[arch-general] Archlinux hypervisor

[Matthew Monaco]

On 11/22/2010 11:41 AM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:
> 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
>

How important is the stability of your system? Will you be able to build custom 
versions of packages when security updates are released so that you don't have 
to start upgrading everything?