[TriLUG] Linux virtualization - Re: Hosting Services w/ Ipower

[Jeremy Portzer]

$WORK is using a non-free product called "Scalent" (www.scalent.com) to 
handle the management aspects of a Xen-based paravirtualization setup. 
It's pretty nice software but still in the 1.0 stage (a bit buggy). 
Scalent allows for all kinds of automatic management and monitoring, 
migrating the "personas" (virtual environments) between VMs as 
necesssary.  It can even migrate from a virtual machine to bare metal 
which is kinda neat.  This does require you to use a fully NFS based 
filesystem (e.g. no local disks) for best results.  Scalent also does 
all sorts of virtual networking, and management of our Dell 1855/1955 
hardware, the value of which I'm not enamored with at the moment.

Having just gotten into virtualization through Scalent, I'm wondering 
what open source has in this arena for top-down management of virtual 
environments.  Scalent has all the pretty GUIs and such that make 
managers happy - is there anything similar in OSS?

--Jeremy

jason tower wrote:
> i appreciate the referrals from ron and chris.  we're actually moving 
> away from vmware (don't worry chris, we'll continue supporting you!) 
> towards a completely open source virtualization solution such as xen or 
> kvm.  actually we've been running a xen paravirt server for a couple of 
> years, it's rock solid with excellent performance but requires 
> cooperation from the guest vm to run which isn't always possible.  the 
> recent opteron cpus (with svm flag) should eliminate that requirement, 
> i've been playing around with kvm on my athlon x2 desktop running ubuntu 
> hardy and it's pretty slick.  still not fully baked but combines the 
> speed of paravirt with the flexibility of vmware.
> 
> jason
>