For some time now, my old Thinkpad T42 has been running as a lightweight server at home. Some people think I’m a bit mad using a laptop as a server, but my vague reasons are a) they’re generally quiet, b) they don’t use a heap of power, c) the battery is in some ways a built-in UPS and d) whenever I’ve tried to take a regular desktop system and make it quiet I end up spending lots of $$$ on various quiet fans and power supplies only to be moderately satisfied with the results. To me, an old 2nd hand laptop is generally better value. Of course, you can’t fit many disks into laptops, but with the T42 I discovered that even though the primary drive has to be a 2.5″ IDE drive, you can fit a large 2.5″ sata drive into them by buying a sata HDD caddy (look on ebay).

Anyway, I have Debian Lenny on the T42 with several OpenVZ containers for things like Asterisk and a mercurial server. In addition it’s a streaming server, as I have two internal drives plus a large external 3.5″ USB drive.

The T42 is getting old, and I’d like to be able to run KVM on it … because basically I like KVM, but KVM needs a VT capable CPU. So I kept my eye out for a cheap 2nd hand VT capable laptop. I ended up buying a 2nd hand Thinkpad R60. This is probably one of the ugliest Thinkpads ever made which might explain the good price I got it for. I certainly wouldn’t buy one to lug around, but sitting on a desk at home quietly running a number of VMs is all I really wanted. It has a T2400 core duo (not core 2) cpu. Technically it is ‘VT capable’, but its a bit of an odd one (which probably applies to the T2500, T2600 etc) in that its not a 64 bit CPU like most other VT cpus. Other than being ugly and having an odd CPU, this R60 does have a lot going for it; 3GB of RAM, DVD burner, firewire, wifi, bluetooth, cardbus and expresscard slots (so I could add an esata expresscard device to add some highspeed desktop drives later on). And the HDD caddies I had for my T42 also fit in the R60.

I originally tried Ubuntu 9.10 on the R60, but the version of qemu they use in combination with KVM actually does not work properly on this old T2400 CPU. I could seemingly install a guest OS, but after reboot I had errors galore. Something to do with the ‘No execute’ bit I think. Anyway, this was yet another case of ubuntu quickly irritating me, so I ended up installing something else. Back to Debian Lenny. And of course VM’s work fine under Lenny and it’s older KVM and older qemu tools.

So far I’ve just run debian lenny 32 bit and Windows 2008 R2 32 bit in some KVM VMs. Both seem to run quite well. The laptop has 3GB of ram, so I can run quite a few VMs at the same time OK. I’ve migrated my asterisk installation from the openVZ container it was in on my T42 to a KVM VM on the R60. It works quite well.

One thing that does bug me about using KVM is the lack of easy to use snapshots. ESXi spoils you in the simplicity of it’s snapshots on running or shutdown VMs. You can use them for backups or easily roll back to them. However, KVM has a haphazard collection of tools that don’t quite do the same thing. virt-manager offers no option for snapshots. If you use virsh instead it does have a ‘save’ option to snapshot a machine … but it seems to always shut the machine down when it runs. If you don’t use libvirtd to manage your VMs and instead use kvm directly, then you can interact directly with the qemu monitor of a VM and it has a savevm option which does something akin to a snapshot, but everytime I’ve tried it on a live VM, it pauses the VM for several minutes which is somewhat annoying. The closest thing to ESXi snapshots that I can think of is to use logical volumes for the VM’s virtual disk, then use LVM snapshots to create snapshots of them. These aren’t full ‘state’ snapshots that include a ram snapshot etc, but are probably good enough for my purposes. The tricky part is rolling back to a snapshot which is not really supported with logical volumes out of the box, but you can do it with something like the dm-merge tool.

I also tried Fedora 12 on the R60. The motivation was that the version of KVM on Debian Lenny is old, and Fedora 12 has quite a number of new features of KVM including better qcow2 performance and something that looks for identical memory pages in VMs to reduce memory usage. This latter feature appears as some ksmd daemon that seems to hog 50% of one CPU. Very annoying, so I killed it. I was hoping that the qcow2 enhancements might solve my ‘snapshots’ issue, but so far it doesn’t look like it. I need to investigate more. In the meantime, I’ll go back to Debian Lenny on the R60.

Of course, I did try running ESXi on the R60. ESXi 3.5u4 seemingly worked perfectly on it. I didn’t’t need any fancy DIY network drivers. It just picked up the internal broadcom gigabit and was able to see the two internal drives. The only problem is that I get a Purple screen of death when I try do a shutdown (some error to do with ACPI, and setting acpi=off in the kernel options does not help). However, if you tell ESXi to reboot it reboots as expected (UPDATE: I have just tried ESXi 3.5u5 … and is has the same purple screen when you attempt a shutdown). I didn’t bother trying ESXi 4, as I am pretty sure that needs a 64 bit CPU.