non-supported by BBQ, baby's first VM.

[DebianJoe]

So, I was chatting with Titan about Virtualization, and that the enterprise class Linux's have some really simple interfaces for setting up a VM.

Thought I'd drop a shot here of a <10 minute project to get it installed and running a Windows VM of one of our work systems.

...assuming KDE isn't your thing, got openSUSE Mike to try out OB. He said that it took all of 30 seconds to swap to:

I have to win him over from his "Why be minimal when I can out-hardware it?" mindset a bit at a time.

[ivanovnegro]

Oh my, oh my...

[Dr_Chroot]

Wow, DJ. Very nice! I only have 2GB of memory atm, otherwise I would certainly tincker around with VMs more. Plan9 is definately on the bucket list...

As I summon the gods of Startpage, it looks like I could use VNC on top of a VPS, though. Will have to look into that B)

[harveyhunt]

Got any details on how you did this DJ?

I've been meaning to get some VMs running, but always turn back - whether that be lack of time or poor libvirt docs.

[DebianJoe]

Yessir.
----general installation----
The installation through Suse's repos is pretty trivial. I'm running a LTS kernel on my work system, so I just matched the kernel modules to the appropriate release and pulled them and the main virtualbox package along with the guest-additions via Zypper. I referenced the Archwiki to gather notes about starting certain modules (which now openSUSE is fully committed to sysD...so they're very similar for starting and stopping services). A lot of doing this is simply trusting the maintainers at openSUSE in this case to get it right, I'm sure running Tumbleweed or Factory would make this significantly more difficult.

----start specific info here----
The tricky part comes with the WHY I was doing this. My work often requires that we travel and be able to interface with some varied and sometimes archaic hardware. Many of the systems use interface software written only for certain Windows platforms, and are fed information across serial. (Servomotors are the WORST about this.) Well, I can't really justify carrying 13 different laptops just so that I'll have a working Unix-like, 64-bit Windows 7, 32-bit Windows 7, Win XP, *cough cough* DOS 6 (I use DoSBox for this), etc. So, I got my company to handle the licensing, and now use two laptops that are tied via ethernet to hook to any number of external machines. One is dedicated Win 7 64 with a Zeroshell VM on it, and it handles my corporate network authentication. The other, is the VM mule.

The VM mule has (and this is machine dependent) the bios settings allowing it to actually allocate 3/4 of the system resources to the VMs, as the main OS is really only used to bring up network interfaces, share files across shared directories (which are tied to network directories), and control the hardware (I use 2 Omron and 1 Belkin USB-->Serial ports...as for whatever crazy reason...the chipsets in them are not 100% interchangeable, and some archaic systems respond better to one than the other). I often end up running 2 VM's in different workspaces, and that loads the hell out of a system. Tuning them in for higher performance is a requirement. Forwarding networks shares across Zeroshell, and then through the VM share is the other tricky to setup part, but once it's done it's pretty cool.

It's not the most efficient system as far as performance is concerned, but compared to carrying multiple systems around just to be able to talk to 3-4 pieces of hardware, and a PLC at the same time, it's MUCH easier. The picture above is actually us in my lab just playing with VDI and different setups. I've been using a T400 with 8gb RAM in it using an almost identical setup for about the past year and a half without any major issues.

[stark]

You can forward network shares from one VM to another O_o ? That's quite a extensive setup.

Do you have to recompile the VM's module's with every kernel update or kernel upgrade that occurs on the host ?

[DebianJoe]

Do you have to recompile the VM's module's with every kernel update or kernel upgrade that occurs on the host ?

Assuming that the kernel isn't static, yes. I tend to not update kernels if they're working on specific hardware to a satisfactory level. It's well within reason to use dkms to automate the recompile process to a certain degree if you are regularly changing kernel versions, though.

[stark]

Alright this is the reason i hate VMs on a rolling release distro, didn't knew about DKMS Thank You! :)

Offtopic:

The new quote in your sig got me real good. Whackily ( if that's a word ) Hilarious :D

Added to Quote of the day thread.

[harveyhunt]

Thanks for the detailed write up DJ, I have VirtualBox running and am going to test out some more BBQ spins. :-)

[machinebacon]

Do you have to recompile the VM's module's with every kernel update or kernel upgrade that occurs on the host ?

Assuming that the kernel isn't static, yes. I tend to not update kernels if they're working on specific hardware to a satisfactory level.

Signed. Nothing is worse than having a non-booting VirtualBox on a productivity system.