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).

How to install VMware Server 2.0.1 (build 156745) on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

Go to the VMware download page. Login or register, and you also get two license keys: one for VMware install on Linux hosts, the other one for MS. Download the TAR file for Ubuntu, I use the 32 bit version of VMware Server 2 for Linux Operating Systems.

Then we need to install some Ubuntu packages in order to be able to compile the VMware code:

Even in the Ubuntu Server 9.04 there is a nice LAMP option with Apache, PHP and MySQL, some more steps are necessary to turn Ubuntu Server 9.04 into a real Drupal development environment. After these steps, you will have a development server, where all Drupal versions, unlimited number of domains and development projects can be set up. Use this tutorial to get a more sophisticated Drupal development environment. And don't forget, there is a simple way in Ubuntu 9.04 for Drupal 6: sudo apt-get install drupal6

Thanks for Markus Heberling and Luigi Gangitano!

With some scripting on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) we can simple generate fully customised Drupal LAMP development servers, as virtual appliance to VMware, or to other virtualization environments like XEN or KVM. In this how-to I'll show how to use this method to have various development or test servers in one hardware box running Ubuntu 8.10 and VMware Server 2.0.

I'm using a machine with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and VMware Server 2.0, as my host system. VMware Server 2.0 install on Ubuntu 8.10. can be learned here or here. We will need free IP addresses for the virtual machines, so you will need a properly configured DHCP server or a router, as well.

How to install VMware Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

How to install VMware Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS host server.

I have started a series of tutorials to describe how to set up a Drupal development environment on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) LAMP server. This LAMP server can be a virtual machine over VMware server.

Session 1: Setting up the LAMP server as a virtual machine
Session 2: Additional components to the LAMP server: webmin, phpMyAdmin, NFS, PHP GD library
Session 3: Configuring the LAMP server: networking, NFS, firewall
Session 4: Drupal install