Is Gentoo the ideal distro for KVM virtualization?

[Nick_C]

Just wondering how suitable Gentoo is to use as a workstation virtualization Host for mainly Win7/Win2008 virtual machines. As a complete noobie to Gentoo and a very junior Linux person, I am wondering if Gentoo is overly complex for my needs.

I am looking for a Host to run Virtual Machine Manager (latest version with USB support) / KVM-QEMU / libvirt on my Workstation. This doesn't need to do much apart from act as the VM host, with working multi-screen graphics and bi-directional sound in and out of the VMs.

By the way the path which has lead me to look at Gentoo is:
Tried numerous distros but most suffer from very slow install of Win7. The only one which doesn't is CentOS which is blindingly fast for a Win7 install, however CentOS does not support the latest virt-manager release which I require. So still looking at other distros.

Any opinions.

[NeddySeagoon]

Nick_C,

It works for me. I can't vouch for the USB or Sound as my KVM host is headless, keyboardless and mouseless. Its also located in my Garage.

Using Gentoo for your KVM host install will ensure you learn and understand what you are setting up. That takes time and it took me a few goes to get right.
If you just need/want install and go, Gentoo is probably the wrong way for you.

Heres my lessons learned. Thats not complete, its as mutch I I have written up so far.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[swcodfather]

Nick_c, if you want a really easy desktop solution then you are probably looking at something like Ubuntu , Debian , Mint or Fedora. They each have their own advantages and drawbacks, but they are easy to configure and set-up and all run well as a desktop. As you have a specific requirement for a particular version of virt-manager and libvirt, then I would check which distro's support that.

You might also consider using Virtualbox, which is also mainly open source, runs on pretty much everything, and is one of the easiest ways to virtualize any other OS on a Linux workstation, just a thought.

However, if you have already set-up and are running Gentoo, then it offers many advantages with regards to what to you are actually running and of course performance.

I tend to use Virtualbox on the desktop and KVM/XEN/OpenVZ on servers.

hth

Nick

[direwolf]

I use gentoo and use KVM a lot for running VM guests. It works for me because I also want to use the desktop while I have VMs running. If it wasn't for that, I would recommend VMWare ESXi. The hypervisor is free, and so is the basic GUI management tool. But - the hypervisor takes over the host. You don't really get a head, other than a hacked terminal when you HAVE to use it (although it's very rarely needed).

If you want to use virt-manager, I can't recommend gentoo. You will spend a lot of time getting it to work, there are lots of requirements and prerequisites and specific configurations just to get it to run. Other distros will get it running for you out of the box.

... Dire
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