[clug] Virtual Machine 'farms'?

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi Alex

----- "Alex Satrapa" <grail at goldweb.com.au> wrote:
> Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using  
> VMWare or VirtualBox?
> 
> I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs  
> based on a 'template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off  
> fripperies such as USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can 
> then boot and take over using a configuration management system such 
> as Chef.
> 
> What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your 
> own virtual machine experiments? Are there any existing tools which  
> make this kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy experimentation relatively  
> easy?

At Open Query we have a few test/build environments that use VMs.
One type is on KVM and the other uses Xen.

Apart from other magic tools, it's fairly easy to clone an existing VM, all you have is some configuration and a disk image. With a disk image, you can of course mount it in the host or from another VM and change anything you like on the filesystem (like IP adress, etc).
That is fast and effective.

Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
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