So I dug out the old web server from out of the attic and am in the process of setting it up as a dedicated VM server to reduce the use/load on my desktop.
I figured why let it sit in the attic and go to waste? It's a dual-dual core Opteron (2 x Opteron 2222 = 4 cores) @ 3.0GHz and I had a bunch of old SATA disks laying around. I put in a 300GB disk for the host/root/swap/boot and 3x500GB drives in RAID5 for the VMs. I figure that'll give me > 900GB of usable disk space (I set root's reserved space to 1% on the RAID array). The server only has 16GB of RAM, but as I'm only using half of the slots (8 of 16) and RAM is relatively still cheap for this type of machine (registered DDR2) I plan on doubling it to 32GB to allow more simultaneous VMs.
Anyway, I installed Gentoo Linux as the host OS and plan to use Linux KVM as the paravirtual layer. It'll be a few hours before I can install a test guest OS as I'm stilling installing required packages in the host. Although it shouldn't take more than a few hours as I setup distcc between the server and my desktop machine (Intel Core i7 @3.2GHz + hyperthreading).
On a different Linux note: I still can't get Linux to work correctly on my netbook/convertible (Dell Inspiron Duo 1090). It suffers from several issues: a random kernel panic when plugging/unplugging the power or plugging/unplugging from the dock (seems to be related to ACPI being confused about there being two AC adapters), the touchscreen doesn't work correctly (depending on the driver, it either doesn't register a mouse click or it registers the click in the upper-left corner of the screen), it doesn't recognize the dock at all if hot-plugged, the accelerometer (used to detect screen orientation changes) isn't recognized, and the list goes on! So unfortunately it's still running a very sluggish Windows 7 Home. Windows 7 runs fine on my full-sized laptop, but it's way too much for a netbook!
I figured why let it sit in the attic and go to waste? It's a dual-dual core Opteron (2 x Opteron 2222 = 4 cores) @ 3.0GHz and I had a bunch of old SATA disks laying around. I put in a 300GB disk for the host/root/swap/boot and 3x500GB drives in RAID5 for the VMs. I figure that'll give me > 900GB of usable disk space (I set root's reserved space to 1% on the RAID array). The server only has 16GB of RAM, but as I'm only using half of the slots (8 of 16) and RAM is relatively still cheap for this type of machine (registered DDR2) I plan on doubling it to 32GB to allow more simultaneous VMs.
Anyway, I installed Gentoo Linux as the host OS and plan to use Linux KVM as the paravirtual layer. It'll be a few hours before I can install a test guest OS as I'm stilling installing required packages in the host. Although it shouldn't take more than a few hours as I setup distcc between the server and my desktop machine (Intel Core i7 @3.2GHz + hyperthreading).
On a different Linux note: I still can't get Linux to work correctly on my netbook/convertible (Dell Inspiron Duo 1090). It suffers from several issues: a random kernel panic when plugging/unplugging the power or plugging/unplugging from the dock (seems to be related to ACPI being confused about there being two AC adapters), the touchscreen doesn't work correctly (depending on the driver, it either doesn't register a mouse click or it registers the click in the upper-left corner of the screen), it doesn't recognize the dock at all if hot-plugged, the accelerometer (used to detect screen orientation changes) isn't recognized, and the list goes on! So unfortunately it's still running a very sluggish Windows 7 Home. Windows 7 runs fine on my full-sized laptop, but it's way too much for a netbook!