Hi all,

Does anyone know of any working and well maintained cloud computing software?

I'm looking for something that could:

allow end users to setup their own XEN VPS's
migrate VPS's to any node int the pool as needed - for example when load is too high on ServerA, migrate VPS8 to ServerB
offer high availability both for the VPS's, and the management node
make use of NAS devices for central storage
offer online resource (RAM / CPU / HDD space) upgrades & downgrades
the ability to scale to x+n, i.e give clients more resources by adding more server nodes to the pool
run on Linux


I had a look out VMware, but I can't justify the costs on the small amount of VPS's that I currently have. And Applogic doesn't return my emails, so I have no idea what it even costs.


Any suggestions?

Check OpenQRM. It might have just what you need.

I have checked out OpenQRM, but it's way too complicated ;) I don't really want to hack together a system and maintain it all day long.

Here's another option I've seen mentioned before, I have no association or first hand experience with it.

http://www.virtualmin.com/cloudmin-offer

CloudMin isn't quite a Cloudcomputing platform, yet. I am trying it out now, but it doesn't offer much at this stage.

You can use Virtuozzo.

You can use Virtuozzo.

Virtuozzo does not support multiple physical servers.

Virtuzzo / OpenVZ also doesn't support real virtualization. It's software based emulated virtualization

You might want to check also UBUNTU Cloud computing http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud

Ubuntu cloud won't really operate nicely in web hosting environment. I'm looking for something that has a web interface, like that vps.net or http://www.gogrid.com/ has, but something that won't break the bank.

.... and I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu :) I prefer enterprise class OS's like CentOS / Debian / FreeBSD / etc :)

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?

well, guys like 3tera, vmops, flexiant and others do stuff like this...

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?
What you want really doesn't exist. There's RightScale, Enomaly, and some other vendors (HyperVM (now basically "EOL"), SolarVPS, VPS.Net, etc. come to mind) but nothing that does all that you're asking for and most are geared to enterprises, "cloud services," linking into existing cloud services (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, etc.) and so on.

As far as clustering/failover goes, you might look at Proxmox VE. It doesn't allow users to create VMs but you can certainly do it yourself through its web UI and it supports OpenVZ, Xen, and KVM. It doesn't have an API itself but you may be able to access the libvirt API through your own scripts and/or other third-party tools.

I've setup Eucalyptus before - the cloud platform that "Ubuntu Cloud" is based on (Eucalyptus has packages for CentOS as well I believe, you don't HAVE to use Ubuntu) - and it works almost exactly like Amazon EC2. In fact, EC's AMI machine creation / teardown / configuration tools work with Eucalyptus so it's basically note-for-note API compatible with EC2. It has its own S3-like storage system Walrus and can have persistent storage if you want the VM to survive beyond the first reboot. Like EC2, Eucalyptus VMs are designed to be provisioned on-the-fly and are destroyed automatically when they're shutdown or rebooted - but again there are ways to make them persistent.

Transforming the existing VPS/VM marketplace into a "cloud" marketplace is still in its infancy from a provisioning, management, and billing perspective. Big vendors like VMware and Citrix and Microsoft are introducing tools all the time, but many are big bucks and they are focusing on the enterprise market place.

In short - there is a lot of opportunity out there for doing this.

Thank you, serverminds :)

What you have provided was what I was looking for, and confirmed my suspicion. There isn't anything affordable for this kind of operation. I don't consider Amazon EC2 as cloud computing, since you need to shutdown the instance to add more space & RAM - which is just another VPS.

HyperVM / SolusVM / FluidVM / etc are all just VPS management systems as well

And while VMware & 3tera can do this, it is exuberantly expensive, beyond the point where it makes financial sense in a shared / reseller / VPS hosting market. I was looking for somewhere where we could scale our Linux hosting, for shared & reseller clients beyond the physical constraints that traditional hardware offers and the concept of cloud computing could have been the right way to go, but it doesn't yet exist.

