[lug] duping minimal vm question

[Charles Hutchinson]

On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:40:53 -0600
"Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 08:57 -0700, karl horlen wrote:
> > - what's the best way to install a minimal centos install on a
> > "master" client / guest vm?

One way that might work for you is rpath.  Many of the "appliance" VMs
out there use that to build the base OS for the application.  They have
an rBuilder online tool to create images.  You have several target
options for the images including vmware, Qemu raw file,
installable ISO, Amazon EC2 and most of the other major virtualization
platforms.

> 
> I've used VMWare and found it much harder to work with than KVM simply
> because I can do all the setup and management from the command line
> with the virt-manager tools.  Note that the virt-manager tools work
> with libvirt and qemu to do their magic.
> 


I have not done much more than dabble with virt-manager and KVM but I
manage a very large Vmware environment at work.  The enterprise
(costly) products have a fairly extensive suite of command line
management tools as well as several different published APIs and SDKs.
The enterprise management tools are quite
powerful but the reporting and performance monitoring options are
nothing to write home about.  I have been working extensively over the
last several months with the vSphere SDK for Perl.  The free Vmware
Server (GSX) has a more limited set of management tools but it can also
be managed with many of the enterprise tools later on if your needs
grow.  I have pointed a few of my reporting Perl scripts at my Server
install and received the expected return values that the ESX and
Virtual Center targets would return.  

All that being said the enterprise Vmware products are VERY costly and
almost all of the management tools are Windows based and require an
Oracle/MS SQL backend.  The rcli and the vMA (centos? based appliance)
are the exceptions.  Most of the rcli functionality can be had on a
linux host just by installing the vSphere SDK.  We do most of our
reporting from Perl programs running on a RHEL 5 server with cron.

Charlie