# Atom and virtualization

## Kemoauc

Hi,

I want to build a small server for home use and wonder if an Intel Atom 230/330 is capable of running qemu/KVM/XEN or some other virtualization technology.

Thanks

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## frenkel

You can run Qemu, but it will be slow, because the Atom processor doesn't have a special virtualization instruction set (Search on google for Intel-VT or AMD Pasifica for more info). The other tho you mention (KVM and Xen) need this special virtualization stuff and won't run on an Intel Atom.

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## Kemoauc

Ok, thanks for this info. My plan is to run all services reachable from the internet (apache, postfix and sshd) inside the virtual machine for security reasons and on the "main" machine basically samba as a NAS/backup. Do you think this will run more or less smoothly or will the performance be just too bad?

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## forkbomb

Depends on what VMs you'll run.

I have an AA1 with an Atom and can do light VM work with VMware Server. As long as the guest VMs aren't running GUIs, I can run a BSD or Linux VM relatively well.* Even DSL and Puppy will run reasonably well. I just don't bother much because the monitor is too small.

I suppose if one were to install VMware Server to the machine and then run the Console on another machine, you should be alright as long as you keep the guests stripped down as much as possible.

In my experience memory, rather than CPU guts, is usually the big limitation with virtualization. Then again I have the luxury of doing the bulk of my VM work on a machine with an Intel Core 2 (which has Intel's virtualization extensions). YMMV.

Also, most of my VM experience is VMware Workstation (5, 6, 6.5) and VMware Server 2.

* EDIT: By relatively well, I mean I can run a headless Linux VM with about 384MB assigned memory (1GB on host) with no to little noticeable slowdown for either the host or the guest. I was playing around with a GUI-less CentOS install and, even though running a VM was sucking my battery, the host and guest were both snappy.

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## DirtyHairy

You might also want to try VirtualBox, it also doesn't require any hardware virtualization support and has always worked very well for me.

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## SlashBeast

Try OpenVZ. Its VE not VM so no need special cpu features.

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## _Razorblade_

 *frenkel wrote:*   

> The other tho you mention (KVM and Xen) need this special virtualization stuff and won't run on an Intel Atom.

 

That is not true, Xen only requires VT for HVM (non-paravirtualized) guests (i.e. Windows).

I'm running a Gentoo server myself based on an Opteron 265 (which doesn't support VT just like Atom) with Xen and multiple different Linux guests for a long time...

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