You can use Virtuozzo.

Virtuozzo doesn't provide anything remotely close to a cloud, not even their lame excuse of clustering...

well, guys like 3tera, vmops, flexiant and others do stuff like this...

Remember Mediatemple's fiasco and their constant downtime way back when? Thanks 3Tera for that one :)

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?

Management wise, no, you're on your own. Infrastructure wise, plenty of back-end software out there, including VMware :)

Virtuozzo doesn't provide anything remotely close to a cloud, not even their lame excuse of clustering...



Remember Mediatemple's fiasco and their constant downtime way back when? Thanks 3Tera for that one :)


Care to back the up with some proof. Media Temple has never used 3Tera AppLogic. The issues they where facing at the time where related to the underlying SAN platform they choose to use along with other methods of sharing resources which are completely the opposite way that AppLogic functions.

I care not but, thank you for asking.

I care not but, thank you for asking.

Then do you care to withdraw your erroneous blaming of 3Tera for Media Temple's problems?

Then do you care to withdraw your erroneous blaming of 3Tera for Media Temple's problems?

just confirming - it was (mt)'s Bluearc infrastructure that was messed up:
http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/2009/03/02/incident-resolved-service-credits-being-issued/

Nothing to do with 3Tera.

AppLogic does pretty much everything that you are wanting but it is not something that can be done on a budget if you are going to buy direct since you will have to buy support from them. We like the way they do licenses on a monthly lease rather than all up front licenses. You can either buy direct from them or get it from a reputable partner. When we priced it all out, to be able to do on VMware or Citrix Xenserver what you can do on AppLogic would have literally costs almost 6 figures. AppLogic has everything in one piece of software including your storage and your ability to replicate to remote hosts in real time.

I will go through your criteria to explain what AppLogic has:

1. allow end users to setup their own XEN VPS's

As of now, to my knowledge, you cannot do this with AppLogic. I believe it is coming soon but currently if you had multiple clients, you would have to provision their VDS for them. But if you setup templates you can do it very quickly

2. migrate VPS's to any node int the pool as needed - for example when load is too high on ServerA, migrate VPS8 to ServerB

You are giving dedicated resources to our VMs so load would not be an issue. You basically have a huge pile of available resources from all the servers in the grid/cloud and when you allocate CPU, it is a hard allocation. So if someone was overloading CPU you would want to sell them more resources. You are NOT sharing CPU in any way though like you might be with virtuozzo or others.

3. offer high availability both for the VPS's, and the management node

HA is automatic with AppLogic which was a huge selling point for us. You just have to make sure that you have double the resources available and AppLogic replicated all data on at least two physical nodes in the grid automatically. If the primary node fails, it will bring up the VM on the secondary node automatically. It will also do this with the controller VM. I have tested this and seen it work well.

4. make use of NAS devices for central storage

AppLogic does better than this. It uses the available hard drive space on each physical node and makes a virtual san out of it. All data is replicated on two separate servers so your volumes are always safe. This gives you much more flexibility AND your storage is automatically replicated so you don't have a single point of failure.

5. offer online resource (RAM / CPU / HDD space) upgrades & downgrades

All resources can be scaled up and down on demand. You do have to reboot the VM (application in AppLogic laguage)though.

6. the ability to scale to x+n, i.e give clients more resources by adding more server nodes to the pool

You can continually add more servers to the grid at anytime without effecting the uptime of the existing grid. You simply add the new server in and then you have more resources to allocation.

7. run on Linux

AppLogoc uses a Centos install and then it reformats it when you set it up.

Keep in mind that with the new Nahalem Xeon CPUs that are hyperthreading, you get to use ALL of the cores that it sees as resources. So an 8 core server that is hyperthreading will give you 16 usable cores that you can allocate as resources. Pretty cool.

We just started up with AppLogic so if you have any questions you can PM me. Or I can hook you up with my sales guy at 3Tera. Not sure why they didn't respond to you but they did just get bought out so they may have been really busy.