best virtualizer to install Ubuntu on a Slackware server
 

Hello!

I am wondering what would be the best virtual machine application (virtualizer) to install Ubuntu (or a variant) in an existing slackware 13.1 server?..

I need to install a mirror of MusicBrainz onto my current slack server but the instructions to setup the musicbrainz mirror are purely targeted for a Debian based OS and of course not Slackware friendly. I first tried to follow the instructions at https://github.com/rembo10/headphone...cbrainz-Mirror but once I reached the cpan dependencies, I got caught in an endless loop of dependencies, inter dependencies, sub dependencies, etc with a significant amount that wouldn't compile...

Anyways being fed up I decided to opt for plan B, the virtual machine. Of course I need the Virtual machine to be totally transparent to the rest of the network and have its own IP address so it can be reached from any machine on the network as much as Headphones running on the slackware server (the host OS)...

Which virtualizer do you suggest? Qemu? VirtualBox? other? Or if someone can help with installing the Musicbrainz onto my existing slack server, that'd be great!

Thanks!

Depends on your scenario: I use Virtualbox on a desktop for testing purposes and banking. There it starts only, when needed, not as a service. On my server, that runs 24/7, all virtualization is done with openvz and runs permanently.
Virtualbox virtualizes hardware, the guest is independent from the host. Openvz virtualizes an OS: each openvz VM and the host use the same kernel, although openvz VMs are able to have seperated nics with their own MACs, quotas, processlists, etc. Openvz may virtualize only linux, while under Virtualbox you are free to run any OS. Virtualbox comes with a nice installer, that even builds the necessary kernel modules. Openvz needs a patched kernel and can sometimes be a bit tricky concerning network configuration. Virtualbox takes much more resources than openvz does, you are able to virtualize significantly more machines under openvz.
Both solutions are very reliable and stable and appear fully transparent in a network as physical machines.

OpenVZ seems to be more or less what I would need... But it seems rather unfriendly to install (setup) and use.. It requires kernel modifications and GRUB modifications that I am not so willing to perform as my server has been running totally flawlessly for 3 years now...

I will keep searching and in the meantime if anyone does not agree openvz is complicated please share your experience or advice I am looking forward to hear from experienced people.

Thanks!

I don't think openvz is much more complicated than VBox is, it's different (but VBox seems to be better documented). A big advantage of openvz to me is the fact that the filesystem of a container ("VM") is accessible from the host (you can mount folderstructures/filesystems from the host directly into the container) and its really lean consumption of resources.

If you have to run VBox headless, you have to pass a similar learning curve as with openvz. There are some graphical tools for openvz (if you don't like CLI), which probably make things easier.

What prevents you from keeping your old kernel parallel to the patched one?

Absolutely nothing.... Its just that my experience with the OSS stuff has been VERY clear: if ain't broken, dont fix it (or as funny as it sounds, upgrade it). This applies to nearly everything I have tried. I believe this is why my server is probably the most reliable appliance in my house. I installed it, configured it, fine tuned it and after about a year, I have reached a point where I can pretty much forget it and it does its job perfectly.

On the other hand, I have installed Ubuntu in a VBox VM on my main desktop computer. After a few minutes or so, I made up my mind: I really dont like ubuntu. This pretty much solves the problem with playing with it in a VM. Upon login in, I tried to follow the "so-called" ubuntu procedure from headphones' github on how to setup a musicbrainz mirror and I got stuck with GPG errors, packages that couldnt me found, mirror problems, etc. After about 30 minutes browsing the web and finding forums where people had experienced similar problems, I decided I had lost enough of my time and decided to get rid of it.

Bad start for a new OS that I dont have any time to learn right now. This Musicbrainz stuff is more or less a temporary thing as headphones is right now useless to me as it cant retrieve database info from musicbrainz due to server abuse from the code.

I guess I have been using Slackware for too long now.

I am now considering to either find an alternative project to headphones, or attempt to install a musicbrainz mirror on my slackware server. This would be the ideal solution as I already have much of the required technology installed and running.

Make a VM and install whatever. All over in 30 minutes, or less.
Perfect for "more or less a temporary" situations.
Don't forget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtu...1.vbox-extpack