Light weight Distro for VMs
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I have an old PC that I would like to run a VM on, but under Windows, it’s going to be heavily dogged.
I’m looking over some of the various light weight distros as options to be able to run one or more Linux VMs; piHole or AdGuard and so on.
This would likely replace the rPi that is the printer server and UBNT controller.
Is a light weight distro going to handle a VM host system?
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Define lightweight.
What's the hardware specs?
How much resources does the VMs need?
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@gjacobse said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Is a light weight distro going to handle a VM host system?
Why not pick your favorite flavor of Linux based OS and start with a minimal install and only add what you need? That should be light enough, no?
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@Pete-S said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Define lightweight.
What's the hardware specs?
How much resources does the VMs need?
Lightweight; puppy Linux, lxle, lubuntu, Linux mint.
- GUI not needed.
Off hand- I don’t recall. I dropped the box in the garage almost two years ago.
Again; piHole or AdGuard, print server, UBNT controller....
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@Obsolesce said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@gjacobse said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Is a light weight distro going to handle a VM host system?
Why not pick your favorite flavor of Linux based OS and start with a minimal install and only add what you need? That should be light enough, no?
Maybe- worth looking into. My concern is the COU and MEM.
I’m not upgrading this thing
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Ubuntu server with cockpit and KVM is probably as light weight as you'd need. The types of services you're talking about wanting to run don't need any sort of high performance.
But why replace an rpi with a VM, other uses planned for the rpi?
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@DustinB3403 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server with cockpit and KVM is probably as light weight as you'd need. The types of services you're talking about wanting to run don't need any sort of high performance.
But why replace an rpi with a VM, other uses planned for the rpi?
Fedora Server minimal install is a good lightweight base. Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
I don't like most distributions that are made to be very lightweight because they are hard to work with. IE: Puppy Linux, forget running 90% of the software your used to having available with it, at least not without great deals of unnecessary complexity.
I agree with @DustinB3403, why put this old power hog in place of the Raspberri Pi? It'll cost you way more in just power use.
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@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@DustinB3403 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server with cockpit and KVM is probably as light weight as you'd need. The types of services you're talking about wanting to run don't need any sort of high performance.
But why replace an rpi with a VM, other uses planned for the rpi?
Fedora Server minimal install is a good lightweight base. Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
I don't like most distributions that are made to be very lightweight because they are hard to work with. IE: Puppy Linux, forget running 90% of the software your used to having available with it, at least not without great deals of unnecessary complexity.
I agree with @DustinB3403, why put this old power hog in place of the Raspberri Pi? It'll cost you way more in just power use.
Some of the really light weight stuff uses busybox and boots from compressed images and what not.
Otherwise a minimal install of debian is the least resource demanding of the major distros.
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@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@DustinB3403 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server with cockpit and KVM is probably as light weight as you'd need. The types of services you're talking about wanting to run don't need any sort of high performance.
But why replace an rpi with a VM, other uses planned for the rpi?
Fedora Server minimal install is a good lightweight base. Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
I don't like most distributions that are made to be very lightweight because they are hard to work with. IE: Puppy Linux, forget running 90% of the software your used to having available with it, at least not without great deals of unnecessary complexity.
I agree with @DustinB3403, why put this old power hog in place of the Raspberri Pi? It'll cost you way more in just power use.
Good to know.
Why replace the pi - only so much it can run at one time.
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I had an old Acer Veriton Celeron "desktop" one of those really small, underpowered ones with I think 8GB ram and a 500GB spinning rust; I had VmWare ESXI 6 running on it and had enough power to run 2 small VM's no issue. Have you thought about ESXi? was low electric usage (50 w peek maybe). Got rid if it when the hard drive crapped out.
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Assuming it installs, just use the current Proxmox VE, the minimal overhead it adds will at least let you still learn a modern toolset for managing KVM.
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@JaredBusch said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Assuming it installs, just use the current Proxmox VE, the minimal overhead it adds will at least let you still learn a modern toolset for managing KVM.
Proxmox has 2GB as minimum recommended RAM for the hypervisor and then whatever you need for the guests.
I guess if you have 4GB RAM you would have 2GB to run a couple of tiny VMs.
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@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
What do you find difficult about a minimal Ubuntu install versus Fedora minimal?
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@Obsolesce said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
What do you find difficult about a minimal Ubuntu install versus Fedora minimal?
Nothing in the installer. It's managing things after install. Having the enabled-sites and available-sites for Apache configs is one example.
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Alpine Linux would probably be best lightweight distro. It's the most popular base for docker images, it supports KVM, so it should work in your scenario.
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@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@Obsolesce said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
What do you find difficult about a minimal Ubuntu install versus Fedora minimal?
Nothing in the installer. It's managing things after install. Having the enabled-sites and available-sites for Apache configs is one example.
I'm not sure I understand what you are thinking about with that one. Debian/ubuntu have tools to enable and disable sites and modules and have had for many years. Do you mean it's harder to use commands than editing configuration files manually?
Also it's actually not obvious at all but the different directories for the apache config files are just include files to make it easier to manage. If you don't like it you can just use one httpd.conf for everything.
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You might be able to getaway with using a minimal install of Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora and use containers.
Pihole and AdGuard works great as containers.
You could also us Proxmox and instead of full VM, just use lxc.
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@Pete-S said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@Obsolesce said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
What do you find difficult about a minimal Ubuntu install versus Fedora minimal?
Nothing in the installer. It's managing things after install. Having the enabled-sites and available-sites for Apache configs is one example.
I'm not sure I understand what you are thinking about with that one. Debian/ubuntu have tools to enable and disable sites and modules and have had for many years. Do you mean it's harder to use commands than editing configuration files manually?
Also it's actually not obvious at all but the different directories for the apache config files are just include files to make it easier to manage. If you don't like it you can just use one httpd.conf for everything.
I know this, but it's still more complex than Fedora/CentOS where you just have different .conf files. Why add the additional steps? It's not like it would prevent someone from messing up a config file!
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@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@Pete-S said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@Obsolesce said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.
What do you find difficult about a minimal Ubuntu install versus Fedora minimal?
Nothing in the installer. It's managing things after install. Having the enabled-sites and available-sites for Apache configs is one example.
I'm not sure I understand what you are thinking about with that one. Debian/ubuntu have tools to enable and disable sites and modules and have had for many years. Do you mean it's harder to use commands than editing configuration files manually?
Also it's actually not obvious at all but the different directories for the apache config files are just include files to make it easier to manage. If you don't like it you can just use one httpd.conf for everything.
I know this, but it's still more complex than Fedora/CentOS where you just have different .conf files. Why add the additional steps? It's not like it would prevent someone from messing up a config file!
Yes, it's more complex but it's because it's more modular. And requires less commands and is faster if you know how it works. It's only more complicated when you have to look where things are. So when you're distro hopping it's sometimes confusing.
Both approaches has it's pros and cons.
Back in the day debian had an apache config file that was just one file, httpd.conf and that was it. Very simple because you had everything in the same place. But I think they changed it simply because it became unwieldy when trying to administer many hosts on the same machine. It's not uncommon to see hundreds of domains and even thousands on the same server at a hosting company for instance.
It's actually pretty easy to put everything back in one config file or a couple, if you wanted to. The more modular layout of the config files isn't something that is compiled in, it's just include files and symlinks. So you could delete the whole shebang without any problems and make it identical to rhel.
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@gjacobse said in Light weight Distro for VMs:
This would likely replace the rPi that is the printer server and UBNT controller.
there are server tasks. The concept of a "light" distro is a reference to desktop releases, not servers. Servers, by definition, are already lightweight.
