Hi All,

Can anyone advise me which particular Linux distribution is most suited to acting as a KVM virtualization host. Last time I experimented with this was over two years ago so I guess things have changed a bit since then.

This will be on my main development/test workstation and will therefore be hosting various Windows and Linux virtualized partitions on the same physical machine as the KVM server host. About the only unusual requirement I have is to be able to use an nVidia dual-screen setup within the virtualized operating systems.

I have just created a test server using Microsoft Hyper-V and discovered the following items do not work as hoped for:
Dual screen - no support for this via Hyper-V
Audio - no audio except a half workaround using remote desktop
USB - no USB passthrough
SCSI tape streamer - no SCSI passthrough so no way of using SCSI connected tape drives from any of the virtual operating systems

As for which brand of Linux these are my thoughts so far:
Fedora - ok but has problems with nVidia dual-screen driver
CentOS - reputedly very stable but no cut-down version available.
Ubuntu - very low footprint version available but not sure about its general virtualization capabilities.

Any suggestions.

Thanks,

CentOS 6 would be a safe bet. Not sure what you really mean by "cut down" here, you can run it with a minimal installation easily enough, but there's precious little benefit really in striving to make things small for the sake of it.

By cut-down I just meant something minimal with the base basics necessary for virtualisation installed, without additional unneeded services etc. Intention being that the small the attack area the safer it will be.

I know what you mean, but so many people strive for needlessly small installation sizes. Don't install X, don't install apache, don't install Samba, but the underlying system still works the way it does, the kernel is still the same kernel, and ripping out individual modules isn't what CentOS is about, and I don't consider it important in the context ad what you're trying to do.

For Linux virtualization I run KVM in Salix XFCE, choosing the Basic installation option. Salix is a clone of Slackware. The Basic installation option is reasonably but not excessively minimalist. Because Slackware does not depart from the upstream developers' intentions you can follow the official documentation without hitting snags along the way. I find that other Linux distributions have a habit of tinkering with upstream releases, presumably to "improve" them. If anything all they do is unnecessarily muddy the water. I would be surprised if the requirements you have could not be met by Slackware or one of its derivatives. I found it very easy to set up KVM on Slackware, and with Software RAID-1 (increased read speed) and LVM (better than image-based) it is blazingly fast. Another advantage of Slackware is that the maintainer does not throw obstacles in your way if you want to update the kernel, or KVM, to the latest upstream version.

If you're after the bare minimum server distro, you can try out RHEV - there's a free eval program for two months. The hypervisor image is around 100Mb.
http://www.redhat.com/promo/rhev3/tryrhev.html

I guess you could build what you want at susestudio.com

Hard to beat esxi from vmware.

I forget the other one I wanted to tell about. Darn.

Yea but I want the host server to be on the same machine as the virtual OSs, ESXi is text mode only so does not allow that.

the host IS the machine... it makes no sense to say the vm's aren't on the same machine as the host... they'd have to be floating in mid air or something!

And generally you should never run X on a proper server, if you are, you're doing it wrong!

OK I probably didn't explain this fully. I am building a new main development workstation, this will have the host virtualization partition on it and will also run the virtualised operation systems on the same physical machine. I know not the ideal way of doing it but as this is my development machine that is what I am trying to do.

Well finally got CentOS installed and now starting to install VMs. However been a lot more difficult getting this far than I had hoped; had problems seeing NTFS drives, now solved, also can still not get access to windows network. I am beginning to wonder if CentOS is the best Linux distro for what I am doing or would I find the same dificulties with any of them. Would I find something more mainstream like Fedora easier to get working?