virtualisation

More times than I care to mention I find myself having to battle with libvirt taking over my iptables rules and starting its own instance of dnsmasq, which just ends up ruining my whole day. Libvirt is a great abstraction layer for virtualisation, and although its xml config format and command line interface are well documented, how it works under the hood is less so.

Our Linux server and desktop virtualisation podcast has been released on Hacker Public Radio . Any feedback welcome.

Virtualisation is the new bleeding edge of technology and, apart from the Rich Internet Application space, is one of those areas where a titanic battle is on for market dominance. My money is on Linux winning out in the long run :)

Sometime solutions that are obvious are difficult to see because you image the solution must be much harder than it really is. Recently I had to recover a forgotten root password for a virtual domain, DomU, on a Xen box for one of our clients.

Virtualisation is the new wave in IT infrastructure management. With virtualisation you can improve your return on investment in hardware whilst saving on costly data centre space and more importantly reducing energy usage. Jumping Bean is able to provide consulting service for server and desktop virtualisation.. For more information on virtualisation please visit http://www.greencomputing.co.za.

Yesterday I needed to virtualise another one of our test servers to try out our proposed migration plan for virtualising some older production servers. I usually use Gentoo for the DOM0 domain with XEN because of the flexibility provided by building from source.

With the advent of hardware support for virtualisation in the Intel and AMD cpus it has been possible for a while now, to run windows OS as unmodified quest operating systems on top of Linux.

At our first Ferndale Linux User Group meeting on the 27th July 2007 I gave a brief presentation and demonstration of the virtualisation technologies available to Linux. The demo went relatively well although the grand finale of a live migration was not ready in time. I have attached the presentation below.