[ale] Debian virtualization suggestions

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Sat, 2009-06-06 at 22:42 -0400, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:29:17 -0400
> "Michael H. Warfield" <mhw at WittsEnd.com> wrote:
> >
> >	If you are adventuresome, the 2.6.29 kernel has pretty much all
> > of lxc (Linux Containers) which does pretty much the same thing
> > as OpenVZ or Linux-vservers.  These are all the equivalent of
> > the *BSD jails/gaols or Solaris containers or zones.
> >
> > 	My personal preference is for OpenVZ (I have over 3 dozen
> > virtual machines running on a single system and the load average
> > rarely goes above .1) but Linux-vservers works just as well (a little
> > different paradigm) and lxc is going to be the mainstream inheritor
> > of both those projects a little ways down the road.

> My experiences with OpenVZ and it's commercial counterpart have been
> less than happy, though my guess is that the provider I've went through
> in the past that used them to sell VPS systems probably just didn't
> know how to manage it correctly.

	That's a big part of it.  And I disagree with some of their preferences
(surprise, surprise).  I dislike the vnet networking device and go with
the veth bridging network devices for almost all of my networking (the
former requires some routing and has other problems while the later sits
on your network like another machine).  The OpenVZ default values for
the resource quotas are also rather anemic.  When I spin up a new system
I either copy the resource values from another, similar, system or I
watch the user_beancounters like a trapped rat while I bring up services
to make sure nothing is overflowing the allocated resources.  Once
they're working, they run great and they don't kill your host.

> I've long liked the BSD jail system (at least as it is in FreeBSD).
> I'll have to check out the containers you mentioned; if they behave
> like BSD jails do and come with the system, that's something I'd be
> interested in using, since I can't run FreeBSD on my current server and
> haven't set up my box the way I'd really want it running...

http://lxc.sourceforge.net/lxc.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lxc-containers/

> 	--- Mike

	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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