It would be nice to have an easy to use, Turnkey, ISO to install a Virtual Server system, such as Xen.  I've been wanting to get into VM, but Xen seems a little daunting at the moment.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Although Xen is probably an unlikely candidate as guest OS don't run nicely OOTB from what I know. I too looked at Xen initially when building a headless VM server but discounted it for a range of reasons (complexity being one of them).

It does seems likely that a Headless VirtualBox Server ISO will make it into the part 2 release of TKL v11.x (although that has been significantly delayed a number of times so not sure when that'll happen - soon hopefully). In the meantime prior to the official appliance being created you could apply the patch provided by Rik (see the forum thread here) or download his precreated ISO here. VBox may not really be what you are after though?

Otherwise it is likely that a TKL 'Meta-appliance' may be produced at some point which will support installation of numerous TKL guest appliances onto a single bare metal machine. However it is likely that this setup will make use of LXC (or OVZ) container style virtualisation which only supports Linux OS (so again may not suit your needs).

Failing those possibilities I can highly recommend ProxmoxVE. It is a commercial grade (free and) open source hypervisor OS based on Debian which installs from CD (downloadable ISO). It has an easy to use WebUI and supports 2 types of virtualisation: OVZ (container style - Linux only) and KVM (full virtualisation - any OS). It also supports clustering OOTB so you can have multiple hardware nodes running and migrate live VMs between the hardware nodes, as well as live backups.

I use PVE both at home (for my personal fileserver and other TKL appliances as well as development) and at work (I have virtualised all our server infrastructure under PVE). There are others here that have tried PVE and I'm yet to hear any serious complaints.

Jeremy Davis's picture

But I haven't looked. Personally I prefer Debian/Ubuntu anyway so have had no desire to look any further. And besides personal preference, why does it matter? They offer commercial support if you wish to use it in an enterprise so it shouldn't really matter.

Thanks.  I'll look into the options that you suggest. 

Noah's picture

I recommend Proxmox VE as well. I run it and it is absolutely fantastic.


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