I describe here an automated installation procedure to easily create Ubuntu virtual servers on the KVM hypervisor, using vmbuilder.

All the attributes of the virtual server will be defined in configuration files, so we will be able to reproduce and tune our server configurations later. Using this technique, complete server stacks can be provisioned. In this example we will create a virtual server for Drupal development. We apply some performance tuning for the install process, and the automated install of a new Drupal developer server can happen in 10 Minutes.

You will need an Ubuntu box with KVM and other tools for this exercise. How to get the proper environment with KVM working on Ubuntu 9.10, check this Howto.

After the new version of Ubuntu (9.10 or Karmic Koala) has been released, I put here a short status on Drupal 6 packages in Ubuntu.

The good new is that there is a package for Drupal 6 in most recent Ubuntu versions:

• Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) has Drupal 6.10
• Karmic Koala (9.10) has Drupal 6.12
• Lucid Lynx (10.04) - not yet released - has Drupal 6.12

How to install KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), 64 bit edition (x86_64).

We implement here the virtualisation philosophy of Ubuntu: we use KVM as backend virtualisation technology, libvirt as its toolkit/API, and the frontends for managing VMs include will be virt-manager (GUI) and virsh (CLI).