Table of Contents

  1. Supported operating systems
  2. Virtual Machine Technologies
    1. QEMU/KVM
    2. Linux-VServer
  3. Use Cases
  4. Discussion

VirtualMachines | VirtualMachinesQemu | VirtualMachinesVserver | VirtualMachinesUseCases

Virtual Machine Environments for testing Configuration Management tools

To get the feel of the many configuration management software options, it really helps to be able to have them control your entire machine, or a small network of machines.

This page describes how to get a small virtual network for this purpose. This virtual network could also serve as a way to do more formal QE testing.

Supported operating systems

In general I am interested in free software operating systems with a long support cycle.

OS Vendor Release QEMU/KVM (qcow) QEMU/KVM (qcow) with
Linux-VServer Support 		Linux-VServer (raw)
GNU/Linux Debian Etch amd64 (165MB), i386 (173MB) todo todo
Fedora 7 todo todo todo

The root password for the above virtual machines is "SysAdmin". For md5sum and sha1sum values see VirtualMachineSums. Plan is to move all virtual machines to the vmcasting packaging format as soon as possible.

Virtual Machine Technologies

QEMU/KVM

At first I thought I would use UML/Xen and MLN; my notes on that which may still have some usefulness to people are at VirtualMachinesMln. However Xen proved annoyingly temperamental and difficult to get operating systems working under, and upon farther reflection I settled on QEMU, which I had passed over previously I remembered part of it (kQEMU) was under a proprietary license; however as of 2007-02-06, it is all released under the GPL or compatible licenses such as the LGPL and BSD. You can also use virtual machines in QEMU's qcow format with KVM, the "Kernel Virtual Machine" that comes standard with the latest Linux kernel releases, if you have a processor which supports hardware virtualization. I've made some notes on how to set up a QEMU virtual machine. All of the above downloadable images were made by following that documentation.

Linux-VServer

For LiveCD images Linux-VServer looks like an excellent choice due to vhashify, which creates "[...] Hard Links on Steroids. Guests can 'share' common files (usually binaries and libraries) in a secure way, by creating hard links with special properties." The Linux-VServer model also has less overhead than the QEMU/KVM model, so it looks like it will make sense to use it instead of QEMU/KVM where possible.

Use Cases

Discussion

Daniel Joseph Barnhart Clark is a supporter of Free Software Activism and the evolution of System Administration as a profession. As a hobby he maintains OpenSysAdmin.com and works on interesting Sys Admin problems; by day he is the System Administrator for One Laptop per Child. He encourages everyone to obtain low-cost (think monthly) warm fuzzies by becoming a member of the Free Software Foundation.