Re: Instant Xen guest (guest-magic tool)

[Steve Kemp <steve@steve.org.uk>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 12:17:47PM -0400, Gaurav Maheshbhai Patel wrote:

> Well good to hear that you are working on same kind of project.
> I was wondering about your suggestion. If we make a copy/snapshot of it. Then Installing fresh copy of Some linux distro....
> 1) How can we do that? 

  Depends on the type of distribution you've got.  For Debian dom0 you
 can use tools like debootstrap to automatically install fresh copies
 of Debian inside a directory/partition.  Similarly you could use a tool
 like rpmstrap to install copies of CentOS.  (Though rpmstrap is very
 fragile and prone to breakage).

> 2) If we do that then, doesn't it take the same time to installing new distro on guest?

  I don't fully understand what you're asking there.  If you're using
 a tool like rpmstrap, or debootstrap, then it'd take a few minutes to
 install (or more depending on your network link).

  If you had several Linux distribution images locally you could do
 a copy in a few seconds.

  (That's what we do at work - we have a collection of configured Linux
 distributions mounted read-only, and we simply copy those into new
 guests automatically.  The process of installing Gentoo, Debian,
 Ubuntu, or CentOS takes only a few minutes - but it does rely upon
 you creating the "source" installations manually first.  There are
 a small collection of fixups applied after the copy to setup unique
 IPs, hostnames, etc, but otherwise the new copies are basically 
 clones of the centralized master copy of each distribution.)

> Also have you looked at the snap shot of guest-magic on sourceforge.net? 

  Yes ..

> Well IP assignment is still issue there because of short deadline of the project. But we are still going to do that.

> Also, can you please tell me about what are you working on? 
> Might be it helps us some what

  xen-tools :

    http://xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/

  Developed and used primarily upon Debian GNU/Linux, but apparently
 portable to things like CentOS and Fedora Core.

Steve
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