OpenStack for cloud reselling?
 

Hi, i'm thinking of going opensource is Open Stack a good contender in the cloud cpanel industries? i'm either going with solusvm or openstack, I'm on a tight budget.

Thank you.

You need to be root to get that thing working properly.

SolusVM is only simple VM management software. No HA or even migration facility.

I would suggest OpenNebula or CloudStack with some custom development from your end. OnApp is a bit expensive and would reduce your profit margin in this ever competing saturated market.

Are you serious? This market is far from saturated.

My opinion, once you have a software product that does complete automation, available to just about everybody that offers this service and its somewhat affordable, it is saturated. Very least, it will saturate in a few months. This is so very true of the hosting market.

Perhaps the only reason why you may feel its far from saturated is that putting up a Cloud or a CDN requires significant investment and then some continued investments. Only a few providers out there with that sort of moola so you can count the school kids out of this game. That still doesn't mean there is a lot of room.

There is no difference between two providers (sane ones) offering the same service using the same tools. Even pricing is very similar. What's new?

That is why I purposely mentioned a few open source tools that requires some investment from a provider (in terms of time and development skills) and perhaps that will make him stand out of the market, albeit very little.

If you consider general purpose hosting, only CDN is the least competitive. But with OnApp CDN this margin might close in as well.

Onapp is 'flattening' the cloud market, like like Hsphere, Plesk or cPanel (and by extension WHMCs or Hostbill) helped flatten the shared hosting business.

That said, there are many architectures, levels of investment, expertise and resulting support levels that simply and effectively differentiate providers.

I'm not quite sure what InfiniteTech means when he says that. The only thing that comes to mind to me is, "But of course".

I know there's ewbuntooers out there, and perhaps he's referencing sudo-linux (ewbuntoo) when he says that. Personally, I wouldn't base anything mission critical on that distro.

Anyway...

More than a bit ;) Currently, two dual quad-core severs will cost about $260/mo if I recall correctly ($100/mo + 10/mo per core). They've also raised their prices recently and some of their lower end products that used to be a gateway for providers adopting them in the first place are no longer available.

SolusVM might be fine if you want to handle a bunch of OpenVZ VMs on a CentOS host, but pay attention to what InfiniteTech said about migrations and HA - a big minus if you're going to be managing Xen or KVM, IMO.

That, and it doesn't support VMware.

I can't speak to OpenNebula, but CloudStack is good stuff, and in very close cooperation with OpenStack BTW.

So if you're looking at OpenStack, then you might want to take a good look at Cloudstack. There's an easy peasy way to play with it by just d/l'ing the StackOps Distro

I've been playing with OpenQRM too, and it seems to be pretty nice. right now, I've got the entire sandbox virtualized on VMs, but it is really, really nice.

In fact I started a thread asking people to comment on OpenQRM vs CloudStack, but I suspect that not many here have implemented OpenQRM or else I would have had some feedback on that thread by now.

These two solutions also support all three of the major virtualization technologies that your clients are likely to want to purchase from you too: Xen, KVM, and VMware.

There's also Enomaly, which isn't free either, but it's good and also has a reputation for stellar tech support along with OnApp.

But if you're looking to simply deploy and offer OpenVZ VPS's then I would suggest just going with SolusVM, which integrates nicely with either Ubersmith or WHMCS for your billing management and ticket systems.

I hope that helps :)

Kindest regards,

.

OpenQRM is a very nice system, did some testing with it in previous versions. Openstack is getting all the momentum and push now thanks to Rackspace, NASA and other big guns putting the driving force behind it.

In what way have OnApp raised their prices?

I'm not sure what you referring to, we have not changed our pricing or removed any lower end products ?, can you clarify ?

OpenStack on it's own is a LOT of work to get rolling these days.

^__ Thats what I meant.

You'll need to know your stuff inside out to get that thing working from source. Not to mention the development time to get them all working together, ideally.

Errata...
 

Oh, I certainly can Carlos ;)

The answer is, "My bad". Late nights, Long hours, and it was Ubersmith DE (not a server/cloud management service at all) not OnApp, that had the price increase announcement.

:o

wrt OpenStack:

Yes we worked through a few frustrations with OpenStack, are currently sandboxing and testing w/it via the TryStack community, but have removed OpenStack completely from serious production consideration at this time for the very reasons you cite :)

Not only that, but on another note, Nati just announced a few hours ago some *maintenance* issues w/TryStack, presumably from a sort of mini slashdotting effect.

I hope that helps :)

Kindest regards,

.

Thanks, I just wanted to ensure we where not putting out any confusing message that might have lead to that assumption :)