Running Existing Gentoo Environment in Virtual Machine

mpsii · l33t Joined: 11 Mar 2003 Posts: 658 Location: Jackson, TN

How would I go about running my current existing Gentoo installation in a virtual machine? I am talking about an exact duplicate, most likely self hosted.

Purpose: test updates or other items before risking it ruining my current environment irreparably.
_________________
-----------------------------------------
Michael

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1144 Location: Romania

back like 15 years ago the only option was vmware.

then things changed.

now, at least on gentoo, the most convenient way is called app-emulation/qemu. also known as kvm. damn good software.

could also check out xen, vmware, virtualbox, hyper-v, and i guess many others.

but qemu/kvm is out of the box the most awesum thing ever.

mpsii · l33t Joined: 11 Mar 2003 Posts: 658 Location: Jackson, TN

I am familiar with KVM, VMWare and Virtualbox.
My goal is to get a near-exact copy of my current running system in a virtualmachine so I can do some playing with my "normal" environment to test/try new things without potentially messing up my "production" instance.
_________________
-----------------------------------------
Michael

russK · l33t Joined: 27 Jun 2006 Posts: 665

VirtualBox is pretty easy to use and has a simple snapshot feature.

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3129

Depending on your setup and purpose you may even be able to boot from a disk snapshot.
Much easier and safer to do with a "smart" storage that is not directly managed by your systems. SAN meets this expectation. Virtual machines with storage managed by hypervisor do. A single box with 2 physical drives does to some extent (it would be harder to do than just snapshot on a hypervisor, but I'm sure it can work)

Naib · Posted: Sat Jul 28, 2018 9:49 am Post subject:

do you need a full virtualisation or would a chroot be good enough?
you could make an ext4 file, mount it, rsync your system into it and chroot into it and it should "just work" (be it with the relevant mounts and copies as per the gentoo manual).

then the next time you want to test you can mount you "image" your image and chroot into it.
_________________