[colug-432] virtualization, clouds, and infrastructure

[Scott Merrill]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Tom Hanlon <tom at functionalmedia.com> wrote:
> I personally do not have much experience with either of these projects but I think they deserve mentioning in this thread because..
> A: they are open source
> B: I think they both partially aim to solve some of these issues.
>
> Eucalyptus:
>
> Tools to manage your private cloud, looks like it aims to allow you to replicate your experience with what amazon Web Services provides but across your machines.
> I did not dive deep enough to see if it provides HA for instances of VM's.
>
> The project is/was somehow tied to ubuntu.. but I am not sure of the connection. Does Ubuntu provide a competing product to the redhat tools in this space ?

I did a test installation of Eucalyptus on a couple of KVM guests.
It's a smooth installation process, and looks pretty good, if you want
to roll your own version of Amazon EC2.

I do not want to roll my own version of EC2. I do not want to
dynamically build and destroy essentially ephemeral servers for my
environment. I'm not looking for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service),
but rather _real_ infrastructure.

Moreover, as I read the various topologies one can use with
Eucalyptus, it looks like each includes several single points of
failure:
   https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEC/Topologies
The storage server (running the "walrus" component) implements the S3
get/put commands, but there's no real examples of how to scale that
out across multiple systems for redundancy. Maybe I simply missed that
part, and would appreciate a pointer in the right direction if that's
the case.

But, as I said in a previous message, we don't want (or need) to run
our own "cloud". We need a dependable, real infrastructure upon which
we can deploy a known quantity of specific-purpose servers, accounting
for growth over time. We're not building up and tearing down ad-hoc
compute nodes.

> Openstack:
>
> Similar as far as I can tell,

Haven't looked at this yet, but I will. Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott