[colug-432] virtualization, clouds, and infrastructure

[Scott Merrill]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Shane Zatezalo <lottadot at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> So RDP to them; free RDP tools for Linux/OSX abound.

Right, that's one way to approach the problem, and it's what I did at
my last gig. It's sub-optimal, from my point of view, but there are
worse problems to have.

>> 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).
>
> We went with VMWare; a 4-box cluster of ESX. So far, it has been completely reliable and everything that we thought it would be (performance, reliability, support, GUI admin tools (for those that are CLI-impaired)). That said, the key thing was that we went with VMWare because we had the resources ($$) to do it all. It's not cheap/free by any means.
>
> I know it's not an open source sol'n, and this *is* the COLUG list, but you asked...

We have several ESX 3.5 clusters in place, but the cost to maintain,
let alone upgrade, these is getting burdensome. I also have a
suspicion that a KVM host will allow Linux and Windows guests to
perform a little better than similar guests hosted on VMware.

VMware also offers a lot of stuff that's simply overkill for our
environment. All the guest patch management, for example.

I'm a little surprised that so many of the KVM management tools are
focusing so much effort on "cloud"-like solutions:
   http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools

Cheers,
Scott