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Virtualization

Deividson Okopnik [deivid.okop at gmail.com]


Sat, 2 Aug 2008 10:54:44 -0300

Hello everyone.

I'm starting a paper here on Virtualization for my post-graduation, and I'm wondering if any of you use virtualization professionally, for what, what software you use to do it and with what host/guest OS's


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Thomas Bonham [thomasbonham at bonhamlinux.org]


Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:59:18 -0700

Deividson Okopnik wrote:

> Hello everyone.
>
> I'm starting a paper here on Virtualization for my post-graduation,
> and I'm wondering if any of you use virtualization professionally, for
> what, what software you use to do it and with what host/guest OS's

I run VMWare fusion on my mac and run Red Hat 4 & 5, Windows XP, Cent OS 5, Solaris 10 x86, and I'm going to try Vista when I get my ram for my computer. At work we run VMWare ESX we run RedHat 5, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. They all run very good. I have also used the free version of vmware for other people servers before.

I hope this is what you are looking for.


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Deividson Okopnik [deivid.okop at gmail.com]


Sat, 2 Aug 2008 11:27:17 -0300

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 10:59 AM, Thomas Bonham <[email protected]> wrote:

> I run VMWare fusion on my mac and run Red Hat 4 & 5, Windows XP, Cent OS
> 5, Solaris 10 x86, and I'm going to try Vista when I get my ram for my
> computer. At work we run VMWare ESX we run RedHat 5, Windows XP, Windows
> Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. They all run very good. I have also
> used the free version of vmware for other people servers before.

What do that "at work" do? You run all those OSs in the same machine? Whats the machine hardware they run on?


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Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]


Sat, 2 Aug 2008 21:30:23 +0700

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 8:54 PM, Deividson Okopnik <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello everyone.
>
> I'm starting a paper here on Virtualization for my post-graduation,
> and I'm wondering if any of you use virtualization professionally, for
> what, what software you use to do it and with what host/guest OS's

Hi...

Mostly I use Qemu with or without kqemu module for experimenting with Linux kernels. It serves me well when researching before writing about Linux.

Lately, I also use KVM (actually it's extended version of Qemu) and UML. KVM works well when I need accelerated virtualization since it utilizes Intel VT or AMD SVM technology. While UML is a good choice when you just want light weight OS virtualization. Me, like the rest of kernel learner, find it a perfect choice for exploring certain areas of kernel because gdb can be easily attached to UML.

VirtualBox also grab my attention. It has nice GUI and mature virtualization. In some of my projects, VirtualBox is a life saver when I want to experiment with several different configurations. Thanks to its snapshot feature, when things go wrong I simply "step back" to previous snapshot state and start fresh.

regards,

Mulyadi.


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Faber J. Fedor [faber at linuxnj.com]


Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:55:24 -0400

On 02/08/08 10:54 -0300, Deividson Okopnik wrote:

> Hello everyone.

Hi Deiv,

Are you perchance related to those other Okopniks running around loose in here? :-)

> I'm starting a paper here on Virtualization for my post-graduation,
> and I'm wondering if any of you use virtualization professionally, for
> what, what software you use to do it and with what host/guest OS's

I use virtualization quite a bit:

For a now-defunct client, I ran their development, QA, and production servers (RHEL3) under VMware Server running on RHEL4 on a Dell Poweredge 4600. There was also an offsite replica of the system for disaster recovery/business continuity reasons. I would do basic file backups twice a week to keep the two in sync and once a month I would backup the VM files to disk, drive them to the offsite center, and copy them over. Voila! Perfect backups!

I run VMware Server at home on CentOS 5.x running various VMs (Suse, openSuse, RHEL, Win XP, and yes, even DOS) for various client and personal projects . For clients, I've done things like set up DRBD and heartbeat between virtual servers, use a Win XP client to login to a client's VPN to access their Linux box, and investigate the feasibility of using Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/core/) using a virtual cluster.

I also run VMware Fusion on my Macbook running Tiger (10.4.x) when I need to travel with virtualization or interact with a Mac. (It's not necessary to run VMs on the Mac to interact with a Mac, but it sure is nice to run everything on my Mac when I'm laying in the hammock out back. :-) A recent example: I'm working on a Windows NT PDC to Samba 3.x + OpenLDAP conversion for a client who is mostly a Mac shop with some XP and two openSuse servers. On my Macbook I've got an openSuse+Samba+openLDAP VM and a Win XP client VM logging into the domain and the local Macbook using the openLDAP server as a directory (doing searches in Address Book). To test out my setup, I went to the client's site, fired up my VMs, changed the IP addresses, and then played with my VMs on his network, i.e. instead of modifying the client's openSuse servers, we attempted to do the "net rpc vampire" with the virtual openSuse on my Macbook (it didn't work, but that's a story for another time).

I've also started playing with Amazon's EC2 for a client project which is technically virtualization but probably isn't what you're looking for.

Virtualbox is next on my list of things to play with just because the rootless windows look cool.

I bought Parallels for the Mac when it first came out, but I wasn't impressed with it, especially since it didn't run Linux VMs, although I hear it's improved greatly since then.

-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber Fedor
President
Linux New Jersey, Inc.
908-320-0357
800-706-0701


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Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]


Sun, 3 Aug 2008 13:49:50 +0100

On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 10:54:44 -0300 "Deividson Okopnik" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello everyone.
> 
> I'm starting a paper here on Virtualization for my post-graduation,
> and I'm wondering if any of you use virtualization professionally, for
> what, what software you use to do it and with what host/guest OS's

At work we use VMWare running various instance of SmoothWall so we can test/fix bugs, etc. I use QEMU a lot to run various flavours of different LDAP servers too.

When I am not at work, I use UML (User Mode Linux) to do all manner of things; but you might not class that as true virtualisation.

-- Thomas Adam

-- 
"It was the cruelest game I've ever played and it's played inside my
head." -- "Hush The Warmth", Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.


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Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]


Mon, 4 Aug 2008 16:36:23 +0100

Deividson --

[ Adding tag@ back on the Cc since you've culled it. :| ]

2008/8/4 Deividson Okopnik <[email protected]>:

>> Hi Deiv,
>
>> Are you perchance related to those other Okopniks running around loose
>> in here? :-)
>
> We never found out how relative we are - but considering the okopnik
> family is not that big we might be

A couple of things:

1. I was not the original person asking this question, Faber Fedor was. 2. If you're going to reply to a thread off-list, regardless of the recipient, please ensure you make it known -why-.

> Last question I guess, anyone uses virtualization for a proxy/db
> server? Like running linux, and a VM inside that linux that is your
> proxy server?

And yes, to answer your question (which no one on the list will receive since you sent this directly to me), I use virtualisation for proxying in the way you describe to test our products and the features I write for it; that aside, many people/small companies work in this way -- this is why VMWare player exists, for instance.

I still like and prefer UML though.

-- Thomas Adam


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Deividson Okopnik [deivid.okop at gmail.com]


Mon, 4 Aug 2008 14:37:46 -0300

> Hi Deiv,
> Are you perchance related to those other Okopniks running around loose
> in here? :-)

We never found out how relative we are - but considering the Okopnik family is not that big we might be.

Last question I guess, anyone uses virtualization for a proxy/db server? Like running linux, and a VM inside that linux that is your proxy server?

p.s. Sending this again to the whole list this time, replied to Thomas only last time :X


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