[colug-432] virtualization, clouds, and infrastructure

[Scott Merrill]

The discussion on Hadoop is interesting, and I do hope a presentation
or two results. If I can help coordinate, please let me know.

On a similar vein, how are you folks handling the management of
virtualized servers in your environments? It's trivial with KVM and
similar tools to run a couple of virtual instances on a single
physical box. It's not so trivial to run those virtual instances in a
highly available fashion across a cluster of physical machines.

VMware makes a pretty penny with VMotion, Storage VMotion, and similar
technology, and by providing a nice management interface to this
issue. Alas, those management tools are Windows-only.

Red Hat has a product (by way of acquisition) called Red Hat
Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M). This, too, is currently a
Windows-only solution.

I've looked at a lot of IaaS ("Infrastructure as a Service"), elastic
cloud, and similar solutions in the last couple of days. None of these
are what I want, particularly. I'm not looking to sell or chargeback
for our infrastructure, and I'm not looking for variable ad-hoc
resource allocation.

What I want is a reliable means of keeping a number of virtual servers
up and accessible across a number of physical boxes, such that any
physical box can be taken offline for maintenance (for example,
rolling reboots across physical hosts).

luci and ricci are are start, but they're nowhere near as end user
friendly as the VMware tools. This is not a big concern for me, but it
is an issue for those with whom I work, who might be expected to
provide on-demand support if I get hit by a bus (or am just home
sick).

Anyone else tackling these issues? Would you care to present to COLUG
on how you're managing things?

Thanks,
Scott