I remember QEMU and how difficult it was so long ago. Today, the infrastructure, KVM and virt-manager make it trivial. Its just point and clock, I'm not kidding. Ubuntu and RedHat have excellent and the VM network is created by default. If you have virt-manager installed, it just works, its almost too easy.
I use ZFS to manage my VM images, QCOW is too slow. I can snapshot the VMs prior to any testing that might destroy it. > I did VMs at home a long time ago, and persisted through quite a few > generations of the technology (some Redhat paravirtualization I forget > the name of to QEMU SW emulation to real KVM), I learned a lot, but I > finally became exhausted. Getting the networking set up was always such > a pain. I would refer to my notes from the previous time I did it, and I > would figure it out again, but I didn't do it enough to have it ever > become easy. And then I still needed to set up whatever I wanted to run > inside each VM. > > And then there was the proliferation of cumbersome QCOW images I needed > to keep track of, and that was annoying. > > Maybe it has become easier, but I haven't dipped in recently, I don't > know the details. > > In this specific case the e-mail server (with a little shell use by me) > will be the only server thing I'll be running at the location in > question. Collapsing the whole thing down to (1) configuring Postfix and > Dovecot again* on a newer OS version and (2) putting 2-device ZFS raid > under it, seems a lot simpler without any extra virtualizing layers. > > * I lied. I also run a DNS server, so the e-mail server itself resolves > to the local NATed address when I am on that network. And I run DHCP > server because I want a few things at static addresses and whatever > internet router box I am using today is always who-knows-what-quirkyâ¦but > now that I have finally moved to openwrt, maybe I should move DHCP > there, heck, my current config files might be usable as-is. > > Maybe I'll later set up a second Pi 4 (if they ever become available > again at prices we used to think Pis should be) and do some ZFS send > stuff to keep it as some version of a ready spare. They could both sit > in the corner making no noise. > > -kb, the Kent who is currently waiting for components to arrive. > > > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
