Amahi Virtualized

	WARNING
	This is recommended only for advanced users, proceed with caution.

This section will document how to run an Amahi HDA in a virtual server environment and such related concepts.
[ Anticipate this page evolving over time. ]

Related Amahi Wiki Reference:

• KVM Virtualization in Linux (with lib-virt, etc)
• Turning your current server into a KVM-capable host (also with lib-virt, etc)
• Amahi in a VM (short intro)
• VirtualBox on a Fedora 12 Host
• Setup VMWare Server on a Fedora 14 host
• Setup PHPVirtualBox - requires VirtualBox already setup
• Amahi Forums - Virtualization Section

Preliminary - Planning and Host Guidance

If you're about to embark on making a virtualization host computer for your Amahi server and other servers you wish to run on the same hardware, then please go ahead with this preliminary guide.
If you already have a host or hypervisor setup and working, then you have a lot of work taken care of already, and you just need to read about whichever one is hosting your HDA. For this you should skip the shortlist below and go straight to the "Options: Amahi Virtualization" section.

1. Decide why you want to virtualize - while beneficial for having many servers and optimizing hardware usage, it does require more computer power and isn't always compatible with the things you might want to do with your VMs, such as CD-ROM pass-thru.
2. Gather quality hardware and check everything. Something as simple as a bad RAM stick will wreak havoc on your VMs.
3. Don't immediately move your production/important files or apps to your new VM. You must test for at least a day or so, and have a comfort level before relying on your VM inside your new virtualization host.
4. Decide ahead of time if you intend on using Greyhole drive pooling or not, with your Amahi VM. This will change how you, A) setup your hypervisor/host and, B) how you setup Amahi
5. Suggested hardware for a hypervisor to run at least 4 VMs would be
   - quad-core CPU or more
   - 8GB of RAM (gives room to grow)
   - lots of storage, across several drives (consider your base OS, and then the VM images themselves, and possible additional storage images or entire drives)
   - Gigabit NIC (at least one, strongly suggested at gigabit speeds to accommodate traffic from several VMs.

Options: Amahi virtualization...

• inside Oracle Virtualbox (VirtualBox Forum)
  - Generic setup
  - with greyhole
  - without greyhole
• inside Proxmox VE (Proxmox Forum)
  - with greyhole
  - without greyhole
• inside VMware ESXi (ESXi5 Forum)
  - with greyhole
  - without greyhole