[fedora-virt] best Fedora virtualization

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:59:55AM -0400, Rich Mahn wrote:
> I am planning on running several virtual machines on a single host.  I
> will have two or three Linux baeed virtual machines and one or two
> Windoze.  I plan on using a F11 host system.
> 
> I need most of these to run automatically on boot-up of the host
> system.  It would be really nice if I could use something like the
> Ctl-Alt-FN to be able to access and switch between virtual machines.
> This needs to be stable.  The machines that these virtual machines are
> intended to replace are often running hundreds of days between
> reboots.

I don't know of anything that lets you use Ctrl-Alt-FN to switch
between guests.  If X is running then you can run several instances of
virt-viewer, possibly fullscreen.

For stability and long-term maintainability, I wonder if you've
considered using RHEL or CentOS?  That means you have to use Xen as
the hypervisor, but if you use libvirt / virsh / virt-manager, the
future upgrade path to KVM is reasonable.  All tools stay the same,
and you just need to run our forthcoming v2v tool on the guests (or
reinstall the guests) when you upgrade.

> My gut feel is that the virt-manager suite might be the way to go,
> editting the apropriate xml files as required.  I also see there
> is a qemu launcher and it seems to work okay.  I suspect there are
> others as well.

The only one we're supporting here on Fedora is libvirt / virsh /
virt-manager.  Use 'virsh edit <domain>' to edit the XML for a domain.
The same commands will work on RHEL / CentOS too.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines.  Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/
See what it can do: http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/recipes.html