My x335 is dual Xeon 2.0, w/ 2 GB RAM, 2x18GB SCSI 10K drives, with Raid 1 on board. Max RAM is 8 GB in 4 slots. I got it for a song about 18 months ago, and have been looking for any easy way to ramp up on virtualization ever since.
The chips support HyperThreading, but none of the virtualization specific extensions, AFAIK.
Which, if any, of the virtualization platforms that Cloudmin supports would be best for this hardware? And will all recent Linux flavors automatically use both processors to the fullest?
I am hoping for a platform that is well documented and as nearly as possible "zipless", which make me think that perhaps Solaris and Zones might be the most mature of these? But Solaris would be completely new to me.
Or maybe the simplest next step is to just run VirtualBox? http://www.virtualbox.org/ but the Ubuntu 7.04 that's on there now would have to be upgraded...so many issues...
Thanks, Ken
If your goal is to use your own server, you'd probably have a lot of luck running CentOS 5.3 with Xen.
It's going to be simple to setup, lots of folks use that, and it won't require you to learn a new OS. Also, CentOS is ready to work with Xen out of the box.
There is always the option to use Amazon's EC2, if you ever discover your current box isn't high end enough; but bumping up the RAM there should really make a big difference.
The documentation is still being improved, but what's available today can be seen here:
http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/cloudmin