Virtualization gurus: seeking advice

[SteveRiley]

Two new Thinkpad laptops coming my way this week. A svelte X1 for traveling and a behemoth T520 for doing some lab/testing work. Naturally, Kubuntu will go on both. The big guy will be my primary work machine, thus I'll also need a Windows VM. Sigh.

Anyway, I was thinking that I'd try a different route: run a thin server OS with hardware virtualization as the base, and then run two VMs next to each other: one Kubuntu and one Windows. The T520 will have 8 GB RAM and two 256 GB SSDs, so I think it'll be beefy enough for this. Has anyone here built such a system? Any preference for the base OS and a particular virtualization product?

[GreyGeek]

Sounds like something that the VMWare Server offers. It installs on the naked hardware. It boots first then boots the VMs.
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/d...are_server/2_0

[SecretCode]

No (have not built such a system) ... but have thought about it.

The main headache I predict is that the emulated graphics adapter may fall somewhat short of native capabilities ... considering that graphics adapters are one of hottest areas of innovation (even if only driven by the needs of gamers). If you like your compositing and alpha blur and so on, you might be disappointed. otoh you might find plasma and kwin more stable

fwiw I'm running kubuntu 11.10 as a host and windows 7 as a VM using VirtualBox, and it's fine - even with attaching an external monitor at home and (quite often) a data projector at work. But the VM does not do transparency behind the Windows 7 task bar or anything.

VMWare may be better at this; I haven't used it for years.

[SteveRiley]

Kubuntu as host with Win7 in a VM... that's what I'm doing now. My main interest in the alternate route is primarily educational: I want to see what it's like. Two potential problems I immediately foresee are the lack of cross-VM copy/paste or volume mouting. The second one might actually work, I really don't know. The first one -- I'd be quite surprised if it were possible.

Graphics adapters... well, the T520 is blessed/cursed (chose your adjective) with Optimus. I honestly have no need for super-whammy graphics, I hope Lenovo's BIOS allows me to shut it off completely and just use the Intel HD 3000.

[SecretCode]

Copy/paste ... should work between VMs just as well as between a VM and a host app as long as the barebones server implements a clipboard. My feeling is they are generally aimed at running server images not desktop images, so that might not be a priority. But your mission is clear: try it out and report back in this thread!

well, the T520 is blessed/cursed (chose your adjective) with Optimus.

[SteveRiley]

Erp! FedEx just deposited a pair of ThinkPads (a ThinkPair? ) at my front door. Aaah! What to do tonight...KFN theme or install-fest?

[GreyGeek]

Need you ask?

Watch a movie, of course!

[ronw]

Watch a movie?! But some of us are also waiting on a new laptop to ship, and waiting for steveriley to do the hard work and report.

[bsniadajewski]

Maybe install-fest whilt you watch a movie

[SteveRiley]

OK, I am completely and overwhelmingly impressed. Feeling brave, I removed the SSD from my T410 and put it in the new T520. Powered it up, booted, but KDM failed to start so I ended up at a command line. Pretty quickly I figured out why.

Fortunately, Lenovo has left the BIOS/UEFI fairly open. First thing I did before the above was to power up and go directly to the BIOS/UEFI setup. I disabled UEFI, AMT, the TPM, WiMAX, and the fingerprint reader. And Optimus! I could switch off the nVidia completely. Yay!

Continuing... I always purge all the various Xserver-xorg stuff that isn't needed on the machines I build. So it was a simple sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel to get the Intel graphics drivers back. Then I purged nvidia-settings and nvidia-current, and deleted the left-over xorg.conf. After next reboot, KDM goodness!

My next step was to test the existing Windows 7 VM that I'm currently running in VirtualBox. The VM wouldn't start; the error log showed nothing useful ("VBOX_E_INVALID_VM_STATE" returns a zillion hits on Google). But within a few moments I found one post that suggested editing the VM's .vbox file and setting the video acceleration parameters to false. So I did that and the VM started! I shut down the VM and re-enabled acceleration. Given that the hardware and the underlying OS's video drivers are different, it's reasonable that VirtualBox needs to reconfigure acceleration for the VMs. The VM now works just like it did before.

So while I'm not currently running my proposed setup, I was able to move an operating system built on one machine over to another machine and get it to work with minimal effort. This is truly astounding. I seriously doubt it would have been that easy with Windows.

So no movies, guys...I'm not that good of a multi-tasker! Plus, this stunningly beautiful 16" 1920x1080 LCD is taking all my attention. Coming from a 15" 1440x900 LCD requires font size adjustments, you know. Oh, and then watching apt-get pull down KDE 4.8 goodness was quite nice, too.

One remaining issue: there's a slight boot delay; dmesg shows:

sriley@SRiley-T410:~$ dmesg |grep ata1
[    1.316994] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf2628000 port 0xf2628100 irq 44
[    6.668692] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   11.310697] ata1: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   11.630300] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[   11.630824] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) succeeded
[   11.630826] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) filtered out
[   11.630875] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
[   11.631228] ata1.00: ATA-7: INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC, 2CV102HD, max UDMA/133
[   11.631297] ata1.00: 312581808 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
[   11.631875] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) succeeded
[   11.631890] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) filtered out
[   11.631939] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
[   11.632286] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

A bit more Google-fooing and I'll get this figured, too.

[GreyGeek]

...
this stunningly beautiful 16" 1920x1080 LCD is taking all my attention. Coming from a 15" 1440x900 LCD requires font size adjustments, you know.
...

When I switched from my mpr675 Gateway with an 18" display to my Sony with the 16" display I felt like I was looking through a tunnel, which took a week or so to get over. When I switched to this Acer 7739 with a 17.3" display I felt at home again. The older you get the bigger you want your screen to be so that you can use a larger font!