[GLLUG] virtualization/netboot question

[Sean O'Malley]

I haven't gotten very far work has me going in a different direction atm
:P Thus the slow reply. :)

I am working on pxeboot with cobbler right now.

> I am interested in your project but I would want to change a few
> things if possible.. I want to use one computer to run two VMs in
> kiosk mode mapped on different keyboard, video, mouse. Making it so
> that both my kids can play at the same time at +/- half the power. I
> also want to run the vms off a nas with only a local swap file.

Device sharing is going to be tricky. The two keyboards, mice might
actually get confused if you use usb, unless possibly you have two usb
buses, etc. It gets weird fast. And it could end up being like it used to
be with the two ethernet cards, and they alternated which one was detected
first. :P

The video is what I am looking at right now. And it would be -sweet- if
you could just assign a VM to it's own native video card. Although that
can get confusing on the guest also because of drivers issues.

I am kind of hoping some "higher" standard will pop out of the gpu HPC
projects for driver inclusion into projects like qemu, and the like so you
only have to emulate a subset of the 3-d objects and the rest can be
passed and displayed natively by the card for better graphic performance.
Then you can have a more generic video driver on the guest OS.

> Although I only have first hand experience with VMware ESXI. I'm
> planning on building both virtualbox and xen then I can compare all
> three.  If you have any insite on witch one to use I'm all ears.

You might also want to try KVM. Redhat just picked it up as part of their
virtualization line, and it is the newest kid on the block..

It would actually be interesting to put up more recent speed performance
numbers between the systems. The last information I saw was from 3 years
ago, and KVM was still an infant. And it was a bit slower then the other 3
you mentioned. However, since Xen was purchased by Citrix (and their stack
management is now free I believe) Xen support has slowed and KVM support
has picked up considerably.

http://www.ovirt.org/ might also be a project of interest to you since it
is more like VMware ESXi It uses KVM and was developed for HPC, and there
are a couple of hosting companies that I assume use it.