Virtualization Essentials

Optimizing a New Linux Virtual Machine

While a generic install of Linux as you have just done will be fine for educational, or even for test and development purposes, production systems should be modified to be as efficient as possible. Inefficient VMs waste system resources and, when multiplied over many VMs, waste data center resources. The economies of scale that comes with virtualization and consolidation also apply to performance. Ensuring that VMs are as efficient as possible multiplies these performance gains and leads to higher consolidation ratios and greater ongoing cost savings.

Linux comes “out-of-the-box” with a number of processes (or in the Linux/Unix parlance, daemons) that are automatically started as part of the operating system ...