Create A Virtual Machine Network

Because of some problems I’m working on, I need some test machines with Windows and some Linux distribution installed. It is impossible to have so many machines or install so many systems on my laptop. So I use qemu to create some virtual machines and use virt-manager to manage them. Here is what I have now:

• My host: Archlinux, 64 bits, Core i3, 2G RAM, 2G swap.
• Guest 1: Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, 64 bits, 1 core, 512M RAM.
• Guest 2: Ubuntu 12.10 server, 64 bits, 1 core, 512M RAM.
• Guest 3: Windows XP, x86, 1 core, 512M RAM.

There are two points I’d like to say:

• Qemu with kvm is quite effective. I could start three guests (or more) at the same time and it works very well.
• Virt-manager is very easy to use. Before it , I waste almost a whole day to use qemu’s command line to put the three guests into a same VLAN.

I’m quite happy with these now. I could

• Try whatever Linux distribution I’d like.
• Do experiments in multi-host environment.
• Test whatever on any OS and need nothing to worry about.

After all, I want to say something about virtaulization. I think the only useful situation of virtaulization is testing, learning or trying to do something for fun. I’m not saying it is not important. When a technology could let us do some funny things, it will be really awesome and important.