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I've been looking at various virtualization products such as KVM, XEN, Virtualbox, Open stack and Eucalyptus.

KVM, XEN, and Virtualbox seem to be easy to use and so far to me make the most sense to deploy small scale.

I'm wondering if it's worth the cycles to learn OpenStack or Eucalyptus.

I've been told that you need a team of developers to deploy OpenStack in a production environment, but this is for a small startup with only 1 system 4 CPUs with 16GB of memory (1 or 2 more systems will be added in 4th quarter).

I can see if the business grew to the point where I had to manage many servers something like OpenStack would be needed.

I found the features of OpenSTack are very nice such as a user having a project to create and manage their own vms.

I think a feature like this is much needed for some of my clients. Is there something else I should be looking at?

I would like my clients to be able to log in via web and be able to manage their vm. Keep in mind I'm the only administrator on this project.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Tom O'Connor
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beaugotro
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    Do not consider using vbox for this. It's a fine desktop toy virtualization solution, but nothing more. – EEAA Feb 13 '14 at 04:09
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    Don't do OpenStack. There's no point unless you're massive, and even then... well, anyway, you're not looking at creating a massive deployment to scale across multiple datacenters, so don't bother with OpenStack. For your size, you might want to consider Hyper-V if Windows, and VMware ESXi either way. The free version of ESXi has limitations, but none that seem like they'd apply to you, so it seems like a good choice to me, especially given the ease of scaling it up to VMware vCenter if you get bigger and want to later on. – HopelessN00b Feb 13 '14 at 04:12
  • I'm still wondering about Eucalyptus. Seems like it's taxing on a system. Would that be another product that is designed for large scale? – beaugotro Feb 13 '14 at 18:20
  • You can [deploy a single-machine OpenStack installation in about 15 minutes with PackStack](https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_OpenStack_Platform/4/html/Getting_Started_Guide/index.html). Or a little more time if you have more machines. And it's scalable. – Michael Hampton Feb 14 '14 at 18:53
  • PackStack? I had to start over. I'm having issues with networking and floating IPs. Using only one nic I can't get into any of the instances. I'm using the instructions found here: http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart – beaugotro Feb 15 '14 at 21:17

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I'd go for VMware ESXi, and then when you expand, you can start to look at VMware vCenter, and their vCloud tool suite (some of which can be used to give your customers control over their own VM).

The entire tool suite includes stuff to manage resource usage by your customers' VMs, so you can bill them accordingly.

OpenStack is nice, but as HopelessN00b says, it's not worth it unless you're MASSIVE, and even then...

VirtualBox just plain sucks.

Tom O'Connor
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If you want something easy and powerfull, go with Proxmox.
It is free software based on Debian using KVM. You drive this with a web interface.
When you face some limitations (for example you want to use physical drives, which is not possible directly with the web interface) you can edit a configuration file and voilà.

Proxmox allow you to manage several virtual machines dispatched on several physical machines. Automated backups and snapshots are just a clic away.
You can even transfert a running virtual machine to another physical machine, but I never tested it.

Bertrand SCHITS
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This really depends on what the VMs will be doing and who will have to be doing that. If you need to give VMs to users/developers, but they will have no control over the deployment of those VMs, openstack is going to be overkill. In fact, any large system will be overkill if you intend to use a single host. KVM with libvirt are perfectly fine and they can scale and provide room for tinkering beyond any other platform.

If you need to have room to grow (start with one host, but should be able to add more) and you need to have a way to give users access to creating their own VMs from prepared templates, openstack might start making sense. So might oVirt (free opensource solution) or RHEV (the supported, stable version of oVirt). With the user portal and power user portal features, oVirt can be the perfect platform for a startup, especially integrated with Puppet and theForeman

dyasny
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  • Red Hat is betting on OpenStack over RHEV/oVirt, as of RHEL 6.5. At this point I wouldn't use RHEV for a greenfield project. – Michael Hampton Feb 14 '14 at 18:51
  • @MichaelHampton, that's not true. RHEV is DC/Server/VDI virtualization, RHOS is for IaaS. Different purposes, albeit with many overlapping usages. RHEV is being integrated with OS components, but OS if not the solution I'd use for a regular datacentre virtualization or for VDI. RHT aren't abandoning RHEV, else they wouldn't have kept releasing new versions and investing so much in oVirt. – dyasny Feb 14 '14 at 20:53
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Proxmox is free, sort of. The 3.1 series requires a support license $400 euros per server per year to get access to the enterprise repos. You can use the non-subscriber repos for free, but they are no as up to date. I have a little over 70 proxmox servers in a cluster. It very fast and reliable. You can migrate VM's from one machine to another as long as you have it o. Shared storage.

gmck
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VMware ESXi is free. with not limitations as a standalone solution, there only limitation of the standalone or free edition is the ability to manage the host via vSphere and enable the enterprise functionality such as VDS, vMotion, DRS, HA, SDRS to name a few.

Now Microsoft Hyper-V is also free persay Windows Server 2012 Standard will allow you to host 1 physical hosts with 2 virtual guests on the same license. that makes your OS license 200 per instance.

Windows 2012 Datacenter is licensed per CPU core, but you can run unlimited number of virtual machines all inheriting the license of the physical host. So lets assume you have a physical server with 8 cores and 256GB ram, that will costs you around $12,000 for the hosts license

the density of the host should allow you to put on it around 200 machines so 12,000 / 200 = $60.00 per OS license.

VMware does and can not offer anything for guest OS licensing

Robert The Architect
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  • So effectively Hyper-V is free if you run windows on the VMs ;) – TomTom Feb 14 '14 at 18:52
  • Hyper-V is free without the purchase of any Windows licenses. Also, your numbers for datacenter licensing are way off (and don't have anything to do with the question) – MDMarra Feb 14 '14 at 19:25
  • I also just saw your claim that you would be as dense as 200:1. This is....crazy. – MDMarra Feb 14 '14 at 19:32
  • Dell Poweredge R920 supports up to 40cores and 256GB ram, with Dynamic Memory it's very easy to cram 200+ small VMs on this 1 host – Robert The Architect Mar 14 '14 at 19:02
  • 1 Windows 2012 Datacenter license covers 2 phyiscal CPU @ 2,400 per license a 4 CPU server needs 2 licenses at a cost of 4,800, 8 CPU server you need 4 licenses, I mean CPU not cores thanks for pointing out – Robert The Architect Mar 14 '14 at 19:07