Re: Providing official virtualisation images of Debian
On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 12:27:09AM +0200, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote:
> I think it's sufficient for starters to provide images for stable
> (they can be updated for every few point updates if needed).
>
> What virtualisation solutions should be supported?
As far as I understand it, a VM is usually two separate things: a disk image
and a VM definition. We can probably prepare a disk image which is versatile
enough to work in a variety of VM technologies: i.e., have the correct drivers
and software for the majority of VM hardware (or commonly virtualised
hardware). This is probably pretty much done for us largely by the kernel
already.
The VM definition file is trickier. qemu/kvm essentially don't have one; you
would supply command-line arguments to the tool. virsh/libvirt/virt-manager et
al sitting on top of KVM have an XML definition. VMWare uses an XML definition.
I suspect VirtualBox does as well.
End users may want to customize many aspects of the VM definition (perhaps all):
not least, specific networking settings; amount of memory; CPU affinity etc.
Perhaps a Debian web service could spit out custom VM definitions alongside the
image file in a chosen disk format for users on-demand?
For starters, compressed RAW disk format is perhaps the most useful disk image
format (can be imported into virtually anything)
--
Jon Dowland
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