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General software and network General OS-independent software and network questions, X11, MTA, routing, etc. |
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multibooting versus virtualization?
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Last time I had a dual boot system was sometime in the 90s. On the other hand, I have multiple VMs running on the PC I'm typing this on. Back when dual boot was very common, PC hardware was not powerful enough to run multiple VMs. Today, most people have quad-core CPUs, gigabytes of RAM, fast SATA or SSD disk, etc. You can run OpenBSD in a very small environment. I run it on multiple 128MB VPSes, on small platforms like the Soekris 4801, the Beagle, etc. So it can certainly run quite nicely in a small VM. Even if you want a graphic environment, OpenBSD does not require much. Likewise, if you want to be able to go back and forth between, say, Windows and a Linux desktop, you might find that modern VM platforms such as Virtualbox, VMware, etc. offer pleasant full screen experiences. |
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...which warrants its own thread. This digression has been separated from the following parent thread:
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.p...2394#post52394 |
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Each to his/her own. My present OpenBSD 5.6 box isn't a beast, it is a Dell Optiplex GX620 running a 2.80 GHz processor with 2 GB of RAM. It runs XFCE very well. I dual boot Slackware64-current and OpenBSD 5.6 on this box. I can run virtual machines on this unit, but, prefer to run a metal install.
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hitest |
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Dual/multiple OS booting has no practical purpose. I am not a big fun of virtualization but it has some useful applications. However virtualization except maybe Jails should not be used for basic network and file services. Those should be run only on the bare metal.
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I can think of use cases for multibooting. At work, we have laptops used by different people, and people have their own preferences for which operating system they want to use. In addition, at home, I prefer FreeBSD on my laptop, but there are a few things, such as teamviewer and google voice that only work on Linux.
I would say, at least here in the US, going partially by hearsay and partially by what I saw when job-hunting last year, as well as experience at my last job, that VMware is becoming much more common for production servers. I would (very respectfully) disagree that nothing but jails should be used for network or file servers, and would trust both KVM (on Linux, at least, haven't used it on FreeBSD in many years) or VMware in production. I wouldn't use VIrtualBox to host multiple production servers, I'm not sure if they're aiming to make it something to be used for that or not. For me at least, VBox is good for quick testing of something, having that Windows install for the one thing that might not work in a BSD or Linux, and so on. |
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False.
Lastly, bare-metal testing is still the gold standard in verification. Testing only in virtualized environments is considered a sloppy practice. |
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Hard hack
I switch drives, on my laptop it requires a small screwdriver, spare laptop drive, and an antistatic bag-for storage. On a desktop this generally easier with any case that has room for an extra drive. Flash drives are pretty cheap these days too. A 500GB 2.5 drive is only ~$60 right now and after that throw the old drive in the anti static baggy the new drive comes in. And I seem to dig up junk laptops from friends and family, often times the drives are still good.
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I dual boot for the following reason. I use FreeBSD as my desktop (word processing, browsing the web, paying bills online, emailing, etc.).
My day job requires me to program in a Windows environment and to work remotely I have to connect to our VPN that only supports Windows machines. For this I have a Windows 7 instance in Virutalbox. This way I can do my personal stuff and work at the same time. I also dual boot in Windows 7 because when my grandson comes over he likes to play 3D video games and try as I might I cannot get any of the more current games to run through a Virtualbox instance. I also use Virtualbox to play with OSes that I'll probably never use for more than a few weeks such as Plan 9.
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick |
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So Oko, going back to KVM, is your distrust of it from experience or more a feeling? I ask because here in the US, at least, I believe a lot of companies put a lot of reliance on it--I know that the popular VPS provider DigitalOcean uses it.
My use of VBox is similar to Rod's, as well as, as I mentioned, having a Windows install for a few things. |
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The newest fad is not virtualization anymore, it is Linux containers which is like FreeBSD jails. Also see Docker that builds on LXC.
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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump |
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I grabbed the list via script, then reviewed the output. Both our primary and secondary DNS servers were in the list. I quietly removed them. Boss comes back and says, "you know, the list was very nearly complete...why didn't you include ns1 and ns2, though? They're very low overhead and would virtualize nicely!" I explained, he laughed and said "this is a state of the art VMWare installation! It won't go down!" I quietly copied our core zone files to my workstation and installed bind...just in case...and created a cronjob to sync the zone files every evening. A few months later, we had an issue with one of the AC units in the DC, I called the building maintenance guys and told them to go shutdown unit "A". When I arrived, they'd shutdown unit "B", and the DC was over 105 degrees. VMWare shutdown (along with pretty much everything else in the DC). Now, bringing up a network without DNS is a fun experience when VMWare won't start because it can't reach the virtualized VMs that are running your core DNS. Luckily, I had the zone files, was able to fire up BIND on my workstation and bring everything back up...but it scares me to think what would have happened if I hadn't thought to copy those zone files =) Edit - I'm an AWS employee, so I obviously fall on the "virtualization is useful" side of the fence. But, as Oko pointed out, there are some things that are best left to bare metal...
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Linux/Network-Security Engineer by Profession. OpenBSD user by choice. Last edited by rocket357; 21st December 2014 at 08:43 PM. |
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Do you really trust KVM that much? Do you really want to really on the single point of failure for so much of your work? I really don't! Last edited by Oko; 22nd December 2014 at 01:05 AM. |
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Last edited by Oko; 22nd December 2014 at 02:54 AM. |
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You bring up a good point Oko, and one we're having to consider for our jails as well. Interesting comment about the pricing though, though there's also power cost, space, and so on, but definitely food for thought. Actually, it's not KVM that I mistrust so much as the single point of failure, which applies to jails too.
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Tags |
docker, freebsd jail, kvm, linux container, virtualization |
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