After reading some posts on the slimdevices forums regarding virtualization, I’m intrigued.
Idea is to install a VERY minimal linux OS, which is only a kernel, an ssh server and VMWare. And run all the distinct servers as VMs.
Questions on this however, are not in short supply.
-Should the file management/RAID system be part of the base install, or should it be a VM?
-How fragmented should this get? Does each application get it’s own OS/vm?
-What are some good guidelines to set this up under?

The one big advantage is manageability of the VMs. Apparently one can view the boot process of the VM OS from a remote location. Need to figure out how that is done.

For the softsqueeze server machine, (audio server) this might not be a good option because audio might be hard to be acessed through a VM layer. At least in VMWare.
I will want control of the different audio outputs of the card/mobo at a hardware level, which won’t happen with VMware.
Also thought about running MythTV as a virtualized process (knoppmyth) by that also is out of the question (at least with vmware) since there is no access at the hardware level, of the capture card… very unfortunate.

The beauty of VMs is that they can be deployed on ANY pc, regardless of the underlaying hardware.

EDIT: Having thought a bit more about this, I might be able to still take advantage of this setup.
I can run all the web services off a VM.
Things like Web, ftp, torrent, servers can be on a VM and the base OS can handle the RAID system, and maybe even MythTV backend?

EDIT 08March2007: wondering if I can run FreeNAS as the base OS, (since it’s like 25-20MB) and it can take care of the physical HDs, and manage serving of files, then install vmware-serever on it, and run all other OSs virtualized…?