On Wed, 30 Nov 2011, Mr. B-o-B wrote:

> On 11/30/2011 9:39 AM, kelly cried from the depths of the abyss:
>> I have been running Libvirt with the KVM / Qemu Linux hypervisor.  I have had 
>> success with Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2003, and many instances 
>> of Linux without issue.  I have not done any BSD installs to date, so I can't 
>> speak to a BSD install under KVM/Qemu.
>> 
>> The drawback with the virt-manager tool is that it seems to be Linux only 
>> (someone tried a port at one point, but I can't seem to find it).
>>   The virsh shell rocks via ssh session from your smart phone though, so
>> you might not need it.  Recent Ubuntu server releases make it simple to
>> install by adding it as a pre-defined package selection for a VM host
>> during install, but it might be good to set it all up under Slackware so
>> you know all the moving parts :-)
>> 
>> Kelly Black
>
> Thanks for the tip Kelly!  I am in the process of consolidating my test 
> environment at work, and I think I am going to give this a try. Slackware is 
> always my default, so this should work well.  I am happy to see 2008r2 works. 
> A couple of my test boxes need that and other flavors of M$, and the rest are 
> mainly Slack boxes.  All my test boxes are running on VMware workstation, or 
> a pile/stack of old desktops turned server.  Not ideal, and I need to stop 
> the insanity.
>
> The timing of this thread is amazing.  I just finished ordering a bunch of 
> parts to refresh a recently unemployed HP server over here just for this 
> purpose.  I was going to give VMware vSphere 5 a try, but this looks like it 
> more up my alley.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Bob
Here's a +1 for the libvirt setup.
I too have been using libvirt/qemu-kvm on Ubuntu Lucid at my day job.
For servers virt-manager (a graphical tool) didn't buy me anything. It's fun on 
the desktop, but all the servers (linux) are set up to talk to the serial 
console which you can get to with the virsh command, 'console'.

It's been about a year and a half since we started using it and we're still 
moving servers to this environment.  The quick boot is a big selling 
point for me. I guess I have about 25 guests now. 
I've been very satisfied.  I can do a command line install by a simple 
modification to the netboot iso but more often I just create the image from a 
base image and a template xml file.

I installed Windows7-64 on it on my desktop to debug an application this past 
week using the standard company image and it's been running fine. I failed to 
get that image to load in VirtualBox and switched to kvm just to try it. It 
worked. (our environment did require a bridged interface to allow Config Manager 
and other pieces of the MS toolset to work.)

I can access it with vnc localhost so virt-manager is still really not needed.
Certainly good enough for what I do on Windows but I can't speak to whether I'd 
run a bunch of Windows servers on it.


Gerry