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Virtual Machine Manager Question.

WarrenUK
WarrenUK Posts: 72
edited February 2020 in LFS201 Class Forum - Discontinued

Hi.

Is there anyway to create a VM using VMM without having to dedicate a huge amount of HD space to it?

I made a CentOS minimal install VM but I could only install it if I dedicated about 10GB. This is crazy. I am only using 10% of that space running it.

Is there anyway around this? I could do with installing Ubuntu Server as well but my laptop only has 64GB HD. So at the moment I am out of space.

P.S. my laptop is running Lubuntu 19.10.

Comments

  • coop
    coop Posts: 917

    when you did the install you had an option about using a fixed amount of space (which is the default) or having it expand with time. THen it would be smaller, but with time it might grow anyway (even if the disk looks smaller in the OS, it will get bigger as the vmdk. You can run a tool to shrink it back later.

    However, a minimal install will not give you a good experience with this class, and 10 GB would have been more than sufficient for a full install. If you really want to not use disk space use AWS free tier and get a small machine without a GUI which is what you have with a minimal install, but there some things you can't do in a cloud machine.

  • luisviveropena
    luisviveropena Posts: 1,343

    Hi Warren,

    That's not crazy, in fact these are the minimum/recommended disk space requirements for CentOS:

    Recommended minimum requirements (Minimum/Recommended disk space)
    CentOS-6 CentOS-7 CentOS-8
    1G/5GB 10GB/20GB 10GB/20GB

    You check the source document here:

    https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product

    Regards,
    Luis.

  • WarrenUK
    WarrenUK Posts: 72

    Thanks guys.

    Is it possible to run a VM that is stored on a non root drive? I tried to set the storage space as a folder on a NTFS drive and I had permission errors and the VM would not install. It was a bit of a crazy stupid idea.

    If I shrunk the drive and used a 50GB space formatted to ext4 to install a VM via VMM would it work?

    My system is Kubuntu 19.10.

  • luisviveropena
    luisviveropena Posts: 1,343

    Hi @WarrenUK ,

    Is it possible to run a VM that is stored on a non root drive? I tried to set the
    storage space as a folder on a NTFS drive and I had permission errors and
    the VM would not install. It was a bit of a crazy stupid idea.

    Oh, as far as I remember, it's not a very good idea to write on a NTFS partition while you are on Linux. Since some time ago we can do it and it's supported, but there would be some permissions errors. Look at this:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/9arp9t/how_reliable_is_using_an_ntfs_drive_under_linux/

    So I'd avoid to use a NTFS partition to work with a VM from Linux.

    If I shrunk the drive and used a 50GB space formatted to ext4 to install
    a VM via VMM would it work?

    Do you mean to re-use the NTFS drive, shrunk it and use for the VM? That should work!

    Regards,
    Luis.

  • WarrenUK
    WarrenUK Posts: 72
    edited February 2020

    Yes. The drive is still the NTFS drive but I have shrunk the drive to leave 50GB of unpartitioned space at the end and I want to partition this space as ext4.

    I have been playing around with formatting a spare usb to ext4 using gparted and I seem to remember that it was owned by root and I could not write to it using Kubuntu GUI and my account. I had to using a terminal and sudo to write to it as root. How would I format the unpartitioned 50GB space on the NTFS harddrive to ext4 without root owning it but instead having my user account own it?

    Thanks.

  • coop
    coop Posts: 917

    a normal user cannot create, change or format partitions (thank god!). Please remember this is is not a real time help desk, posting multiple posts within minutes means (at least for me) I am unlikely to answer until the full group of posts is done. Do more research and thought first, if possible . Carving space out of an existing disk partitining scheme can be difficult depending if it is the main disk and we specifically don't really talk about how to do this since it is easy to brick your system and we cannot anticipate all possible scenarios.

  • WarrenUK
    WarrenUK Posts: 72
    edited February 2020

    I've read into it a bit more and I think I understand what to do.

    Yes sometimes I should think before posting. Haha. After I had posted the previous post It popped into my head which direction I should be thinking/travelling.

    I'll try and post only questions that are strictly in the boundaries of the LFS201 course in future. There are many guides on the internet for questions outside of this.

    Cheers.

  • coop
    coop Posts: 917

    posting tangential questions is fine if they may be of interest. It is just that overly frequently posting is counterproductive :wink:

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