Replying to my own post here, a little bit of reading of the Virtualbox manual and googling around solved most of the mysteries...
Quote From : optsoft October 17, 2013, 3:01 pm 1. What virtualbox Network setting is to be used to access the webuzo install inside the VM? Is it NAT or Host-Only Adapter? or Bridged Adapter?
I created VMs from scratch using Centos 6.4 64-bit Minimal and wget-installing webuzo without configuring anything in it.
I used Bridged mode because, as the vbox manual says, bridged is able to access the internet as well as host and other guests - i.e. it is in the same subnet as the host machine (and hopefully the physical internet router in use).
There are several peculiarities about Centos network configuration which one must know in order to make "clone VMs" of the first VM made in the above fashion (or you can painstakingly reinstall centos, wget-install webuzo, etc)
If I get the time I might try to do a blog post, but for now these should help:
http://nrsocial.blogspot.in/2012/02/network-is-unreachable-centos-62-as.html
Centos quirks mystery solved here:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.centos.general/127970
More about the full vm cloning procedure:
http://brunovernay.blogspot.in/2012/10/virtualbox-centos-network-and-template.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/vmware-linux-lost-eth0-after-cloning-image.html
http://www.envision-systems.com.au/blog/2012/09/21/fix-eth0-network-interface-when-cloning-redhat-centos-or-scientific-virtual-machines-using-oracle-virtualbox-or-vmware/
Quote From : optsoft October 17, 2013, 3:01 pm 2. However, if we discuss this topic of virtualbox in detail, I'm sure many people will be able to test out a multi-node server setup - with each node running a webuzo+centos instance.
I am mainly interested in multiple webuzo-controlled servers talking to each other in my workstations Virtualbox mainly because:
a. RAM is cheap and putting 16GB on a local staging server is easy
b. Websites need to scale horizontally - few MySQL servers, few Apache+PHP servers, a load balancer / varnish cache server, all working together and at that time, bulky control panels like cPanel, Plesk, webmin are not so convenient as a lightweight webuzo.
So 7-8 webuzo's running together in VirtualBox allows to test a complete high-end server environment configuration-wise, if not load-wise.
Then scripts can be written for automatic scaling / adding / removing nodes and all this can be tested on a single physical workstation of 16GB RAM on a standard Ubuntu / CentOS box (which is affordable for most development teams)
The above configuration should probably use Host-only Networking mode as we dont want the external world to access the test environment, but we do want the host and VMs to talk to each other.
The best part about the Bridged mode is that it allows the VMs to get familiar 192.168.1.xx IPs so once set up, everything is pretty smooth.
Another thing about virtualbox is that you can move the virtual harddisks around on different partitions - which means on different harddisks / across network using some kind of network file system access.
All of the VMs can be running webuzo for basic administration (lightweight, simplistic, but does not need daily work on command-line) and be dedicated to their respective tasks. One VM can be the test load generating machine.
Of course, there is a good argument about using OpenVZ / Xen / KVM rather than Virtualbox, but that is out of scope for me as for now.
Quote From : optsoft October 17, 2013, 3:01 pm I'm unable to install virtualbox guest addons - which could be very useful.
Yet to investigate this - will update when I succeed in this.
I personally think that the wiki page about creating a webuzo OS template could use a little more detail - maybe an example of some scripting that allows remote setup and boot of webuzo servers?
This would allow webuzo to be used in cloud environments where servers need to be added or removed dynamically to match high or low loads.
Hope this helps.
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