The groupmsl Virtualisation Effort

The gVE was initiated in 2014 to create a virtualised environment to replace the Raspberry Pi (original model B) server that I was running at home. I needed to replace the Pi because it only had a 100Mb/s network interface, and no SATA, so file trasfers onto and off on the USB hard disk were painfully slow.

The main requirements were:

• Low powered - as not increase running costs too much
• Quiet - because it will have to reside in the same flat as me
• Small - computers aren't exactly pretty...

The plan was to have a number of services running in a virtualised environment so that less downtime is needed per service if another service requires mainternance. Another aim was to be able to use the server as a desktop machine, with GPU passthrough. Ideally two desktop guests: Windows (as my wifes chosen platform) and Linux (my chosen platform). This is the tricky part and requires some configuring and special hardware/settings.

Initially Xen was used to configure this, back in 2014, and some of the details can be seen here. More recently, Qemu/KVM has been used to the same effect, details of which can be seen here