Virtualization Rocks
April 3rd, 2009
I’m not looking to get into a big discussion of what virtualization is, so I’ll steal a quick summary from wikipedia:
In case of server consolidation, many small physical servers are replaced by one larger physical server, to increase the utilization of costly hardware resources such as CPU. Although hardware is consolidated, typically OSes are not. Instead, each OS running on a physical server becomes converted to a distinct OS running inside a virtual machine. The large server can “host” many such “guest” virtual machines.
Ok, that reads a little bit complicated. I have complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) installations running from inside of my Fedora desktop as if they were all on their own machines by themselves. They connect to my internal network just like any other machine, getting their own IPs and being able to connect to my Spacewalk server running downstairs in my family room. From the network point of view, it can’t tell the difference and looks like I have a ton more computers in my house. That’s a good thing, since with the warm weather coming the single desktop I have in my office is enough to generate a small tropical climate as it is already.
Pictures don’t do justice to how cool looking this is. I use a dual monitor setup, so a fullsize screenshot would end up at 3360×1050, just a bit bigger than the annoyingly thin fixed width theme I have on this site (seriously, once this semester ends and I get back some free time, this shit has to change). However, I’ve done my best to capture the total awesomeness of my desktop right now. Click the image for a larger-but-not-fullsize version.
That’s two RHEL 5 installations running on top of Fedora. The terminal is SSHed into one of them, so I don’t actually have to use the GUIs.
The coolest part is that it was dead simple to set up. I used two links, the first for the majority of the installation and the second for the bridge configuration to the network:
