Why isn’t there a distro out there that makes it trivially simple to set up VM’s of all the various popular Linux (and perhaps Solaris/*BSD?) distributions, for the purposes of testing?

I’ve been working with my friend Todd for a few days now to set something like this up. We’re using Fedora 10, Cobbler, Koan, OpenLDAP, Puppet, and a big honkin’ box. So far, so good.

I should add that the first box purchased to do this included an Intel Q8200 quad core processor. Now, being a reasonably new processor, those of us who aren’t hardware news junkies would think that this CPU would support the VT flag which allows for things like KVM to work. Not so! Apparently the entire Q8xxx line has been castrated in this manner. So, I returned that machine and picked up a Phenom X4 instead. It runs like a champ, and being my first AMD purchase in awhile, I’m not disappointed.

I’m hoping to find the time to document some of what we are doing to get all this running. Stay tuned and cross your fingers.