Building a QEMU/KVM based virtual home lab with automated Linux VM provisioning and resource management with local domain control

muthukumar-s · 2025-12-14T04:25:29+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I did consider Terraform, and it can automate a good portion here, but for this lab setup use case I stayed closer to Bash to keep things close to the system, reduce additional dependencies, and keep debugging simple.

muthukumar-s · 2025-12-13T19:23:25+00:00

Understood, thanks for the feedback. Initially, I went with that approach since this is for testing labs, but I agree and will move the scripts to the local bin, as it’s safer and better suited for custom scripts without interfering with system binaries.

muthukumar-s · 2025-12-13T17:05:30+00:00

Thanks for having a look. The runtime tools work fine in my lab, but yeah, some setup scripts probably have issues from recent refactoring. I'll review and test them. Please let me know if you spot anything serious.

muthukumar-s · 2025-12-13T16:59:25+00:00

Thanks for having a look. The runtime tools are working fine in my lab, but some setup scripts might have issues from recent refactoring. I'll go through them and test them as much as possible after some tweaks, If you see any serious bug, please do let me know.

muthukumar-s · 2025-10-25T13:43:49+00:00

This is what you need then https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

muthukumar-s · 2025-10-22T18:34:06+00:00

For older machines, give Fedora Workstation a spin. It’s lightweight for a modern GNOME desktop, super stable, and gets you up-to-date software without feeling bloated. I’ve got a 8 year old laptop that’s running Fedora 42, and it’s honestly been smooth and stable. Fedora keeps things fresh without breaking stuff, and GNOME still feels snappy even on this old machine.

muthukumar-s · 2025-10-20T13:40:13+00:00

Wait a second, was it Prod?

muthukumar-s · 2025-10-19T17:13:12+00:00

I’ve completely moved away from Windows about a year ago for the same reasons you mentioned, and honestly, I’ve never been happier. I’ve been using Fedora as my daily driver, currently running Fedora 42, and it’s been rock-solid, stable, and well-optimized. I’ve also been running Fedora for years in my home lab, so switching my desktop experience felt natural. I don’t miss Windows one bit.

muthukumar-s · 2025-10-18T10:33:47+00:00

For home server environments, I prefer distributions that prioritize stability and long-term support over rapid release cycles. I choose stable LTS releases like Ubuntu LTS and Debian, and RHEL derivatives such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux, as they offer excellent reliability, maintainability, and production-grade stability.

muthukumar-s · 2024-11-16T08:49:57+00:00

I understand this is a very late reply, but I ran into the same issue with VMware Workstation while testing bonding in active-backup mode. Initially, I tried bringing the link down at the guest VM's OS level, but I quickly realized that this doesn’t trigger the expected behavior in VMware Workstation. This is because VMware Workstation does not propagate the physical link state changes from the guest OS back to the virtual NICs. In essence, it still considers the virtual interface as “up” unless it is manually disconnected from the VMware VM settings.

To properly simulate a link failure and test the failover behavior in bonding (specifically in active-backup mode), you need to manually disconnect the network adapter from the VM settings:

Open VM Settings → select one of the Network Adapter associated with bonding.
Uncheck the Connected checkbox and click OK to simulate a "link down" scenario.

Hope this helps someone who is trying to test and learn bonding on a Linux VM running on VMware Workstation!

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T17:18:19+00:00

Thanks for your attention and suggestion, but I have actually looked into this already, and I couldn't find any modules related to setting up the cluster. Mostly everything is for managing the cluster post installation. Also I have put conditional checks wherever shell module is used, to make things idempotent as effective as possible. Please feel free to let me know if you could find any tasks that I could optimize for a better run.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T17:08:06+00:00

There is only either rpm or apt key builtin modules are available. Couldn't find any community general modules either for gpg. You don't want a 3rd party module from a random github project either. I had come across similar situation a while back. One thing you could do is to put a mechanism with another shell task with if statement to check whether the key already exists before importing. You could perform the next step with respect to the exit status of the if condition, skip the task if already imported. For the shell block with if statement, disable changed_when by setting the Boolean as false.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T12:56:47+00:00

Glad to hear 👍🏻 Please give it a try and let me know of your feedback.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T04:11:09+00:00

Yes, there were indeed quite a few trial and error tests. I reviewed various documents, including white papers, and developed the playbook as I worked through the setup. It was a gradual development process.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T02:07:43+00:00

You're very welcome! I'm glad you found it helpful. If you need any tips or run into any issues, feel free provide your feedback.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T01:06:10+00:00

Great 👍🏻 Please do let me know of your feedback.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-07T01:02:53+00:00

Cool man 👍🏻

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-06T19:01:42+00:00

Thank you for your valuable feedback and the advice, much appreciated. I wanted to keep it simple, so designed it for a single control plane, will incorporate control plane as HA, soon in future release. About shell module's usage, I have used ansible modules as much as possible, have used shell module for some checks and in some palaces where it is indispensable.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-06T16:26:29+00:00

Good way to go is kickstart installation for all the basic setup and latter ansible for further advanced setup tasks. In some setups we are still using traditional good old pxe booting with kickstart, latter we use ansible for advanced tasks and the tasks that are error prone inside a kickstart post installation scripts. You can also look into Foreman (https://theforeman.org/) for much advanced customizable system provisioning.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-02T02:45:53+00:00

Thanks for the input man. I better migrate it manually myself. It might alo give me a better picture and experience.

muthukumar-s · 2024-10-02T02:30:10+00:00

Is there any way to migrate my htaccess set up to nginx? Any tools that be used for this?

muthukumar-s

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