Playing with VMs on the network
Like many other geeks recently, I've been playing around with VMs under Linux. I don't like VMware (too intrusive, closed-source stuff irritates me, possible GPL violations, etc), and Xen isn't something I want to play with yet either (again, really invasive). So I'm experimenting with KVM/Qemu. Qemu was awfully slow unless I had KQEMU loaded but then Windows crashed with KQEMU loaded. KVM works well but my n00bism in this area begins to show.
I've got everything working except one thing. The networking I'm using is the built in KVM/Qemu user-mode networking, which is fine for a desktop system, but if I want to do anything involving servers, I'm out of luck. I can't test new services without being able to get to them through the network. I've done reading up on the various KVM/Qemu networking options, but again I get into the area of "invasive changes to the host system" and I use this box for so much more than VMs that I don't want to muck it up too much (Can't exactly snapshot/rollback the host). I've read up on the TUN/TAP method, but what looks more interesting is VDE (I'd like to test multiple VMs simultaneously) but I can't make it work (No traffic passes between the host network to/from the VM), and I don't want to NAT everything on the host, because then I can't get to the VMs. So I'm back to square one.
Basically what I'd like to do is add VMs to the network (Same subnet as everything else, but I'll accept another subnet with a gateway if that's what it has to be) without mucking up the host too badly. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks for your time.
I've got everything working except one thing. The networking I'm using is the built in KVM/Qemu user-mode networking, which is fine for a desktop system, but if I want to do anything involving servers, I'm out of luck. I can't test new services without being able to get to them through the network. I've done reading up on the various KVM/Qemu networking options, but again I get into the area of "invasive changes to the host system" and I use this box for so much more than VMs that I don't want to muck it up too much (Can't exactly snapshot/rollback the host). I've read up on the TUN/TAP method, but what looks more interesting is VDE (I'd like to test multiple VMs simultaneously) but I can't make it work (No traffic passes between the host network to/from the VM), and I don't want to NAT everything on the host, because then I can't get to the VMs. So I'm back to square one.
Basically what I'd like to do is add VMs to the network (Same subnet as everything else, but I'll accept another subnet with a gateway if that's what it has to be) without mucking up the host too badly. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks for your time.
