Re: [Sheflug] Debian -- Upgrade Etch => Lenny

[Chris J <cej@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 October 2008 00:19:56 Chris J wrote:
> 
>> Unfortunatly VMWare Player doesn't pick-up the SMP nature of my system
>> (only one CPU reported in /proc/cpuinfo): probably a restriction of
>> Player. Anyone any experience of Player vs Workstation? (i.e., is it
>> worth forking the cash out for Workstation).
> 
> I haven't tried either of those, but I have used VMware Server, which allows 
> you to say how many processors you want to run the image. And it's free, as 
> in beer.
> 

Pulled this down last night (half a gig(!)) for a look: even though I have
a beefy box here at home, I still object to having upwards of 200MB of
memory dedicated to having other stuff running to support management tools,
and other components [tomcat, various interface services to bridge audio,
USB, etc]. This is probably more a problem with having Windows as the host:
just out of curiousity - what's the overhead for VMWare Server on a Linux
host?

So it's been revoked, unfortuantly, and I'm poking with VirtualBox instead,
hosting two Linux VMs (one 32-bit, one 64-bit). So far, quite impressed.
Doesn't do the SMP stuff, but it happily guests 64-bit machines and it's
fairly lightweight overhead (~20MB for the management tool, when it's
running, a static ~35MB in a supporting service, then about ~50-60MB per VM
from what I can tell).

It has been a bit funny though: it's taken about 4 installs to get a config
 that works safely. I've had a number of hangs when installing Debian Etch
x64 netinst... just stopped dead in the middle of doing things (installing
apt; installing kernel packages) forcing a system reset, and poking with
the VM options. Not sure what caused it -- didn't spend to long with it,
but I now have (seemingly) a stable install.

Virtulisation ++good. Now to get the VMs starting at boot.

Chris...


(just for completeness -- if anyone even considers Microsoft Virual Server
as a host virtuliser, just back away from the keyboard. I have the
misfortune to deal with it at work and it's fairly fragile: when it works,
it's okay. But it doesn't seem to take much to cause something odd to
happen - like complete loss of network bridging, or Administators who can't
authenticate - the best cause of action is uninstall/reboot/reinstall the
entire suite)

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \
 \ cej@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx          \ Quidquid latin dictum sit altum viditur
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  \
   \ http://redclaw.org.uk/        ~--------------------------------------



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