Xen or VMWare machines and Amahi

[sgtfoo]

SO I've been loving my Amahi box for the past long while. Stability and long-time up-time is great so far.

The next version that brings us to Fedora 16 looks like a great time to try and virtualize my Amahi machine.

Has anyone done this yet? Is there a better way to do it? I
ll likely be running XenServer (free).

Could greyhole still work? How would we mount the drives?

I want to virtualize so I have a chance to run Windows Servers and other Linux Servers off the same big box.

[Furry]

Yes, I'm running VMware, and have three VMs; for Amahi, WHS2011 and Ubuntu server (email server).

The Ubuntu VM was made by doing a P2V conversion using the VMware converter app (I was originally running the Ubuntu server on a separate physical machine).

Although I now have VMware and the three VMs installed on a hard drive in the server box, I first tried everything out by installing the VMware on a USB stick in the server, and the VMs on an NFS share on my FreeNAS (so, no hard discs in the server box itself). It worked very well, over the 1Gb network.

It is possible to use a local hard drive, in the server box itself, as storage for the VMs - I've done that, with some of the HDD for storage for Amahi, and some for WHS2011. You first have to add it as storage for the VMs using the VMware client, and then mount and format the partitions from the VM servers themselves.

[sgtfoo]

Interesting.


So currently I have 3 drives in a greypool. Would I need to blank those before VMs can use them? Or could bare drives that are already filled be incorporated?

[radioz]

Generally VM's use files for disk drives.
When you create a new VM it creates a file large enough to hold the 'disk storage' for it.

I use Virtualbox myself, and have a bunch of VM's to test out different Linux distributions. Each one has a file (say 10 - 30 GB) that holds the partitions for the installation. That way you can just move a file to a different machine if you need to move your vm.

[ciscoh]

I use VMWare and connect my drives as physical disks. The exception to this is the OS install drive, swap and Greyhole Landing Zone. I use a 200GB virtual disk for that (500MB Boot, 8GB SWAP, 20GB Root, 10GB Home and the rest to /var/hda/files).

The rest of my drives are connected as physical drives.