[PLUG] help for setup of virtual machine

[Arun Khan]

On Saturday 15 Aug 2009, mihir tailor wrote:

> One of my friends has recently started classes for teaching C.
> He has a pretty decent rig and now he wants to use that pc
> for setting up a lab for his students to practice C programs on.
> he is on a very tight budget and cannot afford to setup multiple pcs,
> so he know wants to know whether he can use Virtualization on fedora
> 11 and setup multiple systems using KVM.

To implement hardware based virtualization your friend needs the correct 
combo of motherboard and CPU (Intel-VT or AMD-V).  This due diligence 
is necessary on your friend's part.  KVM and openvz (wiki.openvz.org) 
both require it.

KVM is a good choice if your friend plans to have different kinds of 
guest OS like other Linux distros, Windows, and even Mac OS X (with 
some hacks in qemu).

openvz will replicate the host OS in a VM.  KVM or openVZ, I would 
recommend going with a server centric platform like CentOS.

>
> His Configuration is as follows :
> AMD Athlon 64 x2 64 bit Dual Core Processor @ 2.6 GHz
> 2.00 Gb RAM (1.87 Gb usable due to onboard graphics card.)
> 160Gb Sata Hdd + 80 Gb Pata Hdd.

What is the total no. of students he want to support with this hardware?

From what I understand the above hardware will not support KVM or 
openVZ.  He may have to opt for VMWare and also up the RAM to 4GB; to 
get decent performance.

The best option may be to use this PC as a terminal server with thin 
clients (figure 6K for the client and 5K for LCD panel plus 250 for low 
end kbd/mouse).

> The System is currently running Windows 7 and Fedora 11.
> My question is is it possible to setup such a system ? Please help.

-- 
Arun Khan