F15 / VirtualBox

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 08:08:26AM -0400, Genes MailLists wrote:
>    (i) Variable size image for the VM
>        - it grows to accommodate need

Interested to know why sparse images or qcow2 don't fulfil your needs.
These have been supported in KVM (and Xen) since forever.

>   (ii) Easy to duplicate VM image (with UUID change)
> 
>        So its easy to deploy images on same or different computers

This is what I do:

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/tip-my-procedure-for-cloning-a-fedora-vm/

Also I'm still looking at what to do about the "virt-clone" tool:

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/virt-tools-survey-virt-clone/

>  (iii) All VM data is stored in user home
> 
>         This means installing a new OS does not negatively impact VM's

You can do this with KVM too.  There is a performance penalty to using
files (but VirtualBox has the same penalty).  With old libvirt you had
to set SELinux labels manually, but new versions do it for you.

>   (iv) Control over the network

I actually prefer libvirt's default (private network with NAT)
configuration.  It's good for what I do which is testing lots of VMs.

It's a lot better than Xen's default setting of "bugger up the network",
or VMware's "first, install these binary drivers in your kernel" config.

For production, I change libvirt to use a shared bridge by adjusting a
couple of configuration files:

http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#Bridged_networking_.28aka_.22shared_physical_device.22.29

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top