New server and virtual machines

After three years it was time to move the server (under which this blog is hosted) again. Now we get eight times the memory for the same monthly price, not bad indeed. The newly setup environment makes heavy use of virtual machines and this is the topic of this post.

A friend of mine and I once already managed a server that consisted of virtual machines handled through Xen. Setting up the base hypervisor (the operating system under which the guest virtual machines run) was a major PITA, especially on a remote machine where you do not have access to the boot manager.

Now fast forward to today, I’m using Ubuntu 9.04. Most of the work was done by just installing ubuntu-virtual-server and ubuntu-vm-builder. The former setups a virtual environment (using KVM) with a virtual network hub where the new virtual machines will be connected on a private subnet. Adding a new virtual machine was more or less invoking ubuntu-vm-builder which states the name of the vm, its distribution and size and then starting it with virsh start name-of-the-vm. Afterwards you’re already able to login to the virtual machine through SSH, add some routing rules on the host machine so that the virtual machines are accessable from the internet and you’re done.

Later on I’ve found some other capabilties of the virsh tool: pool and volume management. Alas while it was able to detect and view my LVM partitions I was not able to dynamically attach one volume to a VM, but maybe this will function soon.

Another nice tool is virt-manager. This gtk-application allows to connect to a remote host running ubuntu-virt-machine. You’re then able to monitor and alter the settings of the network, guest virtual machines and volumes from a graphical tool, also there’s a VNC/console forwarding for accessing the remote machine even if the network dies or is misconfigured.

All after all I must say that I’m impressed with the usability progress..

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