[ale] Headless, Consoleless, DVDless, NetInstall? was: Fedora NetInstall via USB Drive

[Jim Lynch]

scott mcbrien wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Richard Bronosky 
> <Richard at bronosky.com <mailto:Richard at bronosky.com>> wrote:
>
>     Wow, great responses! I haven't finished reading them all yet, but I
>     want to get some additional info out there real quick. I WILL read
>     every comment and study every topic/command/link. You are all much
>     appreciated.
>
>     1. We have about 12 physical boxes out there.
>     2. We pay for RedHat support, have a bunch of licenses, and even
>     though I prefer apt... that's the way it is.
>     3. When I came into this new decision making role we had no
>     virtualization, no LVM. I chose [free] Xen because a) it _was_ the
>     RedHat way, b) I have expertise on my team.
>     4. We don't have X installed on any of our servers and I plan to keep
>     it that way.
>     5. The machines all have a public NIC that are firewalled to only be
>     accessable from my company's network (except the web servers with wide
>     open port 80/443)
>     6. The machines all have a private NIC that goes directly to a [rented
>     (argh!)] Gigabit switch, using the 10.10 network.
>     7. My goal is to virtualize the whole pool. We have done 3 so far. We
>     have got the process pretty slick, except for the part where we have
>     to ask Peer1 to do anything. At this point the only thing we ever ask
>     is "reinstall RHEL5 with LVM and volumes like..."
>
>     I hope that helps. Thanks again!
>
>     .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
>
> Richard,
>
> Just wanted to make a comment on Xen, RHEL 5 is still going to be 
> supported for another 5 years.  I have it on good authority that while 
> RHEL 6 will likely have KVM as it's hypervisor, it'll still support 
> Xen VMs (at least paravirt), but as RHEL 6 isn't released yet, all 
> that is subject to change...
>
> If you wanted to get KVM experience pre RHEL6, it's in Fedora 10 and 
> the now in beta Fedora 11.
>
> -Scott 
>
I gotta put in a plug for my favorite, OpenVZ.  It's sort of a super 
chroot, but really more.  It's a smaller footprint for each VE.  The 
only drawback I see is that it only supports Linux distros.  I have a 2 
Gb system here with 15 OpenVZ VEs, some running Ubuntu some running 
Centos, one running FC5.  There is only one kernel and it serves all the 
VEs, rather than each VE having its own kernel.  You can get more bang 
for your buck if you only run Linux VEs.  It's well supported and there 
is a pretty nice web based control panel to control it.  Migrating from 
one computer to another is a breeze as is cloning.  I've been very happy 
with it so far.

openvz.com

It's in the Centos repo, so I suspect it's in RedHat and Fedora.  
They've just recently (last year) started supporting a Ubuntu hardware 
node kernel.  In the past they only had a RH derivative.  One nice thing 
about the OpenVZ community is that a lot of the mods they made to their 
custom kernel, they've contributed back into the mainstream kernel.  
Virtually all of them have been accepted.  I ran Xen for a while but 
there are some real pricks hanging around the support forum and it got 
tiring reading all the flaming aimed at the new comers.  There was one 
guy in particular I filtered out to see what he had to say.   Only about 
1 in 10 of his resonses were helpful, the rest were name calling and/or 
flames aimed at clueless newcomers. 

Jim.