[fedora-virt] Need Pointers for Setting up Virt Host + Guests

[Jes Sorensen]

On 06/25/10 10:14, Frank Murphy wrote:
> Have a box with a 320GB and a 500gm sata hds'
> 
> What is the best method to set this up.
> 
> It's a core 2 quad 64bit, with currently 4gb ram (max 8)
> 
> I would like it to run Fedora12 32+64 && Fedora13 32+64 && Rawhide.
> 
> For trying to reproduce certain bugs on current Releases.
> 
> I can add extra drives to box as necessary.
> 
> Best base F12,F13, Rawhide?
> 
> XFCE is my preferred DE.

Hi Frank,

That should be pretty straight forward. Run the latest stable release on
your host, eg. F13/x86_64 and download the isos you wish to have
installed. The simplest way to do it is probably to use virt-manager to
install the guests with. Depending on your data setup, like if you want
to be able to share data/source code from the host you could export that
to the guests via NFS. In that case you don't need more than say
10GB/guest for the operating system. Add more if you want more data
space in the guest.

General rule of thumb, don't try to assign more vcpus to a guest than
you have physical cores. Use virtio for networking and disk
(virt-manager should either pick that automatically or give you an
option to choose). Second, if you run a lot of large guests at the same
time, you will see the system being sluggish.

For best performance either use a raw partition on the host for each
guest, or a raw image file. qcow2 is a fair bit slower.

In addition, virt-manager allows you to connect to the GUI of each guest
so you can run whichever window manager you prefer.

Cheers,
Jes