what vm solutions do people use

[Jason White]

Don Raikes <don.raikes at oracle.com> wrote:
> I need a vm solution as well, so if you could send any info on setup and usage, I would appreciate it.

It should be easy enough to find "HOWTO" guides on the Web, so instead of
duplicating what they document better than I can in a mailing list post, I'll
give the highlights here.

There are basically two approaches: you can run kvm from the shell, or you can
run it via virt-install and virsh, which also have the advantage of supporting
other virtualization solutions such as Xen. VirtualBox is from Oracle (a
former Sun project) and has an extensive command line interface also, but I
haven't used it.

If you wish to run Kvm directly (as you may for some of its accessibility
features), I would suggest reading the manual page and selecting command line
options appropriately. On my system (Debian), the qemu manual page is the
place to start - see also qemu-img for creating virtual disk images.

If you're booting an ISO 9660 image that supports text mode, you can run
Qemu/Kvm so that it provides terminal (curses) output. This can be very
helpful during installation; I've booted Grml this way.

The audio and braille display support should all be in the manual page.
Virtual serial ports can be configured too.

I hope this is a helpful starting point.