The need of a Virtual Machine
I recently decided to migrate my dedicated server from Online to OVH and realized that installing a server is extremely painful.
Then I realized that one way to avoid this mess again could be to setup a Virtual Machine so that I could just move that VM to another host later.
How to do it with the command line?
There are plenty of tutorials which explain how to do so. But it looks like the options change every six months. So after hours of experimentation here is what worked for me:
mkdir /var/vms vmbuilder kvm ubuntu \ --cpus 2 --arch amd64 \ --rootsize 65536 \ --mem 4096 \ --hostname vm01 \ --ip 192.168.122.101 --net 192.168.122.0 --mask 255.255.255.0 --gw 192.168.122.1 --bcast 192.168.122.255 --dns 192.168.122.1 \ --user [USER] --name [YOUR NAME] --pass [PASSWORD] \ --suite trusty --flavour virtual \ --addpkg acpid --addpkg linux-image-generic --addpkg vim \ --mirror "ftp://ubuntu.mirrors.ovh.net/ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu" --components main,universe \ --libvirt qemu:///system \ --destdir /var/vms/vm01 virsh start vm01 virsh autostart vm01
- a VM with Ubuntu Trusty as Guest OS run by KVM and controllable with virsh later
- a NATed network with static IPs
(the doc doesn’t mention that you need to specify –net and –mask for –ip to be taken into account)
Note that 192.168.122.0/24 is the default IP range available so you kind of have to choose an IP in that range - An automatic startup