Hey
I've had my Microserver set up as an HTPC and general test box, but due to my tinkering nature I've run into an issue whereby I keep breaking it.
This was fine on my raspberry Pi, because I would just swap out my SD card and start again, but I'm trying to use the Microserver for real world use, not just testing. As such, I suspect it may be sensible to use Virtual Machines for individual tasks, that way if I **** up my web server, I only **** up my web server, not access to my storage, NAS, HTPC etc.
Since I'm using the Microserver as an HTPC, I need the base OS to be a desktop OS so that I can use a PCIe GPU with XBMC. As such, I run Ubuntu as the base OS.
What I'd like to do is use the server as XBMC and a VM host, with web-based access to the VM. I must be able to create, start, stop and delete VMs from within it, and ideally I'd like to be able to make snapshots and SSH directly into them. I'd really prefer it to be as beginner-y as possible to install/use, too: I'm willing to get my hands dirty to some extent, but the less automated it is the more I can balls it up: installing from apt-get and doing the rest from the browser would be perfect. I'd also like to be able to pass through a HDD to be used as a secondary drive in one of the VM's, as I intend for one to be my media/file server and it will obviously need access to my media drive.
Is there anything that does this for free or fairly cheap? It will be entirely for personal/noncommercial use, and I don't want to pay on a per-VM basis, although I'm happy to pay a small-ish amount.
The important points are that it must be web-based and run on top of Ubuntu, and that I can pass a HDD through to the guest OS.
Any suggestions/recommendations?
(NB: I specify KVM because when I tried to use OpenVZ with Cloudmin, it complained that something wasn't compatible. I'm willing to use any other virtualisation tool, VirtualBox etc, if they're easy to use/setup and compatible with my Microserver. I'm assuming ESXi is out because I want to run Ubuntu as the base OS, but anything else is fine)
I've had my Microserver set up as an HTPC and general test box, but due to my tinkering nature I've run into an issue whereby I keep breaking it.
This was fine on my raspberry Pi, because I would just swap out my SD card and start again, but I'm trying to use the Microserver for real world use, not just testing. As such, I suspect it may be sensible to use Virtual Machines for individual tasks, that way if I **** up my web server, I only **** up my web server, not access to my storage, NAS, HTPC etc.
Since I'm using the Microserver as an HTPC, I need the base OS to be a desktop OS so that I can use a PCIe GPU with XBMC. As such, I run Ubuntu as the base OS.
What I'd like to do is use the server as XBMC and a VM host, with web-based access to the VM. I must be able to create, start, stop and delete VMs from within it, and ideally I'd like to be able to make snapshots and SSH directly into them. I'd really prefer it to be as beginner-y as possible to install/use, too: I'm willing to get my hands dirty to some extent, but the less automated it is the more I can balls it up: installing from apt-get and doing the rest from the browser would be perfect. I'd also like to be able to pass through a HDD to be used as a secondary drive in one of the VM's, as I intend for one to be my media/file server and it will obviously need access to my media drive.
Is there anything that does this for free or fairly cheap? It will be entirely for personal/noncommercial use, and I don't want to pay on a per-VM basis, although I'm happy to pay a small-ish amount.
The important points are that it must be web-based and run on top of Ubuntu, and that I can pass a HDD through to the guest OS.
Any suggestions/recommendations?
(NB: I specify KVM because when I tried to use OpenVZ with Cloudmin, it complained that something wasn't compatible. I'm willing to use any other virtualisation tool, VirtualBox etc, if they're easy to use/setup and compatible with my Microserver. I'm assuming ESXi is out because I want to run Ubuntu as the base OS, but anything else is fine)
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