Virtualization

Introduction CSE 291 Virtualization , by Yiying Zhang , is one of my first courses that I have taken as a Master’s student at University of California, San Diego. We started from the basics of virtualization, progressed through different types and solutions, dove into containers, Kubernetes and serverless, and ended on a high note with cloud computing and its future. If you have read my previous posts, I have been using virtualization solutions for quite some time, for both work and play. But I had never really sat down to think how would one virtualize a whole system and what kind of complexity that would bring. The naive way to think about it would be “dual/multi boot, but together”, but that certainly leaves a lot to be desired in terms of explanation. While I had certain ideologies in mind for virtualization, they were lacking where the rubber meets the road, how does it work with existing physical hardware. ...

Motivation Docker recently updated its terms making the Docker Desktop for macOS and Windows free only for personal use. Any business with more than 250 employees or more than $10 million annual revenue needs to buy its Docker Business subscription. For me, the Docker Desktop was already a hit and a miss. It was great when it worked but a pain to troubleshoot when it did not. Also, it does not bode well when they make software based on open source tools paid after it was free for a long time. Now is the time to find an alternative for this. ...

Photon OS is an open-source minimalist Linux operating system from VMware, highly optimized for container workloads. Crazy fast How optimized is it, you ask? The minimal image weighs in at a tiny 470MiB, installs in 20 seconds, uses less than 1GiB of disk space after install, boots in 10 seconds (including the GRUB wait time!), and consumes less than 150MiB RAM after boot. It cannot get better than that (maybe VMware surprises me in the next release!). ...

While my NUC homelab handled what I considered “production” workloads using docker and compose, I wanted to play around with and learn Kubernetes. I understood most of the bird’s eye view concepts like pods, deployments, and ingress, but without much hands-on, most of it was fleeting. So I decided to put my spare RAM and CPU on my desktop to good use by installing a complete K3s cluster. A good part of my research was provided concisely on an excellent guide by Tom . ...

As you might have seen in my previous post, I now have an Intel NUC to set up as an all-in-one server. It should handle all the docker containers I previously had running on my PC and serve as a NAS. Other than that, I had plans for having an LDAP server and DNS server as a backend for Pi-hole. My initial thoughts were to use an Ubuntu server for everything that I mentioned above. But I wanted anything running on Ubuntu to be in the form of a container since otherwise managing configurations becomes a pain. I still had an option with the DNS server with powerdns and many web UIs for the same, but the LDAP server was a different thing. I could not find any good containerized LDAP server + web UI for it. ...