Anyone Actually Using Virtual Linux Servers?

[Kent Borg]

Kent Borg wrote:
> Is anyone actually using virtual Linux servers?

I didn't see any Qemu hands go up in the crowd.  Looks like I am
pioneering again.

Progress.  After fiddling with Postfix, saslauth, and Dovecot, this mail
is going *out* through a Qemu guest on my new box.  I am nearly back to
where I was when Xen turned into a bad idea.  Doing the cutover for
incoming mail is still ahead and will be scary.

I do wish Qemu had better management tools.  So far I am rolling my own;
I have a script that runs out of rc.local and launches my current Qemu
guests, each in their own "screen"s, so I can reconnect to the console.
 The screens are named for easier reattachment, and I have it writing
the PID for each Qemu, but I am not doing anything with that yet.  I
think the named screens will keep me from accidentally launching a
second copy of a guest--screen will not run to hold it.

One thing I miss from Xen is the auto suspend of guests when the host
machine shuts down.  Heck, I can't get Qemu to exit when the guest OS
halts.  I have to pull the last plug by hand.

I might have been tempted to run vmware but when I earlier played with
the early free versions, it was a lumpy experience, it must have been a
beta, I remember something like being forced to keep downloading updates
as they shut off the previous version, but I forget the details.  Plus,
when I sent them a resume' they never even said "No thank you".  Pushes
me back to open source.

-kb

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