[arch-general] Archlinux hypervisor

[C Anthony Risinger]

fellow patrons,

i am moving my company's in house platforms off of a mix of deprecated
soft virtualization solutions like openvz and bare metal installs -- i
have decided on using libvirt + kvm (in conjunction with cgroups for
qemu and possibly other uses).

i'm trying to use Arch for the host/hypervisor setups, for a couple reasons:

) very easy to roll custom initramfs builds
) shooting for a < 128MB 100% in-RAM diskless image (RHEV-H or ESXi)
) host is changed infrequently, and all-at-once (no need for
ongoing/stable repo support)
) i'm very familiar with Arch's initramfs setup, and with Arch in general

the other possibility i'm considering is Gentoo, but it's been quite
some time since i've used it :-/.  neither arch nor gentoo will be
used for guests (likely debian/ubuntu here).

does anyone have any experience/insight here?  the comparable
technology for RHEV-H for redhat, or ESXi for vmware.  i am looking
into the `archboot` setup for inspiration on a custom initramfs build
system.

primarily i'm just look for any pointers/information anyone may find
useful, not only on the image itself but also management and
configuration techniques.

thanks,

C Anthony