[ale] Xen / Virtualization and minimal Linux guest installations

[Jim Lynch]

Brian Pitts wrote:
> On 12/04/2009 01:00 PM, Ty Connell wrote:
>   
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I'm wading into the Xen waters, and I'm interested in testing
>> lightweight / small footprint Linux guest distros.  Kind of what I'm
>> looking for is:
>>
>> 1.  A distro that supports a gui or menu driven installation to the
>> guest "space" (forgive my terminology).
>> 2.  Installs only what's necessary for booting and networking, and
>> 3.  Supports some kind of package manager installation.
>>
>> I don't really want to get into the loop of download source, compile,
>> and configure.  Something that works is OK.  For example, I'd like to
>> setup a guest OS that has nothing but linux, and the stuff to run
>> postfix.  Another guest would run nothing but DNS.  Similarly for Apache.
>>
>> Test box is older hardware thus limiting what I can do with it. 
>>
>> I know there are a number of small footprint projects out there -
>> looking for some advice on culling that herd.
>>     
>
> If you liked Read Hat or Fedora, check out Thincrust. One part of that
> project is an "Appliance Operating System"; basically a minimal Fedora.
> Thincrust is one of the many virtualization-focused projects that are a
> part of Red Hat's Emerging Technology project.
>
> http://www.thincrust.net/
> http://et.redhat.com/page/Main_Page
>
>   
And I have to bring up two others of mention.  I've been running OpenVZ 
for a while now.  Advantages over most of the others including Xen and 
VMware is that it is very light weight.  With those other two you carry 
around a copy of the kernel for each virtual machine or container, 
whichever term you prefer.  This guy, 
http://www.montanalinux.org/openvz-experiment.html put over 600 
containers on a single system.   Sure it had 32Gb of memory and dual, 
quad core processors, but that might give you an idea of how many the OS 
will support.  The biggest limitation on OpenVZ is that the containers 
are limited to Linux only.   There are templates for many of the distros 
in use today.  Some of them quite small.  I was very frustrated trying 
to make Xen work.  I was never successful at building a working kernel, 
though the one in the distro worked, but was old.

The all time simplest virtual OS I have used was the Sun VirtualBox.  It 
installed easily and I was able to bring up XP and Ubuntu 9.10 without 
any problems. 

Jim.