TinyCore VM Host environment

[sihorton]

I started off playing around with tinycore on virtualbox running on my windows PC a number of years ago. I eventually deployed a number of intranet web applications running in tinycore (LAMP stack) on a ubuntu machine with again virtualbox. Things have been so successful (running for many months without any failures or reboots) that I am moving over to always run on tinycore if we have the possibility.

What I love is that nothing is installed that you have not specifically added to the server so this greatly increases stablity, running in a virtual machine is also excellent as you can spin down one instance and spin up a new with updated packages in it.

I am now considering dropping ubuntu + virtualbox as the hosting platform and attempting to run tinycore on the bare metal but still have it run tinycore "virtual machines". What technologies would forum readers suggest that I try out. This will be used in a production environment with quite critical data so I would need established technologies. I have looked at kernel based virtual machines (KVM) but have no experience. Probably going to be running on modern hardware - 16gb ram and 8 or more processors.

What do you think the best solution is?

Sihorton

[Rich]

Hi sihorton
You'll probably need to run one of the 64bit versions of Tinycore to use that much RAM. Some forum members
experienced some problems with multi processor hardware. Go to the search page and search for   maxcpus

[sihorton]

Yes that is true. I know there used to be a multicore version of tinycore but don't see that anymore. However I did see a 64 bit version, not all of the packages are available for it, but I can probably compile the packages I need since they are quite standard (apart from the VM host stuff I guess).

[Rich]

Hi sihorton
Multicore is obsolete and not what you think it is. The core part of the name refers to Tinycore, not processor
cores, and in hindsight may have been an unfortunate name choice. There are two choices for 64 bit, Corepure64
which you already found, or replacing vmlinuz with vmlinux64 in your system. The difference being that using
vmlinuz64 allows you to use all of your RAM but the apps can only access 4Gbytes. However, you can use
all the apps from the 32 bit repository.

[curaga]

As long as each virtual machine needs less than 4gb ram, you can run a 32-bit qemu-kvm on a 64-bit kernel as Rich said.

[sihorton]

Thanks for the comments, do you know what the performance of qemu-kvm would be compared to something like virtualbox or kvm?

[curaga]

qemu-kvm = kvm, the tool has just been named differently, but it's the same thing.

KVM beats virtualbox in every benchmark I've seen. One link: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=1

[sihorton]

Yes thanks for that, looks like an interesting option to use qemu-kvm and it has been around for a long time now so that is positive as well.

Simon