Dmitri on Virtualization

Virtualization is simple, that is the beauty. Everything that works in physical domain holds true in virtual world. You build a VM as if it was a physical box, or just run P2V to virtualize your PC, and ola! it all works.

But to take a full advantage of virtualization, there are hundreds of tricks to configure VM efficiently.

For example, a virtual Hard Disk may be marked independent; in such case it won’t be included in snapshots. I want to snapshot all your data? But how about the system swap partition? I don’t even want it to be persistent!

With Linux the swap file is on dedicated partition. Move it to a dedicated HF, make it independent/non-persistent. Do the same with Windows VM: add new 4Gb HD, configure it as independent/non-persistent, and move page file there.

Or, consider slimming down the OS. Again, that is no news for the Linux world. But why don’t cut some fat from chubby Windows? Mind you it is a lot of fat to loose: almost 50%. The installation of XP with 300Mb foot print, how is that? Not the limit! And after such “slim fast” program Windows can sprint: you should see it booting up!

For ideas on stripping down your Windows, check here and here (rulez!). Or, just fire your Torrent and get the Performance Edition here.

Using optimized and fine-tuned virtual machines can change your experience with virtualization. Keep on looking for secrets.

I was searching for companies offering Virtual Machine hosting. Turned out it is not plenty. And I got an impression that web hosting community is a bit behind on virtualization wave. For them virtualization is Virtuozzo more then VMWare. There is very very few offering of virutual hosting “powered by” VMWare, Xen or Microsoft.

I wonder why and keep the research to get to the bottom of this.

Technorati profile.

I finally managed to run my Subversion Virtual Appliance off the flash drive. It took a lot of trying and learning. The bottom line is it runs! and runs better then I dared to expect.

I use 4GB Kingston USB 2.0 jump drive. Performance was a biggest challenge to overcome. With trials and errors I settled down to using a single large .vmdk and formatting USB drive to NTFS, and performance boosted.

Now it works like this. I insert USB key. Few seconds - removable storage got connected.  Launch VMWare - another 5 seconds. The Subversion VM is kept suspended on the flash drive. Resume! - takes 15 seconds to bring it back up. At this point it is fully functional.

Rebooting VM is slightly slower,

Testing CheckOut: I  and got all 80 files (55Mb) to a new folder in 10 sec, exactly as when VM was running of the laptop harddrive.

The pay-off for NTFS is that now it takes time for the file system to commit the changes. So I need to wait for about a minute before the system allows me to “safely remove” the flash.  But I don’t mind.

The way it works now is absolutely exciting My source control appliance lives in my pocket, doesn’t pollute the system, run off any other computer, and easy to back up.

I love my Virtual Subversion. Except the hard drive size. 120G is ridiculously large for a virtual machine. Especially when I broke it by 2G peaces to run it off a flash-drive: I just couldn’t stand looking at these 60 .vmdk files!And I don’t think my repo would ever take 120G. If you think you would, check this out.

So I decided to resize the Virtual Hard drive to make it smaller, say 10 Gb instead of 120Gb. Resizing the drive is easy, as long as you expand it. But shrinking the virtual hard disk is as hard as then shrinking a physical one. Vmware-vdiskmanager can only expand. And don’t confuse –k option: it does shrinks the vmdk file, but doesn’t alter the Hard Disk size.
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