board, it looks very flexible and secure.

Even so the most reasonable setup would be building fedora as a gateway/firewall and installing amahi on top of it with no virtualization involved, but I don't know RPM distros that well and is more boring than playing with virtualization, plus I value the learning a lot

The atom 330 doesn't have hardware virt support but the manual of Xenserver states that it's really needed only for fully virtualized guest (aka windows), which is not my case, in fact the only system requirements is a 64-bit CPU.
I've noticed that I can assign more virtual CPU than physical one, Thanks to hyper-threading the Xen kernel reads 4 CPU so I am gonna go with 1 virtual CPU to the gateway and 4 to amahi.

My only concern is about memory, I already installed Xenserver on the board and it eats up 400 MB of RAM, I have to provide 128 MB to the gateway (more than plenty but that's the minimum settings) and so, as the total RAM is 2 GB, I'm left with less than 1.5 GB for Amahi, is this too low? I fear I'll have to stripe down fedora to the bone for this to work decently.

That being said I think I'll also have to rebuild a paravirtualized fedora kernel for better performance, Any chance I break Amahi if I rebuild my kernel? should I do that before installing amahi or after?

Wish me luck, I'm currently downloading fedora 12 DVD from torrent and should start install within hours.

[moredruid]

1.5G of RAM is more than sufficient for Amahi
I have 2G installed and the server is really using only around 400M (~1.5G inactive memory)
Full virt vs. paravirt... I'd always go full if possible, but amahi runs great on a paravirt host. rebuilding your kernel shouldn't hurt Amahi. before or after install.

[kdoswald]

I run amahi with only 512megs without any issues. Not running xwindows on it to keep load low.

I installed everything under VM to save money (electric bill) and learn more about it. I do not like useing cheap off shelf router. Many can not handle number of connections I run. My home network can make up to 4k connections during the evening. Most cheap routers can not handle that.

[nuclear216]

Just to let you know guys: it's not ok.

I choose XenServer as Host OS and it's great (I played with desktop virt before but server virt is much more useful) but it works in a strange way and it's complex, let's just say that I found myself using a Windows VM on my desktop in order to run Xenmanager (the citrix app to remote admin the server is a windows only application) in order to create fedora VM in my actual XenServer, than they say virtualization makes life easier...

In order to install a VM with Xenmanager you have to use a certain template, specific for the OS/virt mode, it configure the VM in order to accomodate specific OS. fedora 12 is not present (red hat 5 as paravirt template install does) and so I should use the "other linux" install template, the generic one, sadly this can be selected in the GUI only if hardware virt is present, no "generic linux paravirt" template is present, 3rd party company sell those.

I tried to use the RedHat template but it assumes you're using the Red Hat ISO which contains an already modified paravirtkernel image and relative initrd image, the template assumes it's in the ISO root under a certain dir, but even If I create a fedora ISO with such a package than I should modify the entire install system and make it compatible with what the template expect (a red hat 5.5 system) in order to get a working, stable VM.

another way around which would save the Xenserver installation could be to install fedora VM with xen-tools instead of the citrix CLI, I am looking into that too.

OR, (and this somehow looks like another headache) I could install any supported CentOS version and try to install amahi there, I mean both fedora and CentOS are RH based so matching dependencies shouldn't be impossible, any input here?

kdoswald does Vmware ESXi gave you any install headache like Xenserver is doing to me?

[lou1z]

nuclear216...... forget about vm's with your atom. it's way underpowered.
i run esxi 4. it's extremely fussy (due to it's small footprint) about what hardware it runs on. i've also just got an atom 330 with nvidia ion (acer revo 3610) and there's no way on this earth that it would run a vm in an aceptable state (at least not for me)
but, it's certainly interesting you trying. if you don't ask, ya don't get. i would imagine amahi would run fine on your hardware by itself. can't really help you with my atom as i'm purely running it as a htpc.

[nuclear216]

Hi Louz,
thanks for the suggestion, I'll take it into account.

still I can't say that that was my impression, I mean I just played with two Debian Etch VM (they come as a template in Xenserver ready to use with a paravirt kernel) one is configured as gateway (already sharing the connection to my home network, 4 client) and the other one is currently installing the LAMP stack, the latter uses 4 cpu and the first just one.
I am VNC'ing to both, the system is using less than 1 GB of RAM (including 400MB of Xenserver) and the real CPU it's about 30-40% load when both are apt-getting and VNC ing, will check LAMP stack load after lunch.

Doesn't look this bad to me, are you paravirt or fully virt?
given what I am reading those days it might be that Xen is having better performance on low power host system, it doesn't have to provide both VM with a fully virtualized environment so it should be lighter on the host cpu and so have better performance than fully virt on those low power system.
it's just an idea but it sounds right to me, any input will be appreciated.

What do you mean for "<VMware Esx> it's extremely fussy (due to it's small footprint) about what hardware it runs on", I was planning on giving a check to Vmware esx if i couldn't get fedora to install on Xenserver (btw I haven't managed it yet).

I have seen that VmWare Esxi does support a lot more guests than Xenserver but it doesn't include fedora, did you had to use any special trick to install it?
Also I haven't got what do you use to manage the server once installed, do you have to connect keyboard/monitor or does it come with an external managing apps like Xenserver? just ssh?