One advantage of the combination of Knoppix and Qemu/kvm is that it is not necessary to do any setup of a virtual machine to run Knoppix, and with Knoppix copies on separate partitions bootable with grub, one may simply run gemu/kvm on the MBR of the harddisk and pick the desired install from the ordinary grub boot menu. The actual partition should be mounted read-only at most, as it gets mounted on /mnt-system in the virtual machine.
One complication with qemu/kvm is only simple networking support out of the box: I can reach the internet through the host, default network-manager works just fine for that, but direct communication with the Knoppix guest system isn't set up. Furthermore, with wireless adapters, the traditional simple bridge techique doesn't work.
There are lots of ways to overcome this, and here I want to report just one rather simple, presented in the blog post http://yalb.blogspot.no/2012/04/wire...g-for-kvm.html
It uses the tunctl, from uml-utilities, and parprouted from parprouted
In this case, my internet connection is through a mobile router (192.168.1.1) and wlan0 (192.168.1.100). The guest must be on the same subnet.
I issued the following commands
Then I started qemu/kvm to boot an ordinary Knoppix PMI through grub:Code:sudo sysctl -w /net/ipv4/ip_forward=1 sudo tunctl -t tap0 sudo ip link set tap0 up sudo ip addr add 10.10.10.10/32 dev tap0 sudo parprouted wlan0 tap0
In the guest, disable network-manager's networking and setup the virtual eth0, as root:Code:sudo qemu -machine accel=kvm -hda /dev/sda -net nic -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=no -m 1024 &
Somewhat miraculously to me, this worked!Code:ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.99 up # Static IP echo 'nameserver 192.168.1.1' > /etc/resolv.conf # Use the nameserver of the host route add default gw 192.168.1.100 # Host IP
I haven't tried yet, but this should work for at least a few VM's, creating tap1, tap2 etc and using them instead of tap0.
This way, servers can be tested out or routinely run with qemu/kvm just by copying the KNOPPIX directory (to be precise, in this case KNOPPIX705R1, remastering 1 of 7.0.5) to a partition (which may contain just about anything besides), setting up a grub menu entry for the copy and run qemu/kvm.
My practical motivation for this is to run a database server and a web server on separate virtual machines, possibly an application server too. With three extra partitions, I can easily run three VMs simulataneously this way.
I have used VMware Workstation for this earlier, but this approach seems both simpler and more flexible to me. Plus I can spare myself the frequent VMware module compilation blues. (Workstation 8.0.5 works fine with Knoppix 7.0.5, BTW - Workstation 8.0.4 does not.)
Dell PowerEdge R720 Server - 2x8c CPU,256Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD/3x900Gb SAS, Proxmox
$340.00
HP ProLiant DL360 G9 Server 2x E5-2660v3 2.60Ghz 20-Core 96GB P440ar
$304.35
DELL PowerEdge R730XD 24x 2.5" Server Dual 750W Dual Heatsink - BareBones TESTED
$269.99
Supermicro 4U 36 Bay Storage Server 2.4Ghz 8-C 128GB 1x1280W Rails TrueNAS ZFS
$712.98
Intel Xeon E5-2697A V4 2.6GHz CPU Processor 16-Core Socket LGA2011 SR2K1
$39.99
Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.4GHz 35MB 14-Core 120W LGA2011-3 SR2N7
$17.99
Intel Xeon Gold 6126 2.6 GHz LGA 3647 Server CPU Processor SR3B3
$17.99
SR1XP Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 12 Core 30MB 2.5GHz LGA 2011-3 A Grade Processor
$5.09
Intel Xeon Gold 6144 SR3TR 3.50GHz 24.75MB 8-Core LGA3647 CPU Processor
$179.99
Dell T7810 Workstation 1x E5-2603 v3 8GB RAM Nvidia GPU No HDD OS
$100.00