[lug] duping minimal vm question

[Lee Woodworth]

On 06/03/10 09:57, karl horlen wrote:
...

> i haven't decided which virtual manager to use yet but i'd like to roll out a server which isolates one vm per client.  each client would basically need a minimal lamp stack for a website but nothing else.  i want to keep it as simple as possible. questions:
> 
> - what's the best way to install a minimal centos install on a "master" client / guest vm?
> 
> - once i have that master guest, is it possible to simply use it to dup multiple future guests based on teh master?  if so, how easy is it?  
> 
> - i'm also wondering how many vm guests i can realistically expect to rollout on this server before performance suffers?  i know that's going to be fairly subjective based on the performance requirements of each guest website so guess i'm on my own here.  anybody have a formula / method to estimate usage to quantify this before setting up the vm guests?
> 
> fwiw, i imagine each virtualization implementation has it's own method[s] so i don't need specifics unless you want to share, especially since i haven't picked my vm implementation yet.  but if you feel one VM is generally better than another overall or at guest vm duping per scenario above, info appreciated.
> 
> thanks

As a data point: I have a KVM guest running that handles outbound HTP proxy, DNS, SMTP
and runs well when given 500M. The 500M is overkill for normal usage, but there are times
when the additional memvery is needed. The total RES usage reported by htop for the KVM
process on the host is ~590M (Using AMD-V features of the CPU).

I can't say anything about virtual instance managers as this VM needs to run all the
time and is started from init.d at host boot.