Sunday, February 20. 2011
Moving to a KVM based Gentoo VServer
My current VServer is located at a hoster that uses Xen. Since I had some serious problems with this virtualization technique, I will switch to a KVM based VServer based on Gentoo. While preparing for the migration I found just little information about how to start and where to gather all the neccessary information to get started with a KVM hosted Gentoo guest. So I decided to blog about it so I will remember and everyone else in the whole wide internet can profit from it (Flattr's welcome 
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But first a few words about why I'm going to move to another hoster. My current hoster offered Ubuntu 9.04 and Gentoo 2008.0 when I ordered my VServer there. I wanted to have a Gentoo server so I ordered the server with Gentoo installed. After the usual configuration stuff I found the kernel sources with Xen support are quite dated. In Ubuntu the support seemed to be more current so I switched to Ubuntu and it worked fine until I decided to update to 10.10. First I asked the hoster and they suggested to wait for a current image and then do a complete reinstall. But I didn't want to reinstall everything and tried it anyway. The result was an unbootable system that I only got back running doing a fresh install of the old Ubuntu 9.04 using a very recent backup (thank God it worked). This was the point where I decided that I want to have a virtualized server that doesn't need to be aware of being virtualized. So I went to the Hetzner website and clicked a VServer that is cheaper, has more resources, can run any OS and is easy to keep up-to-date.
So if you plan to setup a VServer with Gentoo and want to use KVM, I hope I can give some hints to get you started!
This article is part of a series:
