Build Your Own Cloud - This should be fun.

monaro800

monaro800

monaro800

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21 May 2012
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Ipswich
Project ;-; Way overdue.

Goal - Simple, reduce power consumption.

Ive decided to give this grid building a go, i need to replace 8 servers, Dual Xeon 4GB DDR 2 x 72GB 15K U320.

so

Im Going to Use

4 Servers, AMD Opteron Dual Core 270 2.2Ghz, 32GB DDR RAM, 2 x 250GB IDE Internal, 8 x 500GB SATA Drive Tray (Overkill i know, but if it works i got another 8 Xeons to scrap.......

Network: Procurve 48Port Gigabit Managed Switch 3.3TBPS MAX

Software;

Operating System CentOS6 x64
Cloud Software: Openstack and myCLOUD

Timeframe 48 Hours.

Lets see how it goes, and ill keep updating this with what i do and how i do it.


1: Downloaded and Burn CentOS 6
2: Installed to 1 Server and Duplicated Drive for Others
3: Hostnames set to cloud1.internal cloud2.internal cloud3.internal cloud4.internal
4: Downloaded appropriate software from mycloud.com
5: Made a coffie
6: Printed install guides


Thats as far as im at right now, first i want to install it on one server and duplicate the drives see if i can do this without having to configure every server

Back in a few
 
I don't know much about "cloud" stuff but am interested in learning more. What exactly do Openstack and myCLOUD allow you to do and how is it different to VMWare/Hyper-V?
 
He basically wants to take those 4 individual servers and pool them into a single centrally managed resource pool from which he can provision virtual services / servers.

You can do this though with Proxmox and Xenserver (using pools) for the same price (£0).

There's also cloudstack which Citrix has just pushed over to Apache, so thats worth a look as well. OpenStack is the NASA one.
 
NightShadow said:
I don't know much about "cloud" stuff but am interested in learning more. What exactly do Openstack and myCLOUD allow you to do and how is it different to VMWare/Hyper-V?
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Thats a bit like asking whether you like Windows, Linux, or OSX. They'll all get you where you wanna go, but your ideology, experience, and personal preference will probably make the decision long before any technical merits.

Whats interesting about these Openstack is it should be fairly trivial to port your infrastructure to Amzons EC2 public cloud, whilst with mycloud it should be built in to provision either to your private cloud using openstack, or a number of public clouds (rackspace & amazon being the most notable), assuming you set it up right.

I guess the primary differences between openstack and the alternatives you mentioned are the technologies they're built on, and the vendors that offer them, though the terms you're using are probably fairly vague* for what you actually mean . I believe Openstack is the open source of the lot, and can utilise several hypervisors including those from vmware. I gather openstack is free.

I'm sure someone with more indepth experience will be along to correct whatever I got wrong there. :)

* Hyper-v** is more comparable to xen, vmware esx, kvm, etc. I believe in order to compare directly with openstack, you need to be talking about additional software with the microsoft and vmware solutions, which is what I guess you actually meant.
 
Hyper-v runs on Windows DataCentre Edition, this is worlds away from the tiny Linux footprint that Xenserver, VMware, Proxmox etc require to operate, no blue screens! (apart from within a Windows VM ofc) :D
 
So a slightly reworded question for you..

Openstack can be used to manage/provision the resources of all of your hypervisors centrally, I assume it does some kind of load balancing/resource allocation, failover stuff etc. In a private cloud scenario how does that differ to ESX and VCenter or Hyper-V and Sytem Center VMM which are hypervisors with central management solutions (ignoring wether the hypervisor is bare-metal, linux based of Windows based)?
 
Subscribed!

Very interested to hear how this goes. I've dipped my toes into the world by running my home server as a collection of VMs on a Windows host. Been tempted to do it properly with a proper hypervisor though. This seems along those lines.
 
NightShadow said:
So a slightly reworded question for you..

Openstack can be used to manage/provision the resources of all of your hypervisors centrally, I assume it does some kind of load balancing/resource allocation, failover stuff etc. In a private cloud scenario how does that differ to ESX and VCenter or Hyper-V and Sytem Center VMM which are hypervisors with central management solutions (ignoring wether the hypervisor is bare-metal, linux based of Windows based)?
Click to expand...

From the little I know I'd say Openstack is ball park comparable to VCentre, and System Centre, where Hyper-V, and ESX are alternatives to Xen, or KVM, etc. Openstack has pluggable Hypervisors, which include ESX (but apparently not Hyper-v), where I'd guess the alternatives are focused on the companies own tech.

In order to do live migration (which I believe all of the above support, but I'm not sure about Hyper-V) it needs to be supported at the Hypervisor level, and then supported all the way up the stack. Previously you'd have problems migrating between Intel and AMD systems with Xen, and I would also suspect you the new host node needs to be using the same hypervisor as the old host node, but I would suspect given those caveats, it'd support live migration resonably well. On the other hand, you may be able to cold migrate between all of the above.

Unfortunately my knowledge is limited and out of date, so as I said, I would suggest waiting for an expert to step in. With that said, my advice is given the costs associated with the Microsoft and VMwares tech, I'd suggest the open alternatives are comparable, and thus a better prospect unless you can state a reason otherwise.
 
Never heard of Openstack, is it a viable alternative for management to vCenter? And a viable alternative for monitoring to VeeamOne?
 
I think open stack is used more for setting up a way to sell virtual machines over the internet, to people for their own use or even to sell to people the platform to create their own vms. It is the type of thing a dedicated server shop would use to start selling cloud based vms. You can see most dedicated server suppliers these days have started selling cloud vps, where you login and have an interface to pick your operating system and can deploy an image.

What I would like to know though is if I could use openstack to create virtual terminals for windows clients in a lan. It may do that, but i am not sure how the user would be presented with it as they would not be able to handle that ui to start their pc. Vmware has client based virtual terminals similar to what i have described.

 
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Ol!ver said:
Anyone looked into this before? Seems an interesting VM host, and free. http://www.proxmox.com/products/proxmox-ve/system-requirements-proxmox-ve

Seems more than capable of clustering multiple VMs etc, so may work here?
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You sure thats free?

If it is, have at it, it should allow you to do what you like (unless you only want 'features' which are vendor specific. If not, I wouldn't bother when they are free Open Source alternatives. The important element in the stack, in my opinion, is the virtualization.

The rest of the stack mainly consists of shiny GUIs, centralized managment, and fancy APIs. Not to say that isn't useful, just reproducable with a small team of developers, so there are many alternatives including those which are free. I imagine all the big well known ones are about equal and will live or die based on the stability of their hypervisor (and virtualzation tools, if they're not built in already) if you're seriosuly wanting to use them.

I'm not going to pretend I'm not bias to the free *nix based solutions, because I am, pretty much everything does similar things, they're all quite good, and it really just depends on what integrates into your setup better, who you trust more, how much money you'd like to part with, how you'd like to spend said money, and how quickly you'd like to be up and running.

If you're just looking for something to play with for job prospects, all of the above is the best answer (and maybe even build a stack yourself). :)
 
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groen said:
I think open stack is used more for setting up a way to sell virtual machines over the internet
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I think you're wrong mate. Really though, whats the difference between an in-house solution and an Internet solution? What networks you allow it to access...


groen said:
to people for their own use or even to sell to people the platform to create their own vms. It is the type of thing a dedicated server shop would use to start selling cloud based vms.

You can see most dedicated server suppliers these days have started selling cloud vps, where you login and have an interface to pick your operating system and can deploy an image.
Click to expand...

My last company used a Hyper-V solution to do just that. I would imagine a some companies use ESX to do the same, and would further imagine many more would if it weren't for the tight margins and Linux bias of the hosting industry.

groen said:
What I would like to know though is if I could use openstack to create virtual terminals for windows clients in a lan. It may do that, but i am not sure how the user would be presented with it as they would not be able to handle that ui to start their pc. Vmware has client based virtual terminals similar to what i have described.
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I'm not sure what you mean. You can VNC to the machines without them having a valid network configuration is that helps. This, I believe, is built into the hypervisor (xen does it for sure), but there is a page on the openstack documentation refering to VNC Proxy. If thats not what you're after, then maybe you can reword what you're after, or link me to the vendors page explaining it and maybe I can help.
 
aln said:
You sure thats free?

If it is, have at it, it should allow you to do what you like (unless you only want 'features' which are vendor specific. If not, I wouldn't bother when they are free Open Source alternatives. The important element in the stack, in my opinion, is the virtualization.
Click to expand...

I've admittedly only glanced through it, but it seems to be free from here: http://www.proxmox.com/downloads/proxmox-ve/17-iso-images and then you pay for support.
 
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