[PLUG] Boxes running different distros - was: We need more Linux

[Larry Brigman]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Mike Connors <mconnors1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>> With decently fast hardware, you don't need a bunch of boxes - you
>> can do this with virtual machines, just like the Big Kids that
>> develop distros.  I think it would be way cool to build a host
>> with virtualized guests for every major distro out there.  It
>> might need a terabit of RAM, but that would be cheaper and lower
>> power than all the separate boxes.  At very least, you could
>> load perhaps 16 virtuals at a time, and smoke test software
>> in a lot of different distros automagically.
> True. I wasn't implying they would all be physical. Maybe a few physical boxes with a
> handful of VMs on ea. What's really nice about VM Ware is their community contributed
> appliances. I don't think Virtual Box supports this. Also, with VM Ware you can have
> comparable physical networking functionality between VM's with Cisco's dist. virt switch
> or Vyatta.

You can do it all on Linux with KVM, libvirt and virt-manager without vmware.
While you are at it setup a NAS box serving up iSCSI for the storage.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page