Linux "micro-cloud"

[Matt Shields]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:54 AM, <markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I have a couple servers in a cambridge colocation, they are rapidly
> approaching 10 years old. Needless to say, its time to upgrade.
>
> I currently have 2 dual PIII 800 MHZ each with a gig of ram. I am looking
> to replace them with two quad-core AMD AthlonII with 8 gigs of ram. (Total
> cost for both motherboads, memory and CPU is $600!!! unbelievable!)
>
> I think I want to set it up a small cloud system. Rather than setup two
> machines, one as a database server and the other as a mass-web host, (like
> I currently have) I think I want to be more creative.
>
> Keep one as a raw machine that runs the databases, as disk I/O is dog slow
> on virtualized hardware, and on the other make it a host a host machine on
> which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and service
> hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
> machine as well)
>
> The the thing I want to discuss...
>
> Are there any "good" vm tools out there that makes this easy. I'm using
> VMPlayer and not sure I want to use it. I'd like a command line text
> system as these will be remote servers and a GUI is painful remotely.
>
> Any ideas? Suggestions?
>
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>

Recently I was looking to replace an aging VMWare Infrastructure 2 cluster
(20 servers) with something new.  I checked out all the different products
out there.  New VMWare products are too high priced.  Their products are
great, but I couldn't justify the extremely high cost.

If you're looking at Xen or KVM, check out Enomaly/Enomalism (
http://enomalism.com/) and Open Symbolic (http://www.opensymbolic.org/).
They look like great products, they have great demos, but I had a tough time
getting them to actually work and control my Xen systems.  The Enomaly
maillist has tons of people who have successfully installed it, but there
are more people that complain that they can't get it working.  The Open
Symbolic system seems great because it also ties together Cobbler
(provisioning), Puppet (config management) and func all together, but even
when I offer to buy a support contract from them it took about 3 weeks for
them to get back to me, and even with them logged into my test environment
they couldn't get their own product to work.

So I opted to look at Citirix XenSource.  If you're looking for live
balancing of VM's across your cluster you can buy their commercial version
(Essential Tools), or if you just want to manage a number of individuals Xen
boxes they have the free XenServer and XenCenter. If you have a backend SAN,
NFS, iSCSI you can use that across all your boxes and do live migrations, it
just won't auto balance the load unless you buy the commercial package.

-matt
http://www.sysadminvalley.com
http://www.beantownhost.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattboston
Mike Ditka <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mike_ditka.html>  -
"If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms."