KVM Hypervisor Distro?

[dabeast]

For those of you that use KVM as your hypervisor what distro do you use?

 

P.S. I'm not interested in unRaid at this time.

[Opask]

There is no specific distro. You can use whichever you feel comfortable with.

The Arch Wiki has a lot of info on it but it should apply the same for any distro minus the package names.

Assuming you want to dedicate a lot of your host's resources to the guest you will probably want something light weight so arch is a good choice for that. And this is definitely not something that you are going to want to do if you are a total noob because you have to do things like blacklisting kernel modules and most of the stuff involves the CLI.

Also good choice on not wanting to use unraid. Protip: its shit.

[dabeast]

There is no specific distro. You can use whichever you feel comfortable with.

The Arch Wiki has a lot of info on it but it should apply the same for any distro minus the package names.

Assuming you want to dedicate a lot of your host's resources to the guest you will probably want something light weight so arch is a good choice for that. And this is definitely not something that you are going to want to do if you are a total noob because you have to do things like blacklisting kernel modules and most of the stuff involves the CLI.

Also good choice on not wanting to use unraid. Protip: its shit.

Lately I have been using Mint with MATE as the window manager however I don't think I want to go full blown like that just for the hypervisor.

 

I was leaning towards just a basic debian setup or centos I wasn't even thinking of arch but i'll give it a look. I still haven't decided on the window manager to use (if any at all).

 

I'm just mostly see what others use if any.

 

Thanks

[Opask]

Lately I have been using Mint with MATE as the window manager however I don't think I want to go full blown like that just for the hypervisor.

 

I was leaning towards just a basic debian setup or centos I wasn't even thinking of arch but i'll give it a look. I still haven't decided on the window manager to use (if any at all).

 

I'm just mostly see what others use if any.

 

Thanks

Like I said go without whatever you feel comfortable with. Regardless of what you want to set it up on the arch wiki is going to provide valuable information. I guarantee that it will be more useful then the wiki for whatever distro you choose except for maybe Gentoo.

Good luck.

[Heller64bit]

There are many, many choices for a hyper-visor, just depends on your needs.

For a stand alone, personal desktop/bare metal hyper-visor setup with KVM & QEMU, I would lean towards CentOS or Ubuntu MATE personally. And If I understand your statement "P.S. I'm not interested in unRaid at this time." to mean you're not interested in a dedicated hyper-visor server, then any answer I give will be null in that regard. However, for the sake of disclosure, I personally run Proxmox VE as a headless Hypervisor server. Proxmox is a dedicated Debian based, Linux Hypervisor that uses both KVM+QEMU for bare metal virtualization and OpenVZ for container virtualization and has for the most part worked out great.

Unlike UnRAID, Proxmox is free to use on an evaluation basis with unlimited time, has an enterprise repo, access to which is free as long as the current version is supported and continued access is included with a paid support subscription as well (around $5/mo for base). Since it's based on Debian, it gets access to Debian repos and security updates as well.

 

Hope you find your solution, virtual environments are awesome with today's modern hardware. Cheers!

  

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

If you want a web gui look into proxmox. I also use centos due to its long support cycle.

[jasonvp]

On 1/19/2016 at 1:26 PM, dabeast said:

For those of you that use KVM as your hypervisor what distro do you use?

 

I don't think this is going to show up properly given the apparently lack of formatting options, but:

 

harleyquinn# cat /etc/centos-release
CentOS Linux release 7.2.1511 (Core)
harleyquinn# virsh list
 Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------
 10    router1                        running
 11    router2                        running
 12    switch1                        running
 13    switch2                        running
 16    vm1                            running
 17    vm2                            running
 18    vm3                            running
 19    vm4                            running
 20    agg                            running
 33    lb1                            